Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Playing fast and loose with the facts has eroded trust in the Government and its vision for the country 29 December 2024  Daily Telegraph  Link In a recent interview, Chancellor Rachel Reeves insisted that she would not “gaslight” working people over her plans to turn the economy around. Unfortunately, this merely turned up the dial on the irony meter. The new Government has consistently made dodgy claims in an attempt to convince voters that the reality is somehow different from what they are seeing with their own eyes. So far, the plan to expand the state has failed miserably, and there are few signs that anything is about to change for the better. One of the most blatant examples of gaslighting is Labour’s insistence that it has stuck to its manifesto commitments on tax. In particular, the Government has claimed that the Budget protected the “payslips of working people” because the majority of additional revenues were raised from employers’ National Insurance (NI). No serio...

Activists, whether campaigning for Palestine, Just Stop Oil or trans rights, do little to endear themselves to Britain’s tolerant citizens Daily Telegraph  Link Whatever label you apply – the woke, the hard Left, progressives – it’s been a lousy year for acolytes of the “omnicause”. We are finally seeing a retreat on the big issues that animate the kinds of activists who chuck soup over old paintings, harangue feminists or turn some parts of London into no-go areas for Jews every Saturday. It’s not that the activists have gone away or the chanting has stopped, but that the nastiness and arrogance of these campaigns are alienating more and more people and in the process becoming less and less effective. Their delusions are wearing as thin as a culturally-appropriated keffiyeh and they only have themselves to blame: 2024 has been the year of the backlash. This boneheadedness of the hard Left was there on election day in July outside my local polling station. I was greeted for the ump...

Unless she can boost growth, the Chancellor may soon be forced to break her own fiscal rules Daily Telegraph 27 December 2024 2:52pm GMT Link Keir Starmer was so sure he would deliver higher growth that he told the BBC last year that this would happen “very quickly, within months of a Labour government coming in”. It turns out that growth is more dependent on tax policy than Labour’s word salad approach of “partnerships” or “secureonomics”. Rather than grow the economy, he and his Chancellor have overseen stagnation. Worryingly, next year they are set to repeat their mistake of talking about growth whilst actively undermining it with their actions. Because, planning reforms aside, almost every big decision the Government has taken has reduced growth compared to what it would otherwise have been and I can’t see this changing. The most obvious example of this is the manifesto-breaking increase in National Insurance contributions. It is true too of smaller-scale decisions on inheritance t...

Labour’s pro-growth credentials barely lasted beyond their first week in Downing Street Source - Daily Telegraph  Link Putting the grown-ups back in charge would bring global investors flocking back to the UK, they said. Political stability would “restore confidence”. And a determination to boost growth would drive up profitability and returns. When Labour was elected by a landslide six months ago, there were plenty of predictions that a new government would end the years of under-performance of the London stock market compared with the rest of the world. The trouble is, it hasn’t worked out like that. Instead, the performance of the British equity market has been dismal, and it is about to get even worse. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has turned into a one-woman wealth destruction machine, and investors are next in line. When Labour won the election there was, in fairness, a brief revival on the stock market. The FTSE 250 index, which reflects the domestic economy, recorded its best we...

 Hi Guys.  I'd like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Thanks for all of your contributions throughout the year. I'm pleased we decided to keep this going.  If you get a chance why not post a YouTube link to your favourite Christmas songs ?  All the Best  Robin

And reshape British politics forever Source - Matt Goodwin Dec 23 2024 Imagine this: It’s May 2029 and Britain has just held a General Election. You turn on the television to find Nigel Farage standing outside 10 Downing Street. He’s wearing a Union Jack tie, flanked by hundreds of new Reform MPs, and is thanking the British people for having just made him Prime Minister. ‘The People’s Army have taken over British politics!’ declares the new PM. ‘The political class in this country used to laugh at me. Well, they’re not laughing now!’ Sound fanciful? Some will say so. But having successfully predicted many events the Establishment dismissed as preposterous – from Brexit to both of Donald Trump’s presidencies – I think that Nigel Farage has every chance of pulling it off. I’m not a member of the Reform Party but I do know Farage well. Over time, we’ve become friends. I’m also a passionate patriot who sympathises with the millions of ordinary Britons who have flocked to his upstart party...

The palpable sense of betrayal among millions of retirees will not easily be forgotten Daily Telegraph Link Just a few months into the new Labour government, and there are huge danger signals for older citizens. It is increasingly clear that pensioners are not a public spending priority, especially those with some savings or private pensions, who want more than just the state pension and don’t qualify to receive means-tested help. Recent examples include this week’s shock decision to break past promises of support for Waspi women. This follows deafening silence on desperately needed social care solutions; imposition of punitive taxes on private pension funds which will undermine the brilliant 2015 pension freedoms; and, of course, axing winter fuel payments without warning to save just over £1bn this year.  All clearly indicate that pensioners are being left out in the cold – literally! There is a palpable sense of betrayal among millions of older people, as pre-election promises o...

Millions of retirees struggle to heat their homes this winter – despite a fall in energy prices 19 December 2024- Daily Telegraph  Link Wes Streeting’s claim that pensioners will be better off despite Labour’s winter fuel raid “simply does not hold water”, charities have said. The health secretary insisted on Wednesday that pensioners “will still be better off this winter than last winter”, even after Labour stripped up to £300 worth of support from some 10 million retirees. But campaigners said millions of pensioners on low incomes would in fact be worse off because the fall in energy prices has been cancelled out by the removal of the winter fuel payment. Elderly households face paying around £500 more to heat their homes this winter, according to the End Fuel Poverty Coalition. The campaign group said retirees’ bills have soared by 39pc, equivalent to £483 a year. The previously universal winter fuel allowance shaved £200 a year off most pensioners’ energy bills, while those ove...

