Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Boost from Euros and Olympics comes too late as business rates punish dwindling sector Source - Daily Telegraph - 17/06/24 Landlords will be hoping for a welcome boost from the Euros and Olympics this summer, but for many pubs it will come too late. Pubs are disappearing at a rate of 80 a month across England and Wales so far this year, according to analysis of official figures by property consultancy Altus Group. The monthly rate of “vanishing” pubs has jumped by 56pc compared to last year. The analysis measures the number of premises that have been either demolished or repurposed and includes some that were sitting vacant or up for let before disappearing. However, the findings suggest an accelerating decline in the number of pubs across the country. Nearly 240 have closed down and either been demolished or converted into homes, offices or businesses so far this year, according to Altus. Wales and the North West have seen the largest decline in pub premises over the past year, with 7

 Should employees avoid socialising at the pub to not offend those who don't drink?   EDI enthusiasts want minority groups to decide how staff members enjoy themselves after work   We should not allow the thin-skinned to dictate how we spend our time Source Capx 13/06/24 Link 13/06/24 There’s a problem with EDI enthusiasts. Their well-meaning aim to avoid putting anyone at an unfair advantage can quickly turn into the kind of joyless puritanism we used to expect from temperance campaigners in 1890 or a delicate maiden aunt in one of the Just William books. If you don’t believe this, have a look at a story about a report from progressive Islington recruitment consultants Rare, self-styled ‘leaders in diversity graduate recruitment’ to the upmarket legal profession, who believe passionately in ‘driving equality through technology’. A serious problem, according to this report, is that top City law firms organise far too many social gatherings in pubs. It’s not that the pubs themselves

 Here are a selection of letters to the Telegraph from people who have previously voted Conservative. 16/06/24 Source - Daily Telegraph.  SIR – As a long-term member of the Conservative Party, I cannot wait to see the back of this totally incompetent Government. These Blairites must never be allowed to return.There are a few good MPs, like Penny Mordaunt, and I can only hope that they will join together with Nigel Farage to form a new, invigorated and competent Conservative Party. Meanwhile, I’ll vote for Reform UK. David BowenL yme Regis, Dorset SIR – There is now no choice. We have to endure a period of unpleasantness under Labour for the Conservatives to have any chance of redemption. Simon Warde Bognor Regis, West Sussex SIR – Sadly, Allister Heath’s “populist tsunami” (Comment, June 12) has long been predictable. It is not surprising that lifelong Conservatives are moving to Reform en masse. After decades of party membership, I resigned four years ago. By then the One Nation cl

 Keir Starmer has proposed a dizzying combination of potentially damaging measures   Labour's proposals threaten the integrity of the House of Lords   Lower the voting age to 16 is a recipe for political disaster Constitutional reform is a difficult issue in politics, because it is complicated, important and, to most people, quite boring. Those who do take an interest, conversely, often inflate its significance. The Labour Party’s manifesto restricts constitutional change to a modest few pages, which may seem appropriate given the other challenges facing the country. Yet Keir Starmer and his advisers have managed to cram into those few pages a dizzying combination of proposals which are variously pointless, misconceived and potentially damaging. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, after all, the Labour leader has a history with such issues. In 2020, Starmer asked former prime minister Gordon Brown to convene a commission of experts and interested parties and produce plans to ‘settl

The prime minster unwittingly created the best possible circumstances for his party to be eclipsed by Reform Source - Daily Telegraph - 14/06/24 Link In the least surprising, but no less dramatic, development of the general election campaign, one poll has placed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK ahead of the Conservatives. It may be an outlier, and the one-point lead is within the margin of error. But that hardly matters. The fact that Rishi Sunak’s party is vying for second place with a Right-wing rival speaks volumes about just how disastrous the Conservative campaign has been so far. And the Conservatives know the game is up. You can almost see the panic in their eyes every time they appear on our TV screens. From a psychological perspective, they have already conceded; they’ve gone beyond denial and are fast on the way to anger and acceptance. But this is about more than a single campaign. The Conservatives have been written off before; there were many obituaries written in the aftermath of

Hard-working families can only take so many tax rises before they reach breaking point Source - Daily Telegraph 13/06/24 Link Britain is at its most dangerous economic juncture for decades. We are living so far beyond our means that we’re becoming detached from reality. GDP flatlined in April and our best case scenario for 2024, a full two years after the pandemic ended, is around 1pc growth. Total government revenues from taxes and other sources are scheduled to reach 41pc this year compared with 37pc in 2019-20 and 32pc in the 1990s. Yet still, politicians are in denial. How else to explain the insistence that the problems facing the country can be resolved with the old saw of “taxing the rich”? They’re all at it: the Greens with their wealth tax and the Lib Dems with their plan to impose a 500pc council tax surcharge on second homes. In their 80-page manifesto, the Tories failed to mention “success” once, other than in self-congratulatory references to their own, questionable record

Sir Keir Starmer’s coming supermajority could be the last hurrah of the failing, neo-Blairite political order Source - Daily Telegraph 12/06/24 Link Be in no doubt: the next few years are going to be calamitous for Britain. Almost everything that is bad today will get worse, and everything that, for now, is still working will be vandalised or destroyed. The public is clamouring for change, but there will be no great rupture under Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, no break with the dismal status quo, just a further acceleration in our national decline.  We should be grateful for small mercies. Jeremy Corbyn would have imposed full-on socialism; many of his allies wanted to ban private schools altogether and savagely expropriate wealth. Starmer will misinterpret his likely super-majority as an endorsement of technocratic rule, giving him carte blanche to double-down on the neo-Blairite consensus that has been hegemonic in the UK since 1997, with an added dollop of class warfare, punitive taxati

