Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

With Starmer floundering, Farage flailing and Ed Davey acting a fool, a Tory revival is now on the cards Source - Daily Telegraph - 31/05/24 Link The polls may not reflect it yet; in fact they remain positively dire for Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party. But many good things have happened for the Tories this week. Credit where it’s due – that feeling we have had for weeks and months now, that the Conservatives are facing some sort of electoral apocalypse, about to be made as extinct as the dinosaurs, has been replaced by something rather more nuanced. I appreciate that some of you remain of the opinion that the Tories have done such a bad job squandering Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority that they deserve not just to be punished but destroyed. Sunak is still viewed by his harshest critics as an unelected manifesto-abandoning wet whose five-point plan is doomed to failure. With tax, spend and immigration all having boomed over the past 14 years, the Conservative malaise is both palp...

Richard Tice says proposal an ‘antidote’ to 14 years of Tory failure to curb net migration, which hit record 745,000 in 2022 Source - Daily Telegraph 30/05/24 Link Reform UK would introduce a migrant tax forcing employers to pay a higher National Insurance (NI) rate on foreign workers, its leader has announced. In an exclusive article for The Telegraph, Richard Tice said Reform would require most employers to pay an NI rate of 20 per cent for every foreign worker they employed, compared with the current 13.8 per cent for British employees. He said the new tax would not only incentivise companies to recruit British workers rather than rely on cheaper foreign staff but could also raise more than £20 billion over the next five years. Foreign health and care workers would be exempt from the tax to protect the NHS, as would businesses that employed five or fewer staff. “The tax will increase the demand and therefore the wages of domestic labour. Because we believe in our young people, we wi...

 Apparently, it’s okay to say disgusting things, so long as you’re a ‘trailblazer’. Source - Spiked 29/05/24 Link Just when we thought the Diane Abbott row was inching towards its grubby conclusion, it has descended into farce. After 24 hours of furious briefing, we’re still none the wiser as to whether the long-serving MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington – the seat Abbott has held since 1987, when she became the UK’s first black female MP – will stand for the Labour Party at the General Election. The Times revealed last night that Abbott had been banned from standing, after spending a year in procedural limbo. She had the party whip suspended in April last year, after she wrote a letter to the Observer, arguing that Jews – as well as the Irish and Travellers – do not experience racism. Then, in what appeared to be the most Keir Starmer move ever, we were told last night that Abbott had been given the whip back, but would still not be allowed to stand. She confirmed this versi...

Conservatives are quitting en masse because there are no shared principles that bind them together. Source - Spiked - 29/05/24 Link Few things better symbolise the exhaustion of British politics than the many members of parliament standing down at the forthcoming General Election. At the time of writing, up to 129 MPs have announced that they will not be seeking re-election come July. With over a week to go before candidate nominations are finalised, this figure looks likely to increase further. The vast majority of those standing down are Conservative MPs. They include former prime minister Theresa May, former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab, former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and, most notably, current ‘levelling up’ secretary Michael Gove. The mass exodus from parliament is not confined to the Tories. Former Labour ministers Harriet Harman and Dame Margaret Hodge are leaving, as is the SNP’s former Westminster leader, Ian Blackford. They are joined by two current deputy speakers an...

 Over 25 years on from the start of the immigration experiment, the system isn't working   Even Labour has recognised the strength of public feeling on immigration   By adopting misguided Blairite ideas, migration has surged out of control Source - Capex 24/05/24 What is this election about? The Prime Minister’s campaign video set it out: amidst a moody cacophony of crises – the Covid pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’ attack on Israel –he heads to the door of Number 10, to tell the people that his actions have won Britain economic stability, a stability which must be protected through a general election.  Only after about a minute does the topic of immigration pop up, with a short reference to the Rwanda Plan. Just after that, the Prime Minister mentioned his plan to end smoking for young people, which was shelved yesterday. Does that mean it doesn’t really matter? Polling suggests otherwise. Immigration has consistently been in the three most important ...

 The great British boozer is at the beating heart of our politics and culture. Source - Spiked - 26/05/24 Link Since the late 2000s, a regular pulse check on pub closures has made for grim reading. Over the past decade, 7,000 pubs have closed. Today, there are fewer than 40,000 left in England and Wales. If it wasn’t for pub-chain Wetherspoons, which has done an impressive job of converting old buildings into elegant drinking dens serving very affordable booze, the pub landscape would be almost barren. New microbreweries and pop-up bars have emerged to cater for a young and not-so-young crowd, but these tend to have a very short shelf-life compared with the established pubs and venues of old. The explanations for pub closures are familiar: the steady, above-inflation price rises of beer over the past few decades, annual rises in alcohol duty and the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces and workplaces in 2007. As a result, people now increasingly prefer to buy their booze at a c...

