Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Labour pledged its devotion to the guardian of fiscal rectitude. It is about to face the consequences Source  Daily Telegraph  Link Seldom has a budget come apart so quickly. It’s not that Rachel Reeves will be forced to take farms out of her new inheritance tax scheme, although that may well come. Nor will Labour rebels force her to abandon any tax rises: a government with a majority as large as Keir Starmer’s can do anything it wants. But her main claims – to be boosting growth, repairing the public finances and getting Britain working again – have been methodically and mercilessly shredded. The markets, it seems, have noticed. The Chancellor’s adversary is not anyone in the Conservative Party but Richard Hughes, a softly spoken American who runs the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). He has put each of her main arguments to the test. What will all of this borrow-and-spend really accomplish? Will those “working people” be better off? By the end of the 200-page report on...

 Joe Biden’s explosive ‘garbage’ comments are a reminder of the Democrats’ extremism, and Harris’ role over the last four years Source - Daily Telegraph Link A spectre is haunting the Democrats – the spectre of Joe Biden. Following his explosive comments yesterday – apparently referring to Republican supporters as “garbage” – a cynic might wonder whether the President had returned from the political dead in order to hammer the final nail into the coffin of Kamala Harris’s ailing election campaign. If he has deliberately stirred up a ruckus in order to sabotage the campaign of a party that manoeuvred him out of his own presidential bid, then it is a mischievous stroke of genius. Still, it seems just as likely that this was just another naive blunder. Either way, the damage is done. Harris has been struggling throughout the campaign to articulate how her presidency might mark a departure from the failures of the past four years. Her uphill task in this election – which has ultimately...

 Telegraph Money reveals whether the Chancellor has left you better or worse off Link The Chancellor has now delivered her blockbuster Budget that she said will raise taxes by £40bn. Family wealth held in pensions has come under a shock attack in Rachel Reeves’s Budget as they will be within the scope of inheritance tax from 2027. Landlords also face tax rises as they will pay additional stamp duty on second homes that experts say will hurt renters. But at least the cost of a pint is going down. Telegraph Money has looked at who the winners and losers are. Winners Minimum wage workers The Chancellor has announced an inflation-busting 6.7pc increase to the national minimum wage taking it to £12.21 an hour from April 2025, with £1,400 a year for a full-time worker. The wage for 18- to 20-year-olds will rise by £1.40 per hour. National wage growth eased to 4.9pc in the three months to July. Carers The Carers Allowance earnings threshold has increased, with the change taking place from...

 Rachel Reeves is poised to extend a freeze on income tax thresholds until 2030 Source - Daily Telegraph -  Link Chancellor Rachel Reeves is poised to extend a freeze on income tax thresholds until 2030 in her maiden Budget on Wednesday. The move, which would drag more workers into paying 40pc tax, would cost millions their personal savings allowance, according to analysis by Coventry Building Society. The lender said under the policy, 2.7 million more earners would have their savings allowance – the amount they can earn before tax – reduced to just £500 by the end of the decade. Analysis of Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) figures by Coventry Building Society ahead of Wednesday’s Budget said savers are on track for a total tax bill of more than £12bn in 2029.  The lender said regular earnings growth would pull seven million workers into higher tax bands, and that an estimated 2.7 million would see their personal savings allowance fall from £1,000 to just £500 as a ...

 To justify the tsunami of tax rises heading our way, Keir Starmer has sought to define 'working person'   Labour's approach to taxation will only lead to economic stagnation and political embarrassment   If the Government wants the growth our economy needs, it needs to pick a lane when it comes to business Source Capx 25/10/24 Link In the age of the identity crisis, it can be difficult to know where you stand. Am I a man? On balance, probably. Am I white? I’m sure I’m guilty enough to be. Am I a ‘working person’? Apparently that’s also a matter of contention. In yet another attempt to justify the tsunami of tax rises barrelling towards us, Keir Starmer has sought to finally define what it means to be a ‘working person’. According to the Prime Minister, the term refers to someone ‘who goes out and earns their living, usually paid in a sort of monthly cheque’. Give that man a prize! That is where his powers of astute observation end, however. When pressed by Sky News’ Beth...

