Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 It is daft to focus solely on one year’s growth  The usual suspects will blame Brexit, but there's little evidence for that claim  The Chancellor’s vision now seems limited to redistributing the burden of corporate taxation Source-  CAPX 31/01/23 Link The IMF’s relatively gloomy forecasts for the UK economy in 2023 should be taken with a fistful of salt. For a start, the organisation’s track record here is poor and some of the assumptions – especially about energy prices and interest rates – already look out of date. The differences between the numbers for the UK and our peers in the rest of Europe are also well within the usual margins of error. Admittedly, the UK is the only major economy which is forecast to be heading into a full-year recession, with GDP falling by 0.6% in 2023. But the German economy is only expected to grow by 0.1%. And it is daft to focus solely on one year’s growth, anyway. If we must play this game, perhaps we should also look at 2021 or 20...

 We can reduce inflation with a growth strategy that cuts taxes, but the civil servants won’t hear it Source - Daily Telegraph 30/01/23 Link John Redwood What is it about cutting tax rates that drives the Treasury mad? Jeremy Hunt says rightly that he wants inflation down, yet his department blocks cuts in VAT, fuel duties and other direct tax charges on activity that would do just that. They opted for subsidies to help us with energy costs instead of taking VAT off domestic energy, or reducing the extortionate carbon taxes on business energy. They chose any way they could find to keep inflation and public spending high. They are itching to put fuel duty up again to make pump prices higher. And why do they think putting up tax rates is the way to cut state borrowing? In the latest November budget they put up tax rates and nevertheless announced a massive 75 per cent increase in public borrowing this year. In part, the borrowing went up because the higher tax rates slow the economy....

The Conservative MP for Ashfield believes a culture of entitlement, rather than poverty, is holding people – and the country – back Source - Daily Telegraph 22/01/23 Link Lee Anderson was holed up in his favourite Nottinghamshire pub late on Friday, boasting on Twitter how he had been able to buy a round of drinks and a packet of pork scratchings for £6.90. “Only in Ashfield,” he told his 48,000 followers. Anderson is not your usual Conservative MP. A former miner and Labour councillor, he only jumped ship to the Tories a year before winning his Ashfield seat at the 2019 general election.  The pub – the New Cross – like Ashfield itself has only recently come around to welcoming Tories. “It is one of those pubs where they used to sweep the teeth up on a Sunday afternoon. It has still got the same clientele coming in,” he says. “I walked in the other week and they all stood up and clapped me. I would have got chased out of this pub 10 years ago if I had dared walk in as a Tory.”...

HM Inspectorate says while it is ‘noble and right’ recruitment should not be at the expense of standards Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/01/23 Link Applicants to the police who can barely write in English are being accepted by the Met in an attempt to improve diversity, one of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has warned. HMI Matt Parr said that while it was entirely “noble and right” that Scotland Yard was aiming to be more representative of the community it policed, it should not be at the expense of standards. In 2021, Dame Cressida Dick, the then Met Commissioner, declared it was the force’s aspiration to recruit 40 per cent of its officers from the black and ethnic minority communities by 2023.  But despite the Government’s programme to boost the number of officers across the country, which has seen a significant recruitment campaign across policing, the number of BAME officers in London remains at less than 17 per cent. Ambitious targets Mr Parr said setting ambitious ...

 First Minister’s refusal to specify Isla Bryson’s gender ‘shows danger of her self-ID plans’ Source - Daily Telegraph 26/01/23 Link Nicola Sturgeon’s controversial trans laws were in disarray on Thursday night after she was forced to announce that a rapist who claimed to be female would be moved into a male prison. Isla Bryson, who was this week convicted of raping two women, was initially housed at Cornton Vale women’s prison in Stirling but has now been transported to the male wing of Edinburgh’s Saughton jail.   Ms Sturgeon announced the move following a huge backlash but repeatedly refused to say whether she considered Bryson, 31 – who was named Adam Graham when committing the rapes and has not legally changed gender – to be a man or a woman. It comes with the First Minister locked in a battle with the UK Government over her Bill allowing people to self-identify their legal gender by signing a statutory declaration, removing the need for a medical diagnosis of gender...

