Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

  The UK is drowning in debt – but Labour could find a way to raise it even higher Source - Daily Telegraph 30/04/23 Link Borrowing has punched its way back through 100pc of GDP. The UK is drowning in debt. Interest rates are going up, meaning more expensive repayments. And our tax burden is on course to hit the highest level since the Second World War, making it virtually impossible to raise them any further. If the Labour Party takes office within the next two years, as many people believe is inevitable, it will in many ways be more limited than any incoming administration for the last fifty years.  As its MPs surely realise, there is only so much money that can be raised by ending non-dom status. Yet it may find itself with a whole new way to analyse and present our fiscal position: the recently-introduced measure of the country’s "net worth".  The trouble is, it is every bit as bogus as every other wheeze for squeezing more money out of the bond markets – and will onl...

  Children are once again being put last by adults with a sinister agenda Source - Daily Telegraph - 28/04/23 LINK With so much money and attention lavished on the NHS over the past 13 years of Conservative rule, there is little doubt that education has been comparatively neglected – at least in terms of public spending. Health spending will have increased by 40 per cent since the Conservatives took office in 2010, while spending on education has risen by just 3 per cent, according to a tentative analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. As the think tank pointed out when it published the figures 18 months ago, spending so much on healthcare and relatively little on education is not entirely consistent with the Government’s “levelling up” agenda. Last year’s Autumn Statement did change the situation somewhat, allowing for an extra £4.6 billion spending on schools, but there has long been a sense that the Department for Education is the poor relation in Whitehall, as the Conserv...

Humza Yousaf’s talks with Rishi Sunak focused on powers to hold a referendum. Without them, his party has nothing to offer Source - Daily Telegraph 26/04/23 Link Yesterday, Humza Yousaf visited Westminster for talks with Rishi Sunak. The police investigation into the SNP’s finances is still ongoing; an auditor for the accounts has yet to be found; two of its most senior figures have been arrested (and subsequently released without charge) in the last month. And what is the issue foremost on the leader’s mind? The power to hold a second independence referendum, of course. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.  Yousaf went through the usual motions, accusing the government of undermining devolution. Cynical observers might conclude that Yousaf is seeking to deflect the public’s attention from the collapse of his party by concocting a row with London. However, I favour a second explanation; it is quite possible that the SNP has elected as its leader a man who hasn’t quite grasped the ...

 Our prime minister is quietly filling in the blank pages of the UK’s post-EU playbook Source - Daily Telegraph 25/04/23 Link Britain was conspicuously absent when a group of close neighbours issued the Esbjerg Declaration a year ago, unveiling plans to turn the North Sea into a massive green power plant for half of Europe. The exclusion made no economic sense since Britain is the world leader in offshore wind. Surplus electricity from giant wind parks on the Dogger Bank will be a lynchpin of European clean power by the early 2030s. It will be an integral part of Europe’s post-Putin energy security. That frosty and petulant stand-off already seems like another world. The UK reached an accord with the EU’s North Seas Energy Cooperation (NSEC) last December on a basis of sovereign parity. This week British ministers are taking part in the North Sea Summit in Ostend as full equals.   What has happened in the meantime is the invasion of Ukraine and a complete change in the po...

 This was no slip of the tongue or angry tweet   For a short letter, Abbott packed in an awful lot of offence   Pseudo-intellectual 'white privilege' theories belong in the dustbin Source - CAPX - 24/04/23 link It may only have been a few lines long, but Diane Abbott’s letter to The Observer managed to pack in a veritable smorgasbord of historical inaccuracy and obscenely offensive rhetoric. The veteran MP has since had the Labour whip removed, and issued a grovelling apology, including the bizarre claim that her letter was the result of an ‘initial draft’. Who among us hasn’t thrown in a bit of casual antisemitism in the ‘note-taking’ stage, after all? Abbott had written in to respond to a Guardian article from Tomiwa Owolade on why racism ‘isn’t a black and white issue’. Her letter was a remarkable feat of ‘grievance competition’, arguing that Jews, Gypsies, Travellers and Irish people ‘are not all their lives subjected to racism’ in the same way black people are. It wa...

Plans for a new force will only undermine the unity and strength of Nato at this critical moment Source - Daily Telegraph 23/04/23 Link On Wednesday the European Parliament voted to set up a new force of 5,000 troops to allow the EU to “respond decisively... in order to assert itself as a credible security and defense actor”. The plan is to start exercising this year and have full operational capability by 2025. This amounts to nothing more than another military white elephant. Even its name – the Rapid Deployment Capability – smacks of bureaucratic impotence. And the very idea is absurd: given the wide array of national self-interests and often fundamentally diverging geopolitical priorities among member nations, its deployment would inevitably be met with opposition by one country or another, even if – as is planned – there was no need for agreement from all members. You just have to look at the dithering and division in the EU when Putin invaded Ukraine, which was a black and white ...

 Falling homeownership and poor investment returns threaten the living standards of future retirees Source - Daily Telegraph 22/04/23 Link Britain is hurtling towards a pensions crisis, according to a major new report, but Generation X will be the hardest hit – and is running out of time to act. Older generations have enjoyed generous “defined benefit” schemes, a boom in home house prices and a long bull run in the stock market, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said this week.  However, the think tank said the gradual disappearance of gold-plated pensions, declining investment returns and falling homeownership means that the next cohort of workers are barrelling towards penury in retirement.  More than three million workers are failing to save any money into a pension this year, it found. But the report, which called for a major review of the British pension system, said that it was most concerned about workers in their 50s who had fallen through the gaps of the Governmen...

