Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Programmes with high drop-out rates and low levels of graduate employment will be under scrutiny Source - Daily Telegraph - 15/01/22 Link Universities are facing a crackdown on “Mickey Mouse” degrees as the watchdog threatens to withdraw student loan funding from low-quality courses. Vice-chancellors will be warned by the Office for Students (OfS) that they risk being hit with sanctions - including financial penalties - if their degrees fail to deliver for students. The higher education regulator had pledged to take a more “robust” approach to quality assurance, which will include launching investigations where bad practice is reported. Degrees with high drop-out rates and low rates of graduate employment will be targeted by the OfS for scrutiny. The regulator will publish proposals this week which set out the series of “minimum requirements” they expect degree courses to meet in terms of student outcomes. If courses are deemed to consistently fall below these they could be barred from...

  The Chancellor has the fiscal room to ditch April's tax hike   It's perfectly reasonable to add the one-off costs of the pandemic to longterm borrowing   There's never a good time to raise taxes – but now is particularly bad Source - CAPX - 25/01/22 Link The case for scrapping the increase in National Insurance contributions (NICs) planned for April is now so overwhelming that it’s hard to find good arguments in favour of keeping it. I’ve seen a few, but they are easy to knock down. Nick MacPherson, formerly the top civil servant at the Treasury, has tweeted that ‘National Insurance is an imperfect tax. But those who want to ditch its increase really need to explain how they will finance structural increases in NHS and social care spending‘. Paul Johnson from the IFS has argued that, ‘a tax rise of this scale will be needed before long. Government could certainly delay it. But could it credibly commit to introducing it next year, which will be a year closer to a general...

The current accusations bedevilling Boris Johnson are being exploited by Remainers to exact revenge for Brexit Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/01/21 Link Just when everything is going Keir Starmer’s way, up pops a ghost from the past to threaten to wreck the Labour leader’s chances of ever seeing the inside of No 10. Michael (now Lord) Heseltine, the former deputy prime minister and arch proponent of Britain’s membership of the European Union, has declared that Boris Johnson’s removal would give Britain a chance to “reconsider Brexit”. This insight carries with it two extraordinary assumptions. The first is that the general public, rather than just a few hundred Remainers in the London media bubble, actually want to be plunged back into the torrid, deeply unpleasant and appallingly divisive atmosphere that prevailed between 2016 and 2019. There is a type of activist whose personal political obsession with the EU and refusal to concede defeat wants nothing more than to return to the past ...

  Those who opposed restrictions at the peak of the pandemic are bizarrely claiming victory   Neither lockdown deniers nor zero Covid zealots will admit that vaccines work   To deny lockdowns worked to reduce the spread of the virus is to deny logic. Source - CAPX - 24/01/22 Link There is a new form of bafflingly illogical social media crowing that needs to be put to bed. Those who erroneously asserted that ‘lockdowns don’t work’ are bizarrely claiming victory now that restrictions are rightly coming to an end. ‘We told you all along’, they say. Contending that those of us who accepted the need for restrictions to avoid a health system collapse have now performed some kind of reverse ferret. It makes me wonder whether or not these Covid-sceptics have ever heard of vaccines. There is a blindingly obvious distinction between the need for non-pharmaceutical interventions amongst a non-immune population, verses one with incredibly high levels of immunity. Stop me if I am gett...

 We are stuck between phoney populists and anti-populists. Time for something new. Source - Spiked - 25/01/22 Link Never has a British government unravelled in such a spectacular and yet glacial fashion. It feels like we’ve been at this for years now. A death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts. A government undone not by corruption or sleaze, but by a series of dreadful-sounding parties, replete with quizzes and sing-songs, all held at a time when attending any sort of gathering was an offence punishable by law. The government’s hypocrisy on Covid rules is outrageous, of course. But the details are all so prosaic – cake, cheese, a suitcase full of wine – and the scandals so mind-numbingly repetitive. It is all infuriating and yet boring at the same time. Last night we learned that Boris Johnson had a half-hour birthday bash in June 2020 – the 15th lockdown-breaking party the Tories have so far been accused of holding. Lulu Lytle – the PM’s obscenely expensive interior decorator, who...

 Can whoever succeeds Johnson hold together the coalition he won so handsomely with?   Cameroon nostalgists should remember that his high watermark was a majority of under 20   Boris Johnson’s genius for political salesmanship did two crucial things Source - CAPX - 21/01/22 Link Boris Johnson’s struggle for political life is nothing if not a gripping human drama. For better and for worse, the personality of the Prime Minister has always been at the very core of his political offer. A contest to succeed him, whenever it comes, therefore poses a serious challenge to the Conservatives: can they disentangle the very real achievements of their current leader from the man himself? Johnson’s genius for political salesmanship cuts at least two ways. Most obviously, he smashed the ‘Red Wall’ by persuading millions of voters who had not voted Tory since the 1980s (if ever) to give the party a shot. He has now redrawn, perhaps permanently, the electoral map; Tony Blair’s old constit...