  The party clearly has a problem with providing definitions for obvious terms 25 October 2024 1:00pm BST Source - Daily Telegraph - 25/10/24 Link On the plus side, at least Keir Starmer did not define a “working person” as “someone who identifies as a working person.” Such circular logic has already landed the Prime Minister and many others on the Left in difficulty when it comes to the fraught – and seemingly impossible – task of defining what a woman is in these pronoun-obsessed times. And now Labour has decided that defining the over-used term “working people” is every bit as difficult. Before we examine Starmer’s own eyebrow-raising definition of the term, given during an interview while attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa, consider his deputy’s efforts at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions. Angela Rayner suggested that “working people” could be defined as that group of people failed by the last Conservative government.  That’s quite a broa...

  Today’s phoney anti-racists only want to sow fear and division. Source - Spiked 24th October 2024 Link The killing of Chris Kaba has pulled back the veil on British society, but not in the way ‘anti-racist’ activists are making out. The shooting dead of 24-year-old Kaba by armed police officer Martyn Blake in 2022 followed by Blake’s acquittal on murder charges this week have not revealed the profound sickness at the heart of our supposedly ‘systemically racist’ society. But they have revealed the profound sickness at the heart of contemporary ‘anti-racism’, whose primary role today is sowing division among the population and promoting a sense of permanent racial peril among ethnic-minority Brits. The speed with which Kaba’s grisly end was reflexively presented as a racist killing was stunning. His body was barely cold before all the usual suspects took to social media, the comment pages and the streets to say, or at least heavily imply, that Kaba – a black young man from south L...

As yields were gradually eroded by costs, one landlord faced a tough decision Source - Daily Telegraph 20/10/24 20 October 2024 7:00am BST Link Patrick and Vivien Robinson saw buy-to-let as a way to provide a steady income to see them through retirement. So 15 years ago, Patrick raided his pension pot and they began buying small, modern, easily rentable houses. But their promising idea has backfired. The couple, both 71, did some simple maths and calculated that by continuing to rent out the properties they would only be around £1,000 better off per property each year than if they sold up and put the money in a savings account or fixed-rate bond. Over the course of 2024 the couple have gradually sold off the six two-bedroom properties they once owned, some in their home town of Nantwich, Cheshire, and others in nearby towns in Staffordshire. The final sale is currently going through, although not without some regrets. “That is six fewer rental homes out there,” says Patrick, who worked...

 The real divide is between the people and the elites. Source - Spiked 21/10/24 This is an edited version of a speech Tom Slater gave at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 20 October 2024, in the session ‘The polarisation problem: can we speak across the divide?’. Link I’d like to spend the time I have mounting a trenchant defence of polarisation – or at least what is often called ‘polarisation’ by our political and media classes. The narrative that is constantly being spun at the moment is that, as of about 10 years ago, politics was… perfect. It was consensual. It was moderate. Political parties might have disagreed around the edges, but they could come together under some core assumptions – and in their shared deference to technocratic expertise. Then the populists showed up and supposedly ruined everything. It’s certainly true that, prior to 2016, political parties only ever seemed to be dancing on the head of a pin, and often ostentatiously dismissed ‘ideology’. But what h...

October 20, 2024  Source - Unheard Link The three-piece band was doing its best to lift spirits with relentlessly upbeat pop songs and bursts of oompah music as rain plummeted down on a bleak autumnal day. A handful of people sat scattered at tables set up under an awning beside some food stalls and a small ferris wheel. Four middle-aged women swayed together in unison to the music, doing their best to bring the Oktoberfest vibe to their town, while a few other brave souls swigged pints of lager or munched on their sausages. But it will take more than a few blasts of brass, bratwurst and pilsner to lift the storm clouds over Wolfsburg. For this prosperous place, about two hours’ drive west of Berlin, is a company town like few others, built from Nazi roots off the back of Volkswagen — “The People’s Car Company” which overcame its fascist birth to become the world’s highest-earning motor manufacturer. Now, however, it is in serious trouble as persistently sluggish management conside...

