Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Remember when the liberal Left supposedly championed people who never went to university? Now it seems to hold them in contempt Source - Daily Telegraph 23/11/23 When you are on the side of liberal enlightenment, you can usually rely on a university study coming along to help you make your point. Ever since June 24, 2016, diehard Remain campaigners have been trying to make out that Leave voters were too thick to know what was good for them, and finally they have the scientific “proof”. A study of 6,366 people by Bath University’s School of Management claims that 73 per cent of those in the highest cognitive group voted Remain, compared with only 40 per cent in the lowest cognitive group.  To be fair to Chris Dawson, who led the study, he doesn’t quite try to make out that all Brexiteers were stupid, and says there is a large overlap, with some clever people actually voting Leave. But he does assert that an awful lot of people weren’t intelligent enough to sift through information d...

Owen Jones’s reaction to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities speaks to a serious sickness in the bourgeois left. Source - Spiked 29/11/23 Link There is a video doing the rounds related to Hamas’s barbaric pogrom of 7 October that is difficult to watch. It is making viewers wince and recoil. It shows the madness that can flourish when people retreat from reason. I am speaking, of course, about Owen Jones’s reaction vid to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities; that arch Guardianista’s 25-minute YouTube musing over what he saw Hamas do. It is a disturbing watch. It provides the starkest proof yet of the collapse of moral reason and plain decency that has occurred on the middle-class left these past seven weeks. The IDF has put together a graphic 43-minute video of the savagery Hamas filmed itself committing against the Jews of Southern Israel on 7 October. The morally deracinated cynics of the liberal Western media say the video is an IDF ruse to whip up support for its war in Gaza. In truth, ...

 The paradox of Farage is that the greater his media exposure, the less popular his causes become   Making him Tory leader could repel as many Tory voters as it might attract, and toxify his agenda for millions   Conservatives should ignore his Antipodean antics and remember his repeated electoral failures Source - CAPX - 28/11/23 Link We’re only making plans for Nigel We only want what’s best for him We’re only making plans for Nigel Nigel just needs that helping hand So sang XTC back in 1979. It’s a cracking song about a lad who has finds his future career working for British Steel mapped out for him by a pair of overbearing parents. I’d hardly want to make assumptions about the music tastes (or parenting styles) of my audience. But the sentiment seems to be one shared by ConservativeHome’s readers, if directed at a very different Nigel.  In a recent survey, seven in ten of our panel members said that Nigel Farage should be admitted to the Conservatives if he sough...

 'Far right' now includes feminists, Brexiters, elected representatives and nihilistic mobs   Elites use playground insults to express disapproval and shut down further discussion   Being angry about violence against children does not make someone 'far right' Source Capx 27/11/23 Link Last Thursday, Dublin city centre resembled a war zone. Violent mobs rioted for over three hours in what’s been described as ‘the worst disorder experienced for decades’. Vehicles, including police cars, were set on fire, and three buses and a tram were destroyed. The ‘huge destruction’ left shops badly damaged and windows broken. Looting followed.  The violence is believed to have been triggered by a knife attack that took place in the city earlier in the day. Three children and two adults were injured, four of whom remain in hospital. Among them is a five-year-old girl, said to be in a ‘critical condition’, and a teaching assistant who ‘used her body as a shield’ to protect children f...

From tax to migration, we know next to nothing about Keir Starmer’s plans - but the little we do is alarming Source - Daily Telegraph 25/11/23 We really need to know what Labour would do if it got into office. There can be no more evasions, ambiguities, and repudiations of the past without clear statements about the future. In short, no more messing around. Let’s hear it. Do they acknowledge that migration on the current scale is unsustainable? If so, what are their plans for dealing with it? Are they determined to spend more on what their unreconstructed Marxist wing calls “schools and hospitals” when what they really mean is public sector pay rises? If so, where will the money come from? It isn’t enough to say, from higher taxes on “the rich” without saying who exactly they have in mind. Since the truly rich can simply move their wealth out of the country, do they mean anyone earning around half as much again as the average wage which is the current threshold for higher rate income t...

First-past-the-post and progressive dogma have contained justified public anger about high numbers. It cannot last Source Daily Telegraph 25/11/23 There is a certain type of commentator – generally with an inexplicable book deal – who delights in telling the British just how much better things are on the Continent. WS Gilbert described them as “the idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this and every country but his own”. Though around for centuries, they’ve been particularly active since 2016, keen to portray the European landmass as an enlightened haven of liberal values compared to “rainy Brexit island”. One such person, writing in the FT shortly before the shocking upset of the Dutch election, confidently predicted it would go the other way. “The Dutch don’t do wild political leaps. Not like certain countries I could mention”. (Ho ho – Brexiteers, this means you). He insists that “Far-right parties are on the margins of the Dutch picture”. The article notably me...