Allison Pearson Daily Telegraph  I’m not done with Essex Police yet, and readers’ tales of similar Kafkaesque treatment have just made me more determined Link I got an early Christmas present. Lord Herbert, chairman of the College of Policing, has said that the Government should consider scrapping non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) after “inconsistency and controversy” over their misuse. That controversy arose, you will recall, after I wrote here about two Essex police officers turning up at my front door on Remembrance Sunday to tell me I was accused of saying something a year ago on social media by a “victim”. But they were unable to reveal what I’d said or whom I had offended. (Essex Police claim my tweet was upgraded to a criminal offence under the Public Order Act, although it was recorded as an NCHI 12 months earlier by Sussex Police. In any case, the CPS slapped down this patent absurdity and confirmed the obvious; no case to answer.) The incident was so Kafkaesque that it pro...

 Trust in the political establishment is already at a dangerous low: Labour are playing a game they can only lose Source - Daily Telegraph - 17/12/24 Link Justice delayed is justice denied, or so a long-established truism dictates. But does the same go for democracy? Yesterday, amid the trumpet fanfare of yet another local government shake-up in England (this one really will work and will embed the local government map for decades to come – promise!), there was much focus on the size of the proposed new single-tier authorities and how many existing district councils were for the chop. It was only later that the second shoe dropped and people started asking whether next May’s local elections were going to happen at all. Annual spring elections are a familiar feature of the political calendar. No government at Westminster can rest on its laurels for long – even after securing a three-figure majority at the last general election – before it needs to start organising to fight the next ...

 The new Tory leader is already coming under attack. Here’s how she wins 15 December 2024  Source - Daily Telegraph-  Link A good sailor knows that tides are more important than waves. Waves demand attention and can be noisy. At their worst, they destroy cliffs and buildings. But waves come and go, one moment frothy, the next millpond quiet. Tides are inevitable, often imperceptible. As we approach the end of 2024, there are plenty of waves (immigration, culture wars, whether Love Actually is the best or worst Christmas film ever). But there are only three tides. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has momentum. Labour’s tide is in danger of going out – but could turn. The Tories are becalmed, but not for the reasons most people think. Three weeks ago Reform hit 100,000 members and set a target of winning hundreds of council seats at the local elections next May. In the summer, talk of Farage having any chance of an assault on Number 10 would have seemed fanciful. Such an outcome...

Hit to Exchequer from lower investment and job losses will outweigh revenue uplift, warn economists Source - Daily Telegraph Link Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax raid on family businesses and farms will backfire by costing the Treasury over £1bn more than it makes, economists have said. A drop in investment caused by the Chancellor slashing tax relief risks outweighing the extra income the Exchequer expects to gain from the changes, according to analysis by CBI Economics. Its report says the Treasury has “underestimated the impact” of changes to business property relief (BPR), with the majority of family businesses forced to cut investment because of the raid Analysts estimate that 125,678 jobs will be lost as a result. Overall, the loss of economic activity will lead to a £2.6bn reduction in income from taxes such as corporation tax, income tax and national insurance over the next five years, the research suggests. This is much more than the estimated £1.38bn in extra inheritance tax ...

The UK's membership of the CPTPP came into effect on Sunday. Britain is the first European country to join the Indo-Pacfic bloc, its previous government billed the move its "biggest trade deal" since Brexit. Source - DW In focus December 15, 2024 Link The United Kingdom became the 12th member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, as of Sunday.  The previous British government signed the accession treaty last year, with most members of the bloc having since ratified the UK's entry. Officials hope membership could boost Britain's struggling economy by as much as $2.5 billion (roughly €2.4 billion) per year.  The country is trying to strike new trade deals abroad in the aftermath of leaving the European Union following its 2016 referendum on Brexit, with EU member states still accounting for over 40% of UK exports and more than 50% of imports. What is the CPTPP?  The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-P...

As an MEP, I represented many Chagossians living in the UK. I know a a moral and mutually beneficial way to solve this crisis Daily Telegraph 01/12/24 Link “Chagos pour British!” they chanted, in the melodious creole of their ancestral archipelago. And any watching Brit could hardly fail to be moved. They were gathered outside our High Commission in Mauritius, a crowd of exiled Chagossians protesting against Labour’s handover of their islands. Simply by speaking those words, they were risking ten years in prison. In 2021, Mauritius made it a criminal offence to “misrepresent the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory”, a law aimed more or less explicitly at the Chagossian diaspora. Chagossians are by no means alone in opposing Labour’s surrender. British voters dislike it. The incoming US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, says it “poses a serious threat to our national security interests.” Even the new Mauritian government, elected three weeks ago, is unconvinced. It ha...

Chancellor’s latest tax raid is another burden on fraction of population which is economically productive Daily Telegraph  Link Britain’s last half-decade is a tale of two countries. For the new leisure class, relieved from the burden of economic production, this is a golden era. Pensions are swelling, the public sector pays more for ever less work, and the benefits bill continues to soar as people realise just how profitable it can be to sit on the couch claiming Personal Independence Payment (Pip) for your mental health and Universal Credit for your lack of work. For the fraction of the population paying for their lifestyles, it’s a catastrophe. To mildly paraphrase Vladimir Lenin, the central issue of the modern British state is who shall pay for whom. Those who manage to get out of bed and go to work despite a state determined to reward grift and punish graft find themselves confronted with: migrants in taxpayer-funded hotels with private healthcare laid on; a rigged housing ma...