Eighteen-year-olds will be expected to serve in the Armed Forces or carry out community service Source -Daily Telegraph 25/05/24 Rishi Sunak has vowed to bring back National Service for 18-year-olds to create a “renewed sense of pride in our country” in his first major policy announcement of the election campaign. Under the mandatory scheme, school leavers will have to either enrol on a 12-month military placement or spend one weekend each month volunteering in their community. The policy pledge comes after Mr Sunak surprised the country with the announcement of the July 4 snap poll on Wednesday. Unveiling the National Service scheme, Mr Sunak said it was aimed at instilling a “shared sense of purpose” in youngsters in the face of forces which were “trying to divide our society”. The Conservatives hope the policy will mark a clear dividing line between them and Labour as they seek to present themselves as the only party that can be trusted with the UK’s security and defence. Earlier th...

Keir Starmer won’t tell us his actual plans, so we must rely on what we know about the Left’s instincts Source - Daily Telegraph 24/05/24 Since Labour is still refusing to tell us what it will actually do in office – despite the very real prospect of Sir Keir Starmer leading the UK in less than six weeks’ time – we must rely on what we know about the party’s instincts, its supporters, and what its leading figures have said in the past. Starmer spent most of Friday morning insisting that he isn’t “tribal” in a bid to convince the electorate that he’s more Blair than Corbyn. But in the vein of a former director of public prosecutions, let’s examine the evidence. There’s a paginated bundle on the KC’s radical ideas and it paints a very worrying picture indeed for the future of Britain. Exhibit one is Starmer’s launch video for his Labour leadership campaign. Released in January 2020, the footage could easily be mistaken for the trailer of a Ken Loach film starring Maxine Peake. In it, Sta...

Rishi Sunak thoroughly deserves the electoral kicking this election is sure to bring. Source - Spiked 22/05/24 Link So British prime minister Rishi Sunak has finally called an election. After squatting in No10 Downing Street for 575 days, with no mandate of his own from the public, he is finally giving the country its say. Good. It’s high time he went to the electorate. Plus, I can’t have been the only one who couldn’t have taken another minute of Westminster Village journalists gossiping on air and on social media about possible election dates like giddy schoolchildren. (It’s going to be 4 July, by the way.) Why now? Well, why not, seems to be the thinking. The Conservatives are a whopping 20 points behind in the polls, a deficit no sitting government has ever overcome. Sunak has hit John Major levels of unpopularity. He hasn’t stopped the boats – his signature pledge. His dismal, drizzly press conference in Downing Street earlier today couldn’t have looked worse for him if Labour had...

I share your frustrations. I wish we had done better. But a vote for Labour would be a catastrophe for Britain and for Brexit Source - Daily Telegraph - 22/05/24 David Frost I recall my utter astonishment, sitting in the Foreign Office in 2017, at Theresa May’s disastrous decision to call an early election. In 2019, sitting in Downing Street, I had a small part in Boris Johnson’s electoral poker game and his subsequent rout of the anti-Brexit opposition in December. Now, in 2024, our repeal of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, that unhappy constitutional innovation brought in by our current Foreign Secretary, has put the power to call an election back in the Prime Minister’s hands. Today he lit the electoral touchpaper.  Good. A summer election might feel better than one in gloomy November. The economic news could easily get worse, not better. And anyway, when politics gets dominated by electoral timing, it’s time to have that election: the window to do anything substantive is gone....

Source Telegraph Politics EMail Link Afternoon! The Conservatives and Labour have spent the past week insisting they alone have the answers on tax – but new polling suggests neither main party is trusted not to increase further an already historic burden. Tax rises expected under both Sunak and Starmer Some 43 per cent of voters fear their taxes will go up under Sir Keir Starmer and Labour, according to a new More in Common/Bloomberg survey, while 40 per cent anticipate further tax rises if Rishi Sunak and the Tories remain in power. Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, last week insisted taxes would rise under Labour “as sure as night follows day”, while the official opposition accused Sunak and Hunt of a £46bn black hole over their long-term ambition of abolishing National Insurance. For all the mud-slinging, large swathes of the public are convinced the tax burden will go up regardless of who governs, with only 12 per cent expecting tax cuts under Labour. Despite promises to the contrary by...

Source - Matt Goodwin 20/05/24 If you want a reminder for why elites in the West are still completely lost when it comes to making sense of populism then watch Nancy Pelosi’s recent speech at the Oxford Union. Asked to debate the motion ‘This House Believes Populism is a Threat to Democracy’, Pelosi, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and somebody who has spent much of her life at the epicentre of American politics, laid out what since 2016 has become the de facto view of populism among elites. It's supporters are idiots. They’ve been lied to. They’ve been manipulated. They’ve fallen under the spell of demagogues and would-be dictators. They’re nothing more than “ethno-nationalists”. And if they are able to express their concerns at all then they’re mainly worried about the state of the economy, nothing more. I don’t know what’s more worrying. The fact that Pelosi, one of the most senior and experienced Democrats, holds this view or the fact so many other elites ac...