 Hearn intends to personally write to the 460 spectators affected and expressed his upset over the disruption caused Source - Daily Telegraph 20/04/22 Link Barry Hearn, the owner of World Snooker, is ready to fund legal action on behalf of the 400 fans who were affected by Just Stop Oil protester Edred Whittingham on Monday night. The 25-year-old student forced the first session of the match between Rob Milkins and Joe Perry to be abandoned after storming the playing area and standing up on the table before throwing orange powered paint across the green baize. Hearn was furious to see paying spectators so inconvenienced and he is ready to help underwrite individual civil actions against Whittingham and has also warned protesters that he will support similar actions if his other events are targeted. The 920-capacity Crucible Theatre was sold out when the protest took place, forcing the match between Milkins and Perry to suspended until the following day. Whittingham and Margaret Rei...

 The reasons Sturgeon gave for her resignation now look utterly bogus   On the plus side, the SNP have a lovely camper van without many miles on the clock   Yousaf leads a dysfunctional, divided party with what look like serious financial problems Source CAPX 19/04/23 Link The tweet from a prominent Scottish journalist said it all: “Yousaf: I don’t believe the SNP is a criminal operation.” Well, that’s reassuring. The party’s next conference slogan, perhaps? The First Minister’s considered view was reached after the rozzers made their second-highest profile arrest so far in their investigation into the SNP’s finances, this time collaring the party’s treasurer, Colin Beattie MSP.  It was bad timing all round: yesterday was Yousaf’s big day, when he made his first speech to the Scottish Parliament as First Minister, at which he set out his political priorities for the next few years. Worthy and dull though his speech was – and he made it to the end without falling over...

 Britain can capitalise on the EU's caution over this booming industry Source - Daily Telegraph 18/04/23 Link There will be controls on privacy and facial recognition. Copyrights will be upheld. And there will be safeguards to make sure that employees and consumers are adequately protected.  As the new generation of chatbots take artificial intelligence into the mainstream for the first time, the European Union is planning the first regulatory system for the booming industry, and officials and parliamentarians are weighing in with their long lists of demands. Doubtless there need to be some rules in place, and AI systems cannot become some new Wild West.  But the EU’s planned rules, typical of the bloc, look as though they may turn into a bureaucratic monster that will punish start-ups and crush innovation.  And this means that, if Britain is bold enough to resist the gravitational pull of the EU system, a huge space could grow up. We could become a hub for entrepren...

 The idea people are leaving the public sector in droves just doesn't stack up   In a sensible world, employers would reward their staff for individual performance   National pay scales are causing a big political problem for the Government Source CAPX 17/04/23 Link   Strikes used to be weapon of the poorly paid and the role of trade unions was to defend downtrodden workers being exploited by their greedy bosses. These days, however, we have junior doctors standing on picket lines demanding a 35% pay increase which would take their starting salary to £40,000. headteachers are also considering strike action and criminal barristers were on strike last year. even those sympathetic to their cause will surely accept that these people are not on the breadline and during their careers will likely earn much more than most of the population. All of this reflects the way the middle classes have been radicalised, with strikes now the weapon of choice for fairly well paid people...

Forget Silicon Valley, the Lone Star State is thriving Source - Daily Telegraph 16/04/23 Link The words on the board hanging from a pole simply read: “Welcome, Snailbrook, Tx, est, 2021.” There’s just one issue: you’ll struggle to find Snailbrook on any map of Texas. In theory, no such place exists. The makeshift sign is one of very few clues that Elon Musk is building a new town from scratch at breakneck speed and under a veil of secrecy on farmland just outside the city of Austin. Over the past three years, entities tied to the billionaire entrepreneur’s various companies have bought at least 3,500 acres in the area – roughly 10 times the size of Hyde Park in London or four times Central Park in New York – according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. Musk appears to be creating a conurbation on the outskirts of the Texan capital, close to where he is also building facilities for companies including SpaceX and Boring Co, his underground mass transit system business. The n...

 Labour’s attack ads mean that the next election will be dirty. The Opposition has the most to lose Source - Daily Telegraph 15/04/23 Link This month, Keir Starmer ensured that in the lead-up to the next general election, the Tories will run their most aggressively negative campaign ever. By releasing a comically overdone Twitter ad effectively claiming “Rishi is soft on paedos”, Starmer has given the Tories licence to savage him from now on. For the Conservatives, this is heaven-sent. They need politics to get dirty. When you are up to 20 points behind in the polls, no number of policy announcements will cut the mustard with voters. They need to tear the other guy down. Discard those claims that negativity backfires. Only incompetent negativity backfir. Voters love quality negative messaging because it is clear and simple. In more than two decades of focus groups, I have never once heard anyone genuinely claim they dislike negativity. Why does all this necessarily favour the Conse...

The first of potentially two or three hundred 70-year-old T-55 tanks that the Kremlin has been pulling out of long-term storage finally have arrived in Ukraine. Source - Forbes 14/04/23 Link   A photo that appeared online on Friday depicts a T-55 reportedly somewhere in Zaporizhzhia Oblast in southern Ukraine. The photo confirms what some observers grimly predicted: the Kremlin is shipping T-55s to Ukraine without upgrading them. The tank in the photo has the same active infrared optics the T-55 had in the late 1950s. And there’s no evidence the Russians have added blocks of explosive reactive armor in order to reinforce the T-55’s original—and thin—steel armor. In other words, the T-55s really are 1950s technology. And hopelessly obsolete compared to even the oldest tank in the Ukrainian inventory. The mismatch could have profound implications in the coming weeks and months, as Russia’s failed winter offensive peters out and Ukraine moves to seize the initiative with its own, long...