Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

His tweaking of the Ministerial Code is not the outrage it is being made out to be. Source - Spiked - 30/05/22 Link   Perhaps we should view it as progress that Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, has described the prime minister as a ‘tinpot despot’. For a start, the phrase has a pleasing poetic quality about it. It also seems to mark an intellectual advance on her previous description of Tory opponents as ‘scum’. It actually contains the germ of an idea, of a critique that goes beyond simple tribal hatred. The idea is that Boris Johnson refuses to be constrained by constitutional norms and uses his parliamentary majority to sweep away safeguards and rewrite rules for his own convenience. The example this notion is currently being pinned to is the government’s rewriting of the terms and conditions of the Ministerial Code, so that breaches do not automatically lead to resignations. A Cabinet Office document published on Friday says it is disproportionate to requir...

 By Joe Barnes, BRUSSELS CORRESPONDENT Source - Telegraph Dispatches - 30/05/22 Link With the strength of the EU’s next package of sanctions against Russia in a race to the bottom, it has led to some embarrassing admissions over the bloc’s apparent unity. Robert Habeck, the German economic minister, was one of the first to concede that the EU’s unity was fraying after its 27 national ambassadors failed to broker a deal for a ban on the import of Russian oil. The row over the long-delayed embargo will take centre stage at Monday’s extraordinary European Council summit in Brussels, despite the issue being only a minor space on the agenda. It is well known that Hungary has provided the main opposition, leading European officials to agree that exempting deliveries of Russian oil via pipelines could create room for a deal. Germany leapt on this, insisting if landlocked Budapest is allowed to continue importing through the Druzhba pipeline, then so should the rest of the EU’s nations. It...

Strengthened by Western complacency, the Russian president has successfully launched his fight-back Source - Daily Telegraph - 29/05/22 Link A victory in Donbas – if he manages to secure it – is not the endgame for Vladimir Putin. He means to bend the entirety of Ukraine to his will and humiliate Nato and the US. Those, like Henry Kissinger and Emmanuel Macron, who think making peace is a matter of handing a slice of territory to Moscow, fail to understand a fundamental point: Putin’s strategic perspective goes much further than eastern Ukraine, and he has far more time and leverage than we assumed. Many commentators had warned the West against complacency after Russia’s failed attempt to seize Ukraine in one blow in February. Putin’s army may have displayed tactical ineptitude and low morale, but it was always clear that a regrouped force could nevertheless achieve some of his objectives. That is precisely what is happening now, with the tide beginning to turn against the Ukrainians i...

 Both leaders had flawed personalities, but moments of greatness within them   Directly helping prevent the fall of Kyiv is Johnson's finest hour   Perhaps a romantic, impetuous flourish is exactly what you need to save a European democracy Source- CApx 27/05/22 Link ‘The final lines of the speech were as predictable as they were perfect. Standing in front of a heaving, joyous Maidan Square, Volodymyr Zelensky proudly by his side, Boris Johnson swept his arm over the crowd as he boomed ‘…and this has been your Finest Hour.’  President Biden beamed. President Macron and Chancellor Scholz were watching it at home on television. Meanwhile news was breaking of more pro democracy demonstrations in Tehran and Damascus, British and American flags prominently displayed, as the new government in Moscow made it clear that it no longer would, or could, militarily support its allies in the Middle East. The Prime Minister later returned to London to a record opinion poll lead, ju...

 SNP will have to get support, cut benefits or raise taxes, says IFS Source - Daily Telegraph 27/05/22 Link Nicola Sturgeon will be forced to beg Whitehall for further funding after the SNP pledged to overspend in Scotland by £640 per person, economists have said. The Scottish Government’s spending review on Tuesday is likely to show a £3.5bn black hole in its budget by 2026–27, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). David Phillips, the think tank’s associate director, said the SNP is facing some “very tough decisions” unless the UK Government rides to its rescue with extra funding. He said: “A series of expensive spending commitments on top of underlying spending pressures mean that the Scottish Government faces a multi-billion budget shortfall over the next four years under current forecasts. “Because it cannot borrow to fund day-to-day spending except in some limited circumstances, next week’s Scottish Spending Review could see the announcement of pretty hefty tax ...

