Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

For far too long this UN agency has provided moral cover to the anti-Semitic haters of Israel. Source - Spiked 29/01/24 Link I long ago lost faith in the left. But even I wouldn’t have believed it if you’d told me that one day they would spend Holocaust Memorial Day cheering an organisation whose members stand accused of slaughtering Jews. That as everyone else was lighting candles for the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, they would be swarming the internet to praise and even fundraise for a group whose staff are suspected of massacring Jews. That on the very day we remember the worst act of anti-Semitism in history, they’d be heaping love and cash on an organisation whose people allegedly played a part in the worst act of anti-Semitism of the 21st century. The left is bad, I know, but are they that bad, I’d have wondered? Now we know the answer to that question. It’s yes. Yes they are. This is the story of UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugee...

It’s a pyrrhic victory for the party but it guarantees Northern Ireland’s place in the UK, a key factor in the return to Stormont Source - Daily Telegraph - 30/01/24 Link It’s been almost eight years since the UK voted to leave the EU and nearly two years since the DUP began its boycott of power-sharing over the Irish Sea border. Brexit could now soon finally be “done” in Northern Ireland after Sir Jeffrey Donaldson announced the DUP was backing the deal. The announcement in the early hours of Tuesday came after a supposedly secret meeting, lasting more than five hours, descended into chaos as Sir Jeffrey faced down his critics. So deep are the divides in the Brexit-supporting party, that someone leaked details of Sir Jeffrey’s speech to a loyalist activist who live-tweeted his remarks about the so-called “surrender deal”. Hardline unionist and loyalist opposition won’t be going away anytime soon. Neither now will the Irish Sea border, the customs barrier between Britain and Northern I...

Officials propose blocking funds to Budapest if Viktor Orban vetoes the €50bn relief package at a summit this week, according to reports Source - Daily Telegraph 29/01/24 Link The European Union has drawn up plans to cripple Hungary’s economy if it blocks a €50 billion (£42.6 billion) aid package for Ukraine at a Brussels summit this week, according to a new report. EU officials have proposed targeting Budapest’s economy by attempting to trigger a run on the country’s forint currency and collapse investor confidence to hit “jobs and growth” in a confidential document drawn up ahead of the leaders’ meeting. Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, vetoed a plan to shore up Ukraine’s economy over the next four years at a summit in December last year. He has vowed to block it again at the emergency gathering on Thursday. “In the case of no agreement in the February 1 [summit], other heads of state and government would publicly declare that in the light of the unconstructive behaviour of t...

Don’t blame Reform. Sunak’s party is unravelling because it succumbed to socialist delusions that were impossible to implement Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/01/24 Rishi Sunak is doomed and the party that he leads may not survive his electoral collapse. That is the consensus accepted with varying degrees of despair, or glee, within conservative circles. There are two quite separate grounds for this belief. One is a personal judgment on the Prime Minister himself, who is seen as the chief assassin of a leader who had won a spectacular general election victory, Boris Johnson, and then as the usurper of a subsequent leader, Liz Truss, who had been duly elected by the party’s membership. That history, which effectively robs Mr Sunak’s position of democratic legitimacy, is an original sin that can never be expunged. But there is a larger and more important reason for what is assumed to be the inevitable extinction of the Tory Party as it is now composed: that it has failed in the most critic...

The Prime Minister has hinted at an autumn poll but could call one as early as May. The Telegraph examines his options Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/01/24 Link Rishi Sunak attempted to dampen down speculation over the timing of a general election by stating his “working assumption” was that the poll would take place in the second half of the year. The announcement was intended to head off a planned Labour attempt to label the Prime Minister a “bottler” if he avoids calling an earlier election in May rather than waiting until the autumn. Mr Sunak has not, however, ruled out a May election and Sir Keir Starmer’s party is readying itself for the possibility of an early poll to ensure it is not wrong-footed if the Prime Minister gambles on going to the country in the spring. That leaves three likely scenarios: an early election in the late spring or early summer, an autumn election, or a poll at the last possible moment, in January 2025. Here, The Telegraph examines each of those possibili...

 Tying ourselves to a stumbling bloc cannot be the best way forward Source - Daily Telegraph - 26/01/2024 Link The German economy is stagnating. Last year was bad enough. The first official estimates suggest that output (measured by GDP) shrank by 0.3pc over 2023 as a whole – a full year recession. Unfortunately, the omens for 2024 are no better. Two leading business polls this week are already indicating that Germany is mired in recession. The latest HCOB PMI survey, compiled by S&P Global, signalled that activity in services and manufacturing was still contracting in January. In contrast, the equivalent UK PMI index rose to a seven-month high and has been above the ‘neutral’ 50 level for three successive months. The leading national survey, compiled by Germany’s ifo institute, also showed that sentiment among German companies deteriorated further at the start of the year. he weakness was broadly based, with retail trade and construction under the cosh too. The ifo’s own ‘Busi...

Millions of voters want radical change. Neither Sunak nor Starmer are offering anything like it Source - Daily Telegraph ALLISTER HEATH 24 January 2024 • 6:41pm There are two viable ways to respond to an existential threat in the state of nature: fight or flight. You either destroy your predator, or you run away. You don’t just stand still, wave a white flag and wait for the end. The same is true in the political jungle, and yet the Tories’ nervous systems are now so dysfunctional that they have produced neither of the rational physiological responses to the terrifying likelihood of a Labour landslide.  Rather than launching the fight of its life, the Government’s reaction has been to freeze, to keep making the same mistakes, to double-down on the same flawed strategy, to do little and to say even less; as political death wishes go, this one takes some beating.  Wouldn’t it at least make sense to try not to lose the election, and to declare total war against the Labour Party, ...

