Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

  Thursday’s local elections will send a clear message to the mainstream parties Daily Telegraph 29/04/25 Link At a conference a few weeks ago, a very jolly woman made a beeline for me and introduced herself. “I’m backing Reform,” she said. Pause. “And I’m the chairman of my Conservative Party association!” I must have raised an eyebrow because she added, with what may have been a conspiratorial wink, “I’m far from the only one in that position, you know.” I didn’t know, but it’s not very surprising when you consider the state of the polls and the surging popularity of that Tory chairwoman’s new pash, Reform UK. There have always been Shy Tories (Right-of-centre voters too nervous about receiving a hostile reception to out themselves), but they have clearly been superseded in recent times by Sly Tories or even Spy Tories; those who are keeping one foot in the Conservative camp while playing footsie with Farage in the voting booth. The border between the Tories and Reform is now as ...

The Runcorn and Helsby by-election is just two days away. Will one of Labour’s safest seats close the door on the governing party? Daily Telegraph  Runcorn fight will go down to the wire “I can’t stand the man, I wouldn’t vote for the man, I’m going Green. Bye-bye!” This was what Karen Shore, the Labour candidate in Runcorn, and Cabinet minister Hillary Benn were told moments before a door was slammed shut in their faces on the campaign trail yesterday. Sir Keir Starmer’s party faces a far more significant threat from Reform UK than the Greens in less than 48 hours’ time but the traditionally Labour town turning against the Prime Minister on the Left as well as to the Right is a bad omen. By-elections are notoriously difficult to poll but all the surveys suggest the race between Labour and Reform will go down to the wire. Not that you would guess there was much urgency, with the Prime Minister missing from the campaign trail. My colleague Ben Butcher has taken a closer look at his ...

 At the start of a seismic week in British politics, it is little wonder that Downing Street already has one eye on what will come next. Daily Telegraph  Monday April 28 2025 Link Labour prepares for migration crackdown At the start of a seismic week in British politics, it is little wonder that Downing Street already has one eye on what will come next. prepares for migration crackdown Reform UK is expected to win as many as 425 seats at the local elections on Thursday from a standing start, as the public braces to reject both Labour and the Tories at the ballot box. The Liberal Democrats are also primed for significant gains, while the Greens are projected to double their seats. Nigel Farage’s party is also hopeful of success in at least two regional mayoral contests. As my colleague Ben Riley-Smith reveals today, Sir Keir Starmer is planning to retaliate by unveiling a crackdown on immigration after the elections, with a white paper expected within weeks that is likely to ma...

The local elections are a chance to show a leader who believes he’s above it all the anger he has wrought Kemi Badenoch - Daily Telegraph  Link Keir Starmer once tried to portray Boris Johnson as a “trivial man”. But the country knew who Boris was and why they voted for him. With Starmer, after years of watching him, the truth is still foggy – until you realise he’s not guided by principles at all. Our Prime Minister just says whatever he needs to get through the next news cycle, the next day or the next election. That’s not leadership. That’s cowardice. The truth is that Keir Starmer is the trivial one. He merely pretends to be serious, wearing glasses paid for by another man, and spouting opinions given to him by others. He blows with the wind, twisting like a weathervane. There is no conviction, no moral core. Just performance. When faced with hard decisions, he dodges them. And he breaks his promises. He promised not to raise taxes on working people. His first Budget did exactl...

Labour MPs have been rolling out a three-pronged attack against Reform amid a surge in support for Nigel Farage Andrew Rosindell: St George's Day should be a public holiday GB NEWS GB News Published: 23/04/2025 - 11:39 Link Sir Keir Starmer has taken a veiled swipe at Reform UK leader Nigel Farage in his St George's Day tribute. The Prime Minister, who is currently attempting to thwart the rise of Reform UK, was joined by a number of high profile English icons at No10. Turning his attention to the politicisation of patriotism, Starmer said: "That flag doesn't belong to me as Prime Minister, it doesn't belong to my party, the Labour Party, or to any group or political party. "It belongs to all of us, to England in all of its wonderful diversity. And we should be proud of that flag and we must never concede it because it's an expression of our values and our patriotism." The Prime Minister's comments come after Nigel Farage warned: "I’m very co...

Pollsters at Find Out Now have placed Nigel Farage's Reform UK in a breakaway first place - with 28 per cent of Britons saying they would vote for the party at a General Election. GB News Link Eight percentage points lower sit both Labour and the Conservatives on 20 per cent - but when mapped out across the UK, the ramifications of the data would see Sir Keir Starmer turfed out of Downing Street. Labour's 406 MPs would be reduced by almost 90 per cent to 41 - with Reform surging nationwide from Cornwall to Cumbria, picking up 374 seats for a Commons majority. Responding to the figures, a party statement read simply: "Only Reform will fix broken Britain. Vote Reform, get Reform." Some of the party's highest-profile MPs would also lose their seats to left-wing challengers - Foreign Secretary David Lammy would lose out to the Greens, as would Corbynista firebrand Diane Abbott. The Conservatives would also see their parliamentary presence more than halved, dropping by...