 Source Daily Telegraph 26/01/23 Link Afternoon! If Boris Johnson is going to make a comeback later this summer to save the Tory party after last May’s disastrous local elections, he might find that a lot of his supporters have disappeared. The knives are certainly out for them, with the futures of party chairman Nadhim Zahawi and BBC chairman Richard Sharp in the balance. Zahawi was one of the most senior backers of Johnson’s return to the top of the party last October when he was considering standing again for the leadership. And Sharp was a friend of Johnson who helped to arrange a £800,000 loan for the cash-strapped ex-PM when he was in office. Both are now under investigation. Today, it was the turn of former Tory MP David Gauke to tur Daily Yelegran up the heat in the row over Zahawi’s tax affairs. “I think it is going to be very uncomfortable for Rishi Sunak at 12 o’clock today if Nadhim Zahawi is still in place,” he told BBC Radio 4 this morning. “There are just too many im...

The chilling case of rapist ‘Isla Bryson’ shows us how wokeness has deranged us. Source - Spiked 25/01/23 Link ‘You’re on the wrong side of history.’ So squeal the trans ideologues, in response to anyone who dares raise concerns about the new gender ideology and the threat it poses to reason, women’s safety and sex-based rights. I wonder how it’s feeling over there today, on the ‘right side of history’, with the chilling case of ‘Isla Bryson’, the male rapist who now claims to ‘identify’ as a woman, plastered across the newspapers. Bryson – real name Adam Graham – was found guilty of raping two women this week. The High Court in Glasgow heard that Bryson raped one woman in Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire, and another in Drumchapel, Glasgow. Prosecutors say he ‘preyed’ on the two ‘vulnerable’ women, who he met online. The judge said he should expect a ‘significant sentence’. The coverage, as is so often the way with cases like this, has been downright insane. This male rapist has been ro...

 Don‘t get carried away by overly optimistic economic data – the numbers are still patchy Source - Daily Telegraph 22/01/23 Link Just as the days start to get ever so slightly longer, is it possible to glimpse the beginnings of a brightening of the economic scene? Let us not be parochial. The economic travails that we have been passing through here in the UK have been largely global in nature. Accordingly, you could reasonably expect the recovery, when it comes, to have a large global element too. As it happens, the economic data continues to be decidedly soft in America, where a recession looks on the cards. Yet, over recent weeks, European economic data releases have tended to surprise on the optimistic side. It has long seemed that France was well positioned to avoid a recession but in the last week the German Chancellor, Herr Scholtz, expressed confidence that Germany would also avoid a recession this year. Given the importance of manufacturing to the German economy and the dam...

 Source - Daily Telegraph 23/01/23 Link Afternoon, Rishi Sunak has asked his independent ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus to look into the tax affairs of Nadhim Zahawi, as “clearly in this case there are questions that need answering”. The PM stepped in after Zahawi’s friends insisted the chairman of the Conservative Party was not planning to resign amid a furore over his tax affairs. If this feels like it is five minutes to midnight on Zahawi’s political future, it is because it is. Zahawi said this morning: “I am confident I acted properly throughout and look forward to answering any and all specific questions in a formal setting to Sir Laurie.” Well, quite. But I can’t help feeling that Zahawi could have avoided the embarrassing investigation into his tax affairs if he had only been more upfront in the first place. News that he had reached a multi-million pound settlement with HMRC first emerged eight days ago. This morning the BBC is reporting that the total amount paid is in t...

 Ministers should find the courage to stop the Mayor of London’s appalling Ulez expansion scheme Source - Daily Telegraph 21/01/23 Link Now that Rishi Sunak has found the gumption to challenge Nicola Sturgeon over her putative law to allow people to change their gender at whim, he should turn his attention to Sadiq Khan and his expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). Surely, the Government can find the powers to stop this highly-regressive charge, on the dual grounds that it is unfair and will be hugely damaging to the capital’s economy. Yes, I know that it is fashionable to be in favour of devolving power to local people, but Ulez expansion is a prime example of how devolution often fails to reach the people themselves, but rather becomes lodged in the offices of mayors and other officials. In order to expand Ulez to outer London, Khan was obliged to hold a consultation. But we found out last week just how loaded that process apparently was. With public support laggi...