 Prime Minister brought in four top economists to help persuade the Chancellor of spending splurge to ease the cost of living crisis Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/05/22 Link Ever since Rishi Sunak delivered his underwhelming Spring Statement in March, Boris Johnson has been searching for a way to make the Chancellor reopen his wallet. On Monday, he finally found it - when a brains trust of leading economists privately backed a fresh spending splurge to ease the cost of living crisis. Crucially, they argued against the Treasury’s view that any increase in public spending would increase inflation, giving the Prime Minister the covering fire he needed to take Mr Sunak over the top with him. By Tuesday afternoon, when Mr Johnson sat down with Mr Sunak to thrash out the details of the spending package, the Chancellor needed little convincing. Ofgem had given them advance warning of an announcement that the energy price cap was likely to rocket by a further £830 in the autumn. “Once that...

Exclusive: Chancellor to tackle cost-of-living crisis by announcing additional reductions funded by windfall tax on oil and gas firms Source - Daily Telegraph - 26/05/22 Link Every household in the country will get extra money taken off their energy bills this autumn under a new cost of living support package to be unveiled by Rishi Sunak on Thursday. Boris Johnson nor Rishi Sunak in a picture published as part of the Sue Gray report. The energy bill relief announcements could help Downing Street bounce news of revelations about lockdown-breaking parties out of the headlines C The Chancellor is set to announce an increase to the £200 saving unveiled earlier in the year and scrap plans to make people pay back the amount over the coming years. To fund the move, he will announce an oil and gas windfall tax that will see the amount companies pay linked to how much they invest. The multi-billion pound package is also expected to include new “targeted” support for the poorest households, pos...

The Boris snaps might excite the centrist dads, but this stuff is boring the rest of us to tears. Source - Spike 24/05/22 Link The Partygate row has dominated British politics – or at least media coverage of British politics – for almost half a year now. On numerous occasions it has supposedly taken Boris Johnson to the brink of defenestration at the hands of backbench MPs spooked by public fury about the prime minister’s lax approach to his own lockdown laws. Yet somehow those mutinous MPs have never quite obtained sufficient momentum to ouvre la fenêtre pour expulser le grand chien, as Johnson might put it in one of his jocular sorties into Franglais. Now, less than a week after a Metropolitan Police inquiry closed, leaving Johnson with just a single fixed penalty notice for an infringement of lockdown rules involving nine minutes with a birthday cake, Partygate has flared up yet again with the impending publication of the final report into the affair by senior mandarin Sue Gray. And...

The City’s mania for ‘ESG’ is stifling debate and will stop us from solving the world’s problems Source - Daily Telegraph - 23/05/22 Link Let’s first be clear about what Stuart Kirk, the HSBC executive who has sparked a Twitter witch hunt and is being hung out to dry by his employer for giving a controversial presentation last week, didn’t say. He didn’t - despite what you might have assumed from the subsequent furore - deny the possibility of man-made climate change. In fact, in his brief talk at a Financial Times event, he specifically said: “I don’t doubt the science at all.” He also accepted that climate change posed an ecological risk; he mentioned, for example, that the number of forest fires in California is likely to increase and sea levels will rise. And he forecast that the activities of industrial and fossil fuel companies will be curtailed. Kirk’s apparent heresy was daring to suggest the financial risks posed by those trends might have been overstated. He ventured that cen...

 Nationalising ScotRail, launching a ticket sale and then slashing services follows a long line of pratfalls Source- Daily Telegraph - 21/05/22 Link Chaos at ScotRail is the latest twist in a torrid month for Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish National Party. Less than two months after being nationalised at a cost of at least £4m, and days after launching a half-price offer to coax in travellers, the operator announced it would cut services by a third from next week in a dispute with the unions. Almost 700 weekday services will be lost, with further cuts yet to fall on weekend operations. It follows a string of disastrous efforts by the Scottish Government to involve the state in business affairs, which is putting pressure on the country’s economy. Liz Cameron, chief executive of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, says ScotRail’s issues are a new blow to the country’s companies. “When the ScotRail franchise was taken on by the Scottish Government, businesses had hoped to see improvem...