The EU’s punishing climate policies are facing an almighty public backlash. Source - Spiked 11/06/24 Link In 2019, Green parties achieved their best ever European Parliament election results. They even topped the polls in some member states, including Germany. Europe’s cultural and political elites could barely conceal their delight at the time, viewing the rising support for the Greens as an endorsement of their own managerialist mission to tackle the so-called climate emergency. The EU’s technocrats seized their chance. Within months of this alleged ‘green wave’, Brussels pushed through its Green Deal, which committed all member states to Net Zero, or carbon neutrality, by 2050. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hailed the Green Deal at the time as ‘Europe’s man-on-the-moon moment’. Things look very different today. As the results of last week’s European elections show, support for Green parties has dropped off a cliff. There were exceptions, such as in Denmark, wher

 Even when the end was nigh, both the Thatcher and Major governments had records to defend   Recent Conservative policies don't tackle what's actually wrong with our political economy   It's little wonder that right-wing voters are unenthused about turning out for the Tories on election day Link Has there ever been a general election campaign like this? People with longer memories than I might be able to think of one, but I can’t. Even a couple of weeks ago, warnings that the Conservative campaign might collapse altogether felt like hyperbole; such a prospect is now entirely plausible. Britain has seen parties decisively ejected from office after long periods before. There was the Conservative victory in 1979, albeit that was truly cemented in 1983; New Labour’s then-historic rout of the Tories in 1997. Even David Cameron in 2010, while falling short of a majority, picked up almost a hundred seats. What those elections had in common, however, is that the government went dow

 The Labour leader is a creature of the managerial state. Source - Spiked - 09/06/24 Link Who is Keir Starmer? It’s the question that has launched a thousand comment pieces over the past few years, as pundits scrabble around trying to work out what exactly the Labour leader and presumed next UK prime minister stands for. Well might they ask, too. As Tom Slater has explained on spiked, this is a politician who has shredded virtually every principle he professed to hold dear and broken almost every policy promise he has ever made. He is a u-turning machine, a master of the reverse ferret. Pledges made to Labour members in 2020 to nationalise public services or abolish tuition fees were unceremoniously dropped a couple of years later. Talk of raising income tax for top earners has been replaced by a commitment not to implement tax rises. Trying to work out who Starmer is, and above all what it is he stands for, is like trying to catch smoke. There is no ideology, no guiding principles, no

  The seaside town represents a Britain that’s going nowhere. The future belongs to places with more ambition and drive Matthew Parris Saturday September 06 2014, 1.01am, The Times Link At Stratford railway station in East London they’re a bit sheepish about the line to Clacton-on-Sea. Directed to platform 10a, the intending passenger easily finds platform 10; but of 10a there is no trace. It transpires that 10a is elsewhere, down a staircase at the far end of the platform. On 10a there are no train indicators and no staff. But you may just spot a “Clacton” sign on the train as it pulls in. By the time you get to Clacton, most passengers have fled at intermediate stops. You walk almost alone through a well-kept station built for busier times, past a tidy canteen with a good range of meat pies at £1.50, and past a welcome-to-Clacton artwork constructed sweetly of glazed tiles picturing the resort. A red plastic litter-bin is prominent in the composition. This is not a dirty or un-self-r

Live Telegraph poll puts Reform leader far ahead, as Penny Mordaunt struggles to keep up and Angela Rayner flops Daily Telegraph 07/06/24 Link They say you should never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, and that adage should now include never picking a fight with someone who has their own TV show. Nigel Farage, unleashed into a live debate for the first time this election, was polished, pugnacious and popular. Penny Mordaunt, the Leader of the Commons, made a decent fist of trying to keep up with him, but hamstrung by the reality of 14 years in Government, she was elbowed into second place by the charismatic Reform UK leader. A live Telegraph online poll of who was up and who was down put Mr Farage far ahead throughout the 90-minute BBC show, with a net positivity rating more than twice as large as Ms Mordaunt’s. The big loser on the night was Angela Rayner. Sent out with a mission to be the sensible voice in the room, she struggled to think on her feet, was skewere

 For the first time, all candidates in the general election are being offered security   Just 31% of 18 to 24-year-olds say it is 'totally unacceptable' when MPs are verbally threatened in public   Political violence is fundamentally anti-democratic Link Source - Capx 06/06/24 For the first time, PoliticsHome revealed on Monday, all candidates in the general election are being offered security. It ranges from guidance and briefings to protective details for high-risk individuals. Such drastic measures have never been taken before – not even in the 1970s and 1980s, when the IRA went after British politicians. On Tuesday, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was targeted on the campaign trail when a young woman threw a milkshake at him. Some commentators dismissed the incident as an innocuous prank, but any attack – physical or verbal – on a politician is unacceptable. It should never be a laughing matter. Next time a politician is assaulted, the cost might be considerably higher than a

The public no longer believes the NHS is the envy of the world. So why on earth wouldn’t the Labour leader treat a family member privately? Source - Daily Telegraph - 05/06/24 Link From the Moonies to the Branch Dravidians of Waco, cults come in all shapes and sizes, but share common characteristics: isolating followers from family and friends on the outside; punishing doubts and questions; and demanding crazy sacrifices from devotees. For a generation, attitudes to the NHS have often matched this description. Public devotion to the organisation hit fever pitch during the pandemic, when the apparent brainwashing reached its zenith. The nation felt compelled to demonstrate its commitment by raising flags; baking rainbow coloured cakes and displaying messages of gratitude in their front windows. Under the watchful eye of disapproving neighbour, even those uncomfortable with the increasingly creepy virtue signalling participated in the rituals, dutifully showing up on their doorsteps for