 Heaven forbid a politician do anything that smacks of luxury or expense   We love ignoring systemic issues if it's a chance to lionise personal inconvenience   Sadly, a Britain that is actually prosperous will involve doing things people don't like Source CApX - 20/01/23 Link The Prime Minister using a government aeroplane to get to engagements in different parts of the country is fine. It’s fine! He’s a busy man, and whilst this country may not be vast, it is nonetheless not exactly a small island. How have we spent more than two weeks, as a nation, whinging about this? And yet here we are, with the press still spluttering about Rishi Sunak’s flying habits. This time the problem is apparently that he used an RAF jet for a flight that was just 41 minutes. Of course, the journey was only that short because he used an RAF jet. But ‘Prime Minister uses official plane to shave hours off travel time’ sounds like less of a scandal, so here we are. When the first of these stori...

 The EU's impotence against Joe Biden's protectionism shows its influence is waning Source - Daily Telegraph 19/01/23 Link The European Union's advocates claim it is the world’s regulatory superpower.  They argue that sheer size of its market means that no one can ignore it - and its negotiating skills means that it can steam-roller other countries into accepting its terms.  The EU makes a big deal of its influence in the world. Its heft and weight is sold as one of the key benefits of membership - and one of the big losses for the UK now that we have left. Yet over the last few months, the EU has been waging a furious war against President Joe Biden’s nakedly protectionist subsidies and tariffs.  At Davos on Wednesday Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz threatened a full-scale trade war with the US, joining a chorus of complaints from European leaders. And the result? Nothing. The United States has simply shrugged it off, and possibly hasn’t even noticed.  There i...

Rishi Sunak was heckled during a visit to Morecambe this morning as he and Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove spoke to people involved in the new Eden Project there. Source - Daily Telegraph 19/01/23 Link During a walkabout on the site of the project - which has just been awarded £50 million in funding from the Government - one passer-by shouted at the Prime Minister: "Lend us 20 quid for my heating bill, Rishi." Multi-millionaire Sunak was in the North of England to convince communities that he cares about shifting billions of central government cash into overlooked parts of the country. The Telegraph's analysis - headlined "Sunak pumps more money into South" - won't have helped though. We found that more cash is now being funnelled into the South than when Boris Johnson was prime minister. Sunak insisted that the most funding per person is going to the North of England. "The region that has done the best in the amount of funding per person is the Nor...

Despite years of preaching about the need to combat emissions, Germany is one of the biggest polluters of all Source - Daily Telegraph 18/01/23 Link It is the only major country where the Greens hold one of the great offices of state. It invests massively in cycle lanes and recycling. And it prides itself on being a model global citizen, leading European and international efforts to persuade countries to work together on agreed rules for the common good. Yet after years of preaching to everyone else about the need to combat CO2 emissions, Germany has turned into one of the biggest polluters of all. The hypocrisy is breath-taking.  Over the last week, Germany has been gripped by images of riot police taking on protestors in the tiny village of Lützerath. Owned by the energy giant RWE, its residents have already been forced out of their homes. Protestors have been fighting running battles to save the village, but the water cannons, batons and riot shields look to have been enough to ...

Latest figures suggest Government finances have more leeway than first thought, and the upcoming Budget might just hold a few surprises Source - Daily Telegraph 17/01/23 Link How bad are the Government’s finances, really? Conservative MPs are getting twitchy about a flow of news in recent days that suggests the economy is not in as bad a place as Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have tried to convince us. Last week the Bank of England disclosed that it had dropped all of the £19.3 billion of gilts purchased last autumn to stabilise the UK debt market. Added to that, the Bank said it had made £3.8 billion in profit from the affair. This cash will eventually make its way to HM Treasury. That came a day before economists said the Treasury will bank an £11 billion windfall from a stronger-than-expected economy which grew 0.1 per cent in November, largely on the back of football fans following the progress of England and Wales in the World Cup. And MPs are already noting that the warmer than exp...

The SNP leader is on a collision course with Westminster over her Bill, but this is no longer a party political issue – it’s about safety Source - Daily Telegraph 16/01/23 Link A clash between the UK and Scottish governments looms over legislation passed by Holyrood, which would allow Scots to change their gender from the age of 16 and remove the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria for a Gender Recognition Certificate. Rishi Sunak is so “concerned” by these reforms that he has blocked the Bill, while Sir Keir Starmer declared that 16 was too young for anyone to legally change their gender. So this is no longer a party political issue; the right and left are in agreement and the specific point on which they – and any rational individual – agree is that we’re talking about children here. Trans rights have been ignored for too long and need to be upheld – but this has become an issue about the rights, and safety, of our children. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of...