 Jump to content History teaches us that when the British Left tries to influence American politics, it goes wrong Source - Daily Telegraph  Link The good news keeps rolling in for Donald J Trump. The polls are tightening in his favour, the betting markets suggest he’s winning, and Kamala Harris’s ongoing “media blitz” has turned into an exercise in self-immolation. Best of all, perhaps, the British Labour Party has decided to send almost 100 of its young activists across the pond to canvas for Kamala in the crucial swing states of Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. It’s hard to think of anything more likely to put off American voters than a group of Left-wing limeys showing up, uninvited, in order to lecture the locals about the perils of authoritarianism. Imagine the scene at the barn doors of Beaver County, Pennsylvania when Marcus and Indy, from Bethnal Green, come a’ knockin: “Waddaya want?” “Hey, yah, so we’re from the international Progressive Alliance a...

Chancellor set to extend freeze on income tax thresholds, raise more money from IHT and put up fuel duty Source - Daily Telegraph Link Rachel Reeves is to launch a manifesto-breaking tax raid on incomes in this month’s Budget. The Chancellor is set to extend the freeze on income tax thresholds as part of a triple raid that will include raising more money from inheritance tax and putting up fuel duty by as much as 7p. The freezing of the thresholds was supposed to end in 2028, but she is planning to extend it beyond that date. An extension until 2030 would drag an extra 400,000 people into the basic rate of tax and 600,000 into the higher and additional rates, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It would also mean the full state pension would be charged income tax for the first time. The move would raise £7 billion a year – equivalent to an increase in the basic rate of income tax by 1p. However, the Labour manifesto said the party would “not increase taxes on working people”...

Irritated, monosyllabic, angry and still comically bland, it was like watching a volcano erupt with cottage cheese Madeline Grant - Daily Telegraph PARLIAMENTARY SKETCHWRITER 16 October 2024  Link In one of his final PMQs as Leader of the Opposition, Rishi Sunak decided to submit the Prime Minister to a sort of death by a thousand cuts.  A set of quiet, carefully-worded and considered questions about the influence of China on national life. Starmer’s replies began as merely weaselly. “The continued military activity in the Strait is not conducive to peace and stability,” he said, when asked to condemn Chinese drills around Taiwan.  As condemnations go, this wasn’t the most reassuring. Think: “the continued military activity of German troops in Poland is not conducive to peace and stability” or “continued Norman activity around Senlac Hill is not conducive to peace and stability”. Clearly irritated with this manner of questioning, Sir Tetchy turned monosyllabic.  “Tha...

The game is up. Labour’s tax increases could be the largest on record, shattering their manifesto pledges Source - Daily Telegraph - Link It is an extraordinary scandal, a breach of trust on a monumental scale. Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are feeding us a fake narrative, a farrago of downright lies, exaggerations, obfuscations and Orwellian double-speak designed to gaslight us into accepting what could be the largest peacetime tax increase by a Chancellor in one Budget.  The Government has barely spoken a single truth on economic or fiscal matters since gaining power, and is now threatening to breach the letter and the spirit of its manifesto. It keeps increasing the size of the “black hole” that is supposedly compelling this unprecedented assault on taxpayers: originally £22 billion, it is now being put at £40 billion, prompting talk of fiscal tightening of up to £50 billion.  We could end up with a 2 per cent of GDP tax increase, combined with higher borrowing on the ...

Source - Low Status Opinions 15/10/24 I don’t know about you, but I’m old enough to recall the fall of Rishi Sunak’s Tory government. No one mourned its passing. By the end, the fetid stench of rot and decay hung over the whole sorry enterprise. An administration despised by the entire nation, but loathed most of all, by its own erstwhile supporters. Traditional Tory voters who had watched incredulous as the party of Churchill, Thatcher and er, Hague, drifted forever leftwards. Betraying its core principles, and surrendering ever more of our nation’s culture, history, and values to the wreckers, critical theorists, and haters. Younger readers are unlikely to appreciate the genuine relief we all experienced, when after fourteen long years of Tory atrophy, incompetence, sleaze, and treachery, Sunak’s hapless administration finally collapsed in on itself in the spring of 2024. Its final act of wilful self immolation, to call an election months before it was obliged to do so. As if even i...