Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 Foreign Secretary's allies have opened talks with energy firms about ramping up domestic oil and gas production to combat rising prices Source - Daily Telegraph - 30/08/22 Link Liz Truss's most senior advisers have opened talks with energy firms about ramping up the production of North Sea oil and gas if she becomes prime minister. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Brexit opportunities minister, are striving to maximise domestic production ahead of the winter. They have been involved in discussions with global giants including Shell, Total and Perenco about plans for a new round of drilling licences, according to The Times. The pair are expected to take up the top two positions in the Treasury, with Mr Kwarteng becoming chancellor and Mr Rees-Mogg the chief secretary. Allies of Ms Truss insisted the pair held the talks in their capacity as current government ministers and not as part of her transition plans for entering No 10. Boris Johnson's...

 The case for an independent Scotland has totally unravelled. Source - Spiked 24/08/22 Link The Scottish National Party, in its 15 years of governing Scotland, has often looked close to achieving its dream of independence. Now, within two years of the party’s 90th birthday, all it can see is a slow defeat ahead. As things stand right now, the case for an independent Scotland has rarely looked weaker. External events, including Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, as well as unforced errors, from its poor management of Scotland’s public services to its hasty, ill-conceived plans for a second referendum, seem to have put independence out of reach. This is good news for those of us opposed to the breakup of the United Kingdom. The case against independence At the heart of the SNP’s case is that an independent Scotland could rejoin the European Union. Indeed, ever since former leader Alex Salmond persuaded the SNP to ditch its old Eurosceptic leanings and embrace the EU in 1990, the SNP ha...

 Taxpayers should not have to ‘fork out for half-empty buildings’, says minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/08/22 Link Jacob Rees-Mogg is to sell off £1.5 billion of government offices in central London after civil servants refused to stop working from home, The Telegraph can reveal. Taxpayers should not have to “fork out for half-empty buildings”, according to the minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency, who said expensive office space had been “under-utilised”. He said officials would enjoy a “better quality of life” if their jobs were relocated to offices outside London. Next week, Mr Rees-Mogg will publish a Government Property Strategy aimed at realising £2 billion in savings from property sales and efficiencies. The plan includes selling £1.5 billion of property assets over the next three years, with staff consolidated into fewer buildings as part of a new network of government “hubs”. A further £500 mi...

The one-time pin-up boy of the free market talks inflation, the economy and why there’s reason to be optimistic Source - Daily Telegraph 27/08/22 Link Prof Patrick Minford has been one of Britain’s leading macroeconomists since the 1970s. For more than 20 years he was a professor at Liverpool University; since 1997 he has been professor of applied economics at the Cardiff Business School. Mrs Thatcher used to brainstorm with him when transforming Britain’s economy in the 1980s. He became a pin-up boy of free-marketeers, and a target for her detractors. He has never sought to be a political figure and keeps a low profile – but suddenly he is above the parapet, having endorsed the economic ideas of Liz Truss, which bear an alarming resemblance to his own. Looking much younger than his 79 years, Minford, who is thoughtful and articulate, is speaking to me over Zoom from his book-lined study in his home in Cardiff. I ask him about his relationship with our potential future prime minister. ...

 A visa ban would harm the Kremlin and bring the war in Ukraine to a close faster Source - Daily Telegraph - 24/08/22 Link It's one of the biggest issues dividing European leaders — whether a blanket ban on EU visas for Russian tourists should be imposed as retribution for Moscow’s war against Ukraine.  Russian cars parked in Helsinki airport as Finland has become a hub for tourists flying into Europe CREDIT: ALESSANDRO RAMPAZZO/AFP Differences of opinion have cast a shadow over the eurozone project since the beginning, but Russia’s invasion has repeatedly laid bare just how fragile consensus is on virtually any issue of major economic and political importance.  A call for all Russian travellers to be prevented from entering Europe promises to prompt one of the most explosive rows yet, splitting the bloc almost entirely into two clear sub-regions as the Continent is forced to wrestle with some of the more difficult moral questions that the war has served up.  It is p...

 All the evidence shows exams are much fairer than continuous assessment   Like the ex-PM himself, Blair's ideas about education were the future once   The poorest children have the most to lose from changes to the system Source- CAPX -  23/08/23 Link A new academic year has broken, has it not? And with it, inevitably, come the calls for GCSEs and A levels to be reformed or abolished outright. Following on from the recent Times Education Commission’s demand for a total ‘reset’ of education comes a similar call from former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The report, ‘Ending the Big Squeeze on Skills: How to Futureproof Education in England’, published by Blair’s Institute for Global Change, is similarly radical in its calls for changes to assessment. I say ‘radical’, but actually the arguments put forward in the report, the language used, the unfounded claims made about what such changes can deliver, are all depressingly familiar to anyone who has followed the ‘skills vs ...