No one can doubt the ex-Levelling Up Secretary's intelligence – but his foresight is terrible A leadership challenge would not mean a coronation for the right of the Conservative Party – but further civil war After this abortive putsch, the 'Popular Conservatives' are looking as silly as they did after the Truss implosion Source-  Capx - 24/01/24 Link Readers of a certain vintage will remember Blake’s 7. Callaghan Britain’s answer to Star Wars, it followed the attempts of freedom fighter Roj Blake and the crew of the ‘Liberator’ to resist the Terran Federation. Despite its titular hero quitting halfway through, spaceships made from hairdryers, and scenery that wobbled when it wasn’t being chewed by the cast, it ran for four series.  Particularly memorable is the ending of the final episode. Avon – Blake’s less trustworthy but camper replacement – tracks his former ally down to a distant planet. Convinced Blake has betrayed him, he shoots him dead. Shots ring out from Federa...

The threat posed by the Houthis is obvious even in Brussels, but once again the EU is its own worst enemy Source - Daily Telegraph - 23/01/24 As so often in the past, British and American forces are back in action together, this time against the Houthis, who are trying to cut off shipping in the Red Sea. Anglo-American strikes from sea and air are backed by our traditional allies Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with support from Bahrain. But the only European Union member state to participate in Operation Prosperity Guardian is The Netherlands. From Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Rome and Madrid there is nothing but sullen indifference. Even the Germans, initially on side, seem to have fallen silent. Yet it is the EU that has most to gain from keeping open one of the world’s most important trade arteries. Already the costly re-routing of shipping in response to Houthi drone, missile and seaborne attacks is driving up consumer prices across Europe. The threat posed by the Houthis is obviou...

The Democrats would rather attack Trump voters and warn of Armageddon than consider why so many people distrust them Source - Daily Telegraph 22/01/24 Link The Left’s reaction to Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses suggests that it has learned absolutely nothing in the last eight years. While the Democrats continue to obsess about identity and reparations for slavery and pronouns, the 45th president is making great strides towards his goal of becoming the 47th. And nothing that Joe Biden’s party is saying sounds remotely relevant to the kind of people for whom Trump provides an attractive and realistic candidate for the presidency. In 2017, talk show host and Left-wing comedian Bill Maher put it as succinctly as anyone, telling Democrats: “While you self-involved fools were policing the language at the Kids’ Choice Awards, a madman talked his way into the White House.” A year earlier, the Democrats were so dismissive of Trump and the electoral threat posed by the Republicans th...

 The BBC is allowing the ex-footballer to referee his own game   The Beeb's failure to enforce social media guidelines in a balanced way is fueling media distrust   If the Corporation wants to save itself, it needs to stop conceding so many own goals Source - capx - 22/01/24 Link In it’s fixture with Gary Lineker, the BBC seems to be allowing the ex-footballer to referee his own game. Ever since fellow BBC sports staff walked out of Match of the Day in support of the presenter last March following his tweet saying the government’s language over immigration was like ‘1930s Germany’, Linker has held the upper hand. New social media rules for BBC staff were created around him. Still, he managed to break them last week by retweeting a call for the Israeli football team to be boycotted. Ironically enough the idea of wanting to boycott Jews felt particularly ‘1930s Germany’.  There was enough of a fuss that he deleted the tweet. He let it be known that he had retweeted it ...

The model nation for centrist liberals is in political and economic turmoil. Source - Spiked -  21/01/24 Link Germany has long occupied a special place in the liberal-elite imagination. Over the past few decades, and especially since the world was upended by the votes for Brexit and Trump, Germany has been held up by the great and good as a model nation. As the rest of the West lost their minds, or so the story goes, Germany remained a paragon of economic efficiency, political maturity and environmental stewardship. The last bulwark of the liberal order in an age of rising populism. This elite Germanophilia is best embodied in John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes From a Grown-Up Country. First published in August 2020, it became an unlikely bestseller in the UK. It received rave reviews and was declared ‘book of the year’ by the Guardian, the New Statesman and The Economist. Its central claim is that Germany has forged ‘a new paradigm in stability’ that the rest of t...

The unexpected Conservative triumph in Hackney has lessons that go wider that just east London Source - Daily Telegraph 20/01/24 With all the other by-elections going on, you probably haven’t been keeping a close eye on recent events in Hackney, east London, where the Conservatives have just pulled off an astonishing victory by winning the hotly contested Cazenove ward with 53 per cent of the vote. Labour’s shock defeat came after its candidate Laura Pascal was suspended and then reinstated in the run-up to polling day on Thursday. This fiasco was believed to relate to an (entirely sensible) post she had made on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Trans women are not female. By definition they are male.” She is also thought to have been criticised for appearing to “like” another post which suggested a trans woman wearing “womanface” was sexist. Labour saw its vote share plummet by 13 points to 31 per cent – heralding an unexpected victory for Pascal’s Conservative rival, Ian Sharer. Labour ...

Sturgeon's pandemic narrative could be completely destroyed as the Covid Inquiry heads north of the border Source - Daily Telegraph 16/01/24 The UK Covid inquiry is heading for Edinburgh, where it will hear evidence on what happened north of the border during the pandemic, and who was to blame. You read that right: poor decision-making and party politics played just as much a part of the pandemic narrative in Scotland as anywhere else in the country, despite the prevailing myth that, under Nicola Sturgeon’s wise and courageous leadership, Scots fared much better than England did under that rogue, Boris Johnson. Sturgeon talked a good game. That, in fact, sums up her leadership. Her reputation – particularly among the Left-leaning, progressive elites of London’s media bubble – was based on the former first minister’s ability to communicate effectively with almost any audience, despite the fact that observers rather more familiar with her modus operandi could spot the faux affability...