The Runcorn and Helsby by-election campaign opens with Reform UK in pole position, according to my survey in the constituency. However, there is time for Labour to close the gap if they can persuade enough of their unhappy 2024 supporters to turn out and vote, the findings suggest. By Lord Ashcroft 14 March 2025 By-elections Link Reform are ahead of Labour by 40% to 35% when we weight respondents according to their stated likelihood to turn out and vote at the by-election, with the Conservatives in third place on 10%. This represents a 20% swing from Labour to Reform since the general election. However, when we include only those who say they are certain to vote, the Reform lead rises to 9 points (42% to 33%) – a 22% swing since July. Only just over half (55%) of Labour’s general election voters say they will definitely vote, compared to 78% of 2024 Reform voters and 70% of Tories. Labour’s chances of holding the seat therefore depend on persuading as many of possible of their supporte...

Ministers are already plotting to undermine the Supreme Court’s gender ruling. Spiked 22nd April 2025 Link Before women across the UK had even finished celebrating last week’s Supreme Court ruling on gender, Labour ministers were already plotting to overturn it. After the UK’s highest court stated on Wednesday that a ‘woman’ is defined by biological sex in law, a group of Labour higher-ups began discussing how they could work to reinterpret, undermine or quietly sidestep the judgement. According to WhatsApp messages leaked to the Mail on Sunday at the weekend, a group chat consisting of various LGBT Labour ministers – including culture minister Chris Bryant and Home Office minister Angela Eagle – began making plans to undermine the Supreme Court ruling as early as Thursday. In one set of messages, MPs attacked Kishwer Falkner, chairwoman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, for stating that only biological women should use women’s single-sex facilities. Labour MP Steve Race des...

Tax rises are never popular, but I think we have a winner. Second home owners feel that they are being unjustly targeted and treated as cash cows. Understandably, they're not happy. Daily Telegraph Link Two thirds of local authorities across England have this month brought in a double council tax charge on second homes, piling misery on 280,000 owners who will see their bills rise 77 per cent to £3,672, on average, according to analysis by The Telegraph. In some areas, council tax bills for second homes will surpass £10,000. I’ve rarely seen a topic enrage readers like this stealth tax on wealth. The Telegraph’s inbox has been inundated with emails of woe from those who feel that they have done nothing wrong but are being financially penalised. Property owners tell us they feel more like residents in their second home area than their hometown, taking great efforts to get to know their neighbours and pumping money into the economy. Yet councils want them gone, ostensibly to free up ...

Labour MPs to meet in attempt to thwart Supreme Court judgment on definition of a woman Daily Telegraph  Link Sir Keir Starmer has refused to stop a plot by ministers to thwart last week’s Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women. Labour ministers and MPs will this week meet to discuss how to promote trans rights in the wake of the landmark judgment. They are understood to be planning to take their demands to the equalities minister. The plot emerged in leaked WhatsApp messages from a group chat of Labour MPs, including ministers Sir Chris Bryant and Dame Angela Eagle. Both railed against comments made by Baroness Falkner, the equality watchdog chief, who said the ruling meant trans women would be banned from women’s single-sex spaces. They urged colleagues to meet them to discuss their concerns. However, Downing Street refused to take any action against the two ministers, claiming they were not trying to undermine the judgment. While the Government has said it w...

JK Rowling, take a bow. The defeat of gender ideology in the UK is now almost complete, and it was the Left, not the Right, that delivered it Link Daily Telegraph 19/4/25 Paradoxically, the greatest victory for conservatism since Brexit was engineered by a heroic gang of Left-wing feminists, most notably Rowling, only belatedly supported by a Conservative Party that for long was too timid to stand up to the woke juggernaut. It’s a tale that has a lot to teach about the realignment of modern politics, the Labour Party’s retreat into a weird metropolitan bubble, the fading of the Tories and the rise of Reform. Now that the vibes have fully shifted, culminating in the Supreme Court ruling that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equalities Act refer to biological sex and not the gender with which a person identifies, few in Westminster want to be reminded of their erstwhile unsoundness. Yet it shouldn’t be forgotten that when a small group of feminists launched For Women Scotland in 2018, ...