German tabloid reports ‘secret’ plan to force Ukraine’s hand on opening peace talks by scaling back weapons deliveries Source - Daily Telegraph 24/11/23 Germany and the US will put pressure on Ukraine to negotiate with Russia by scaling back weapons deliveries in what would be a major blow to Kyiv’s hopes of victory, German media reported on Friday. Bild, a German tabloid, reported what it described as a “secret” German-American plan to force Ukraine’s hand on opening peace talks, citing sources in the German government. Under the plan, Washington and Berlin would supply Ukraine with sufficient weapons and armour to hold the current front line, but not enough to retake occupied territory. They hope to push Volodymr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, towards the negotiating table with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader. “Zelensky should realise that it can’t go on like this,” a German government source told Bild, referring to Ukraine’s stalled counter-offensive against Russian in the ea...

 The victory of Geert Wilders shows voters are desperate to hit back against the elites. Source - Spiked - 23/11/23 Link To say the victory of Geert Wilders in yesterday’s Dutch elections came as a shock might be the understatement of the century. Not even his aides in the PVV (Party for Freedom) were fully prepared for the earthquake to come. The tiny, cramped venue where it held its election party last night was booked just four days ago, after Wilders enjoyed a last-minute surge in the polls. With almost all the votes now counted, Wilders’s PVV has won 37 of the 150 seats in the Dutch parliament, with 24 per cent of the vote, trouncing his nearest rivals, a coalition of the Labour and Green parties. Make no mistake: this is a humiliation for the Dutch establishment and another political earthquake in Europe. Before yesterday’s elections, European elites would have told you that a ‘sensible’ country like the Netherlands was immune to populism. The 2017 elections were heralded acr...

The tax cuts and welfare reforms made this a truly conservative fiscal event, but it must be just the start Source - Daily Telegraph  Early last year, Rishi Sunak was telling us that National Insurance and corporation tax needed to be increased savagely. Some 18 months later, his Chancellor is slashing National Insurance and reversing part of the raid on company profits.  It was John Maynard Keynes who said “when the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?”. I’m no Keynesian, and I cannot see how either the facts or the rules of economics have altered over such a short period, but let’s not be churlish.  The Autumn Statement is a big step in the right direction for which Sunak deserves to be congratulated. It represents not so much a conversion for the Prime Minister as a welcome return to his intellectual roots, a restoration rather than a revolution, the next stage in a journey that started when he toned down net zero, slashed HS2, ended the war on cars, a...

Jeremy Hunt vows to support entrepreneurs and is expected to cut National Insurance Source - Daily Telegraph - 22/11/23 Jeremy Hunt will unveil the biggest business tax cut in half a century on Wednesday as he puts boosting economic growth at the heart of his Autumn Statement. The Chancellor will permanently extend “full expensing”, which allows companies to claim back up to 25p for every pound invested and which had been due to end in March 2026. The Treasury was on Tuesday night closely guarding which personal tax cuts would be unveiled in the statement. National Insurance is expected to be cut, in what would be a boost to 28 million people, with income tax reductions also being explored. As he argues that the economy has turned a corner now that inflation has halved this year, the Chancellor will say: “In today’s Autumn Statement for growth, the Conservatives will reject big government, high spending and high tax because we know that leads to less growth, not more.  “Instead, we...

On tax and migration, half measures threaten to miss the scale of public anger at today’s failed orthodoxies Source - Daily Telegraph 21/11/23 The spectre of revolution is returning to British politics. Both major parties are out of their depth in the face of multiple national crises. The Reform Party is rising in the polls in a way that has not been seen since the Ukip-mania of 2014. The reality of national decline has penetrated the collective consciousness, while public discourse is once more becoming cantankerous and divided. And all of this is somehow lost on the British establishment, which is convinced that Labour’s likely return to power next year heralds the final end of the 2016 populist movement and the restoration of the old centrist regime.  Everywhere one looks, history appears to be repeating itself. Like the Tory government pre-2016, our bright but blinkered PM seems to think he has the meticulous masterplan that will just about hold things together without the need...

 The ‘gerontocratic transition’ means that, in 2024, a majority of voters in most constituencies will be over 55   We must face up to the reality that as Britain’s population is greying, so too is its political economy   This century's most successful nations will escape the tax and spend vortex caused by their ageing populations There are many long-term challenges facing Britain’s policymakers. But the ageing population is surely the most intractable. The demographic tide is constantly tugging us towards a world of lower economic growth and higher taxation. But those same trends also give the elderly an enormous amount of political power – which leads to policy being set in their interests, rather than the interests of the younger generation. The result is an inbuilt tendency for public policy to run contrary to the long term national interest.  In this essay, we will show how our ageing population means that we are set to run into a hard constraint on economic grow...