 Conservative ministers are planning to break the unions' ‘stranglehold’ on transport and education Source - Daily Telegraph - 21/05/22 Link The Conservatives are threatening to launch a double-pronged attack against trade unions in an effort to break their stranglehold on the public. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, told The Telegraph that the Government was poised to draw up laws requiring minimum numbers of rail staff to work during a strike. The law would make any industrial action illegal if those levels were not met. The intervention came as a ballot of 40,000 Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) union members was due to close on Tuesday, with Mick Lynch, the body’s general secretary, having warned that a strike would “bring the country to a standstill”.  The Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, which has vowed to coordinate with the RMT, has threatened the biggest disruption since the General Strike in 1926, over job cuts and pay freezes. Separately, Nadh...

 if the EU will not negotiate the substance of the Protocol, how will change come about?   We can't sustain a Protocol that's having the opposite effect of what was intended   For Northern Ireland there is no 'best of both worlds' from its unique regulatory position Source _capx 20/05/22 Link The Foreign Secretary has announced legislation to allow the Government to override certain parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol that have been put into effect in national law. As I set out in my recent IEA briefing paper, the Protocol is costing NI and the UK as a whole hundreds of millions of pounds, and there is no evidence for the proposition that Northern Ireland will experience a ‘best of both worlds’ effect from its unfettered access to both the UK and EU markets. Nor is there any evidence that UK goods are unlawfully making their way to Ireland, despite the Protocol being only partially implemented so far. So it seems clear that change must be made to the Protocol to prot...

 That’s the question a group of researchers tasked themselves with answering. Here they reveal their findings Source - positive.news 18/05/22 Link Communities should have a right to improve the unloved public spaces around them by growing fruit and vegetables, according to a new campaign that’s calling for a “right to grow” law in the UK. This law, akin to the Countryside & Rights of Way Act that first gave the public the right to roam across parts of Britain’s countryside in 2000, aims to get local councils and landowners – such as the NHS and water companies – to open up parts of land in towns and cities for cultivation by local citizens. Initiatives like Incredible Edible, which is leading the campaign, have been successfully taking over public spaces with food growing projects for over a decade now. We set out to understand how opening up these spaces to anyone who wants to grow food could contribute to improving environmental, physical and mental health across the country....

 Natural gas is to be classified as a “green” investment under proposals from business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, according to a report. Source - Energy Voice 16/05/22 Link Mr Kwarteng is said to be keen to have the drilling listed as “environmentally sustainable”, according to The Telegraph, in new documents being drafted by his department and the Treasury. As ESG funds move away from fossil fuels, the proposals are expected to encourage banks and pension funds to invest in the extraction projects. A similar move was made by the European Union last year, despite environmental criticism. Last week, Shell and Siemens Energy delivered what they termed “uncomfortable truths” about the realities on natural gas and the need for it as the UK transitions to low-carbon energy alternatives. Although gas has been endorsed as a transition fuel, environmental protestors have highlighted it as a significant contributor of carbon dioxide emissions. A Whitehall source told The Telegraph that Mr Kw...

Brussels said to be offering concessions on the post-Brexit agreement, but warns of action if no compromise is reached Source Daily Telegraph - 17/05/22 Link The EU will offer Britain new concessions on the Northern Ireland Protocol, but has threatened a trade war if Boris Johnson refuses to agree a compromise. The Telegraph understands that the European Commission will propose tweaking the bloc’s own laws to ease checks between mainland Britain and the province in order to end the long-running row over Brexit rules. According to sources, Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s chief negotiator, set out the olive branch in a call with Liz Truss after weeks of acrimony between the pair. Details of their conversion emerged after the Foreign Secretary vowed on Tuesday to introduce new powers to tear up the post-Brexit solution and suspend border checks in the Irish Sea. Despite the threat, insiders said that Mr Sefcovic was willing to agree significant compromises to virtually eliminate all customs and ...

 Many people expect high inflation to persist for a long time. But that might not be true, says Max King. Inflation may fall faster than expected – and the UK may avoid recession. Here’s why. Source - Money week - 13/05/22 The front cover of The Economist on 23 April showed a picture of Benjamin Franklin with his hand covering half his face in horror.  The headline: “The Fed that failed.”  So it seems.  The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of US inflation has surged to 6.6%. Meanwhile, the recent consumer price inflation reading fell to 8.3% from 8.5%, but that was higher than expected and also shows signs of growing “stickiness”.  The comparable UK number is 7%, but expected to go higher, while for the eurozone it is 7.5%. Yet long-term followers of Economist covers know that it has a reputation as one of the world’s most reliable contrary indicators.  Is it time to wonder if the inflation panic, far from becoming embedded, is peaking and will soon fade...