 The hard left are demanding radical policies that will only make things worse   Claims that companies are 'profiteering' from misery don't stand up   Price caps and nationalisation will just lead to more poverty – look at Venezuela Source - CApx - 24/08/22 Link Owen Jones is glorifying French-style civil disobedience and direct action. Mick Lynch, between echoing Kremlin talking points on Ukraine, has called for the expropriation of North Sea gas. The latest union-led campaign, Enough is Enough, wants a £15 an hour minimum wage, rent caps, and higher taxes on corporations. Everywhere you look, the cost-of-living crisis is being exploited by leftwing campaigners. They are demanding radical policies, from price caps to nationalisation, that would risk turning the crisis into a depression. Activist Naomi Klein has written about disaster capitalism: taking advantage of shocks to introduce free enterprise policies. Today we are experiencing disaster socialism. The disaster so...

 UK diplomats urge European leaders to keep up support as cost of living crisis bites Source - Daily Telegraph - 23/08/22 Link European support for Ukraine’s battle against Russia could dry up amid the cost of living crisis, Britain fears. The Telegraph understands that UK diplomats have been travelling to European capitals to make the case against cutting aid to Kyiv. European governments were said to be increasingly concerned about spending on arms and humanitarian supplies as citizens face rocketing energy prices, according to a source briefed on the talks. On Tuesday, economists said the eurozone had entered recession, with German businesses in their worst slump for two years. On the six-month anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday, the US is set to announce $3 billion of new weaponry for the country in its single largest package to date. Writing for The Telegraph, Liz Truss, the Tory leadership front runner, meanwhile pledged to increase intelligence sharing from ...

Confected outrage is more about bringing down the Government than helping workers Source - Daily Telegraph - 22/08/22 Link Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Felixstowe port found itself in the grip of a crisis. After all, someone at the terminal’s parent company – possibly after being repeatedly hit round the head with a large, wet fish – thought it was a good idea to employ Chris Grayling as a “strategic adviser”, on £100,000 a year for just seven hours a week work no less. “Strategic” is not necessarily a word that springs to mind when looking back on Grayling’s highlights reel as a Cabinet minister. In fact you would struggle to find a less strategic act than his decision to award a £14m ferry contract to a firm that had no ferries, while serving as transport secretary, though there is a wealth of alternative material to choose from in Grayling’s case. The selection of outsourcing giant Carillion to run prison maintenance when the company was on the brink of collapse, duri...

Controls on national debt should be abandoned because they do not encourage growth or limit inflation, says former minister Source - Daily Telegraph - 20/08/22 Link Britain’s fiscal rules should be ripped up by Liz Truss if she wins the Conservative leadership race, one of her key allies has said. Sir John Redwood, who served as the head of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street policy unit and is tipped to return to government if Ms Truss wins, said she should abandon the practice of targeting a set percentage of GDP for national debt and the deficit. He also called for a review of both the Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and suggested the Foreign Secretary should be inspired by Mrs Thatcher in removing utilities and transport from state control. Since 1997, fiscal rules have been announced by chancellors during Budget statements in an attempt to control government spending. They usually set a restriction on the proportion of national debt or deficit as a perce...

 Working for the state is far more lucrative than a job in private industry Source - Daily telegraph -  21/08/22 Link UK public sector wages lagging behind the private sector”. “Public sector workers are clearly worse off”. Last week, when the Office for National Statistics released the latest wage data, countless newspaper headlines and broadcast bulletins suggested that public sector workers are, on average, paid less than the rest of us. The clear implication was that the fifth of the workforce employed by the state deserves a particularly large wage increase, more than anyone else. Such media commentary matters given that millions of public sector workers will likely vote on strikes this coming autumn, in what could be the biggest wave of industrial action since the 1970s. Many state employees feel their poor pay justifies walking out, whatever the suffering and chaos that imposes on the rest of us. Public sector shutdowns could impact schools, hospitals and fire stations,...

The Kremlin is manipulating statistics to disguise the damage being done by sanctions Source - Daily Telegraph 18/08/22 Link The venerable New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and even global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) seem to have succumbed to Putin’s paraphrasing of Mark Twain: “The rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated. These institutions did so by echoing last week’s official GDP release from the Kremlin, which stated that the Russian economy shrank a less-than-anticipated 4pc from April through June compared to a year earlier. Strangely, while Western journalists question Putin propaganda suggesting that Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is really a Nazi in disguise, that Russia is liberating Ukraine from the Ukrainian Nazis who massacred innocent civilians in Bucha, or that the 82 bold Russian journalists murdered who questioned President Putin’s rule were merely careless around open windows, they uncriticall...

 Existing financial watchdogs frequently ‘conflict or pull in different directions’, says Lord Blackwell Source - Daily Telegraph - 18/08/22 Link Liz Truss should create a new City super-regulator to liberate businesses from red tape if she becomes Prime Minister, the former chairman of Lloyds has said. Lord Blackwell, a former adviser to John Major and Margaret Thatcher who led the FTSE 100 bank's board until last year, said he would back a merger of the Financial Conduct Authority and the regulatory arm of the Bank of England. Ms Truss, the Foreign Secretary, is reportedly considering the move if she wins the Tory leadership race as part of efforts to liberate the banking system from counterproductive rules. Lord Blackwell said that the existing financial watchdogs frequently "conflict or pull in different directions" and "leave it to the big institutions they're regulating to sort out the conflict".  Truss will consider merging the Financial Conduct Autho...