Boris Johnson warns Europe against ‘naivety’ over the Russian president as the Foreign Office names Kremlin’s agents Source - Daily Telegraph 22/01/22 Link Britain accused Russia of plotting to install a puppet leader in Kyiv, as Boris Johnson warned European Union leaders against “naivety” over Vladimir Putin’s demands over Ukraine and described the crisis as “gravely dangerous”. In a highly unusual move, Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, publicly released specially declassified intelligence naming Yevhen Murayev, a former Ukrainian MP, as the Kremlin’s preferred candidate to take over the country following an invasion. Officials also named four former Ukrainian ministers alleged to be colluding with Russian intelligence officers, including spies involved in planning an attack. Whitehall was on Saturday night preparing to stand up specialist counter-disinformation cells and officials began work on new sanctions to debilitate the Russian economy if the Kremlin advances.  Britain is...

What we're seeing from this approach to policing is the emergence of a semi-official state ideology   XR and BLM have effectively awarded themselves the right to use force to remove the rights of others   Identity politics has now permeated the law itself – and some victims of crime are more equal than others  Source - CAPX 15/01/22 Link Imagine just for a moment that improbably members of the English Defence League had just been acquitted by a north London jury of desecrating the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery. How do you think the Metropolitan Police would have responded? Hopefully, and almost certainly, they would have condemned both the verdict and those who had carried out this act of criminal damage. They might, and should, also have gone on to say that they would continue to pursue anybody who did this type of thing again. Furthermore, they would be putting in place special security measures to protect the tomb. The Met, in this hypothetical situation, woul...

The French president also warned that migrants will continue to try and cross the Channel unless Britain changes its migration policies Source - Daily Telegraph - 19/01/22 Link Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday called on the European Union to be “tough” with the UK and force it to stick to its Brexit commitments on the Northern Ireland protocol and fishing. In a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the French president also said that the EU must commit to "strategic rearmament” in the face of threats notably from Russia, with whom he called for "frank and demanding" talks. The EU must beef up its defence to avoid “war" and become a "power in the future", he added. In an address marking France’s six-month rotating presidency of the EU, Mr Macron said that Europe and the UK needed to “regain trust in one another” in the wake of tensions over Brexit and the Withdrawal Agreement. "We want to make certain that the agreements entered into are respect...

 Johnson’s downfall would give Labour a whiff of blood in its nostrils and enhance Keir Starmer’s stature as one of its main authors Source - Daily Telegraph 19/01/22 Link Ditching a proven election-winner should never be done lightly and often brings lasting misfortune to a political party. Just ask Labour’s “curry house plotters”, who forced Tony Blair out earlier than he wanted to go, how their conspiracy has turned out – four successive general election defeats later. The latest move by Tory MPs against Boris Johnson has been dubbed the “pork pie plot” in recognition of the alleged involvement of the member for Rutland and Melton. It could see 20 Tory MPs newly-elected in 2019 submit letters of no confidence in the Prime Minister as early as today. Given the gravity of such a move, it is hard to see why the group would wish to embark on it with incomplete information. Because the impending Sue Gray report into Downing Street partying is a very important missing piece of the jig...

 The BBC licence fee has long outlived its practicality and its justification   Astonishingly, almost one-third of female convictions are for non-payment of the licence fee   If the BBC did have to compete for public funds, it would surely be very successful Source - CAPX - 18/01/22 Link Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has finally announced the intention to end the compulsory BBC licence fee. This should have been done years ago, but each time the BBC has managed to pressure the government of the day into extending a system that has long outlived its practicality and its justification.  Even now, although Dorries has said the next announcement about the licence fee will be the last, and that after 2027 it will be time to discuss ‘new ways’ to fund the corporation, an unnamed ‘BBC source’ describes the proposal as mere ‘speculation’. Clearly, they are determined to fight their corner, as before, and try to keep their lock on licence fee payers’ money. The licence fee...

America’s elites have developed a pathological hatred of democracy. Source - Spiked 15/01/22 Link The governing elites of the Anglo-American world are in the grip of hysteria. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attends a vigil commemorating the anniversary of the Capitol riot, 6 January 2022. Early symptoms of this hysteria were showing in their panicked response to the pandemic. However, since the turn of the year, these symptoms have developed into full-on delirium. The main prompt for this has been the anniversary of the Capitol riot in Washington, DC, on 6 January. Elite media outlets have been unable simply to reflect on the events of that day a year ago. Instead they have been indulging in endless speculation about the likelihood of a new civil war in America. The Guardian, in particular, has been full of such dystopian claims. ‘US could be under right-wing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warns’, runs one headline. ‘America is now in fascism’s legal phase’, runs another. As o...

Less severe variant inspires optimism that the UK is now in the Covid ‘end game’ Source - Daily Telegraph - 16/01/22 Link Boris Johnson may feel he has little choice when deciding whether to ditch Plan B. Just as persuasive as the extremely positive omicron data coming out of UK hospitals is a need for Johnson to placate furious Tory MPs after the latest and most damaging episode of ‘Partygate’. The anti-lockdown Covid Recovery Group of Conservative MPs have made clear they will not accept anything less than zero restrictions by the end of January as the PM’s future hangs in the balance. “We need a ‘learn to live with it day’,” says Mark Harper, the Tory MP who chairs the group. “As we head into what will be a difficult few months for many, a great way to help people with the cost of living would be to get the economy motoring. That starts by removing Plan B Covid restrictions.” Steve Baker, fellow Tory MP and the group's deputy chairman, adds that “opposition to Plan B will only h...