  The findings of this week’s Home Affairs committee report into the Southport riots are laughable Daily Telegraph  Link Allison Pearson There is a reason some nicknames stick. That nasal knight who occupies the role of Prime Minister is “Two-Tier Keir” because if two sides indulge in poor behaviour, you just know he will support the side whose narrow political belief leads him to prefer one rather than treating both just the same. A brilliant Morten Morland cartoon from 2023 shows Starmer dressed in police uniform with the palm of his hand raised as if against an advancing mob. The caption has him saying: “STOP IT. SOME OF YOU!” This perception of bias is hugely damaging because it fixes the PM in the popular imagination as a duplicitous hypocrite who arrived in No 10 promising a “government unburdened by doctrine, guided only by a determination to serve your interests”. Whose interests might they be? You may well find yourself asking that question after nine months of our fa...

The Supreme Court gender ruling is a victory for women’s rights, lesbians and reason itself. 16th April 2025 Spiked The UK Supreme Court has just confirmed what anyone with a grasp on reality has always known: that women are adult human females. In a unanimous and refreshingly rational judgement, the justices in For Women Scotland Ltd vs The Scottish Ministers make clear that the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 means exactly what it says – male and female, as determined by biology. It’s a landmark victory for women’s rights, and a resounding humiliation for the Scottish ministers who thought they could rewrite reality. The case centres on the Scottish government’s Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018. Its goal was simple enough: get more women on to public boards. But in the hands of Holyrood’s gender fanatics, the legislation was contorted into a Trojan horse for gender ideology. According to the Scottish government’s guidance, any man with a gender-recogniti...

Unite considering series of walkouts in event of further pay disputes like the row in Birmingham  Daily Telegraph  Link Unite, one of Britain’s largest trade unions, is considering a series of walkouts in the event of any further pay disputes like the row in Birmingham. Workers are embroiled in similar disputes in Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire, and some Unite staff in Sheffield are already on strike. It comes with no end in sight to the bin strike in Birmingham, where Unite members overwhelmingly rejected a second offer from the council as their walkout entered its sixth week. The vote will be seen as a humiliation for Angela Rayner, the Local Government Secretary, after she pleaded with union bosses to accept the deal. Critics claimed that Unite voting against the deal showed Ms Rayner and Sir Keir were “the puppets of the unions”, while council bosses called the decision “incredibly disappointing”. A senior union source warned that several local authorities were in similar si...

The report concluded that claims of 'two-tier policing' during the summer riots was 'baseless' and 'disgraceful' GB News Link Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has hit out at the findings of a report into the summer riots sparked by the Southport attack - declaring he does "not accept" there was "no evidence" of "two-tier policing". The report, released by the Home Affairs Committee, details a probe into the police forces' response to the disorder in the wake of the murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July. The report concluded that those participating in disorder "were not policed more strongly" because of their "supposed political views", but because they were "throwing missiles, assaulting police officers and committing arson". Hitting out at the report, Farage told media that there is a "strong feeling" in Britain of "not only two-tier policing", but ...

The private rented sector is shrinking as more landlords plan to exit the sector, according to a new survey. Property118 - The Landlords Union 11th April 2025 Link Data by landlord organisation iHowz reveals 59% of landlords are considering leaving the market, with 88% of those planning to sell. The survey also reveals that more than half of landlords (66%) have been in the market for more than 20 years, but only a third (37%) manage two to five properties and 19% manage ten to 20. Only 4% of landlords plan to expand According to ihowz, the main reasons for landlords leaving include the Renters’ Rights Bill, excessive regulations, including selective licensing rules and tax burdens. The top concerns around the Renters’ Rights Bill included the abolition of Section 21 and loss of fixed-term tenancies. Additional concerns include pet-related damage, with the Renters’ Rights Bill granting tenants the right to keep pets, which landlords cannot ‘unreasonably’ refuse. Of those landlords stay...

 Labour’s vote share fell 32.2 per cent in worrying sign before May elections GB News Published: 11/04/2025 - Link Reform UK delivered a crushing electoral blow to Labour last night with a thumping by-election win, despite a Cabinet Minister campaigning on behalf of Labour. The disruptor party scooped almost 50 per cent of the vote in the ward of Longdendale (Tameside) just east of Manchester which falls within Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds’ Stalybridge and Hyde constituency. The Cabinet Minister, who recently came under fire for his claims about his career as a solicitor, leant his weight to Labour’s campaign yesterday, but it was not enough to hold off the Reform surge. Reform’s Allan Hopwood scooped 46.6 per cent of the vote, beating Labour’s Francesca Coates into second (25 per cent) and Kieron Wild of the Conservatives (12.4 per cent). It means Hopwood has become Reform’s first councillor in Greater Manchester, a traditionally safe Labour area that elected 25 Labour mem...