Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

ONS figures show 600,000 are economically inactive as Milburn report urges action to tackle ‘failure of system stuck in the past’ Daily Telegraph 28/05/26 the highest level since records began, with more than 600,000 16 to 24-year-olds not in work or searching for a job. The official figures were released on Thursday as a landmark report found that youth worklessness is costing Britain £125bn a year, nearly double the nation’s entire defence budget. The ONS figures revealed that 613,000 young people were classed as economically inactive, which means they are not in work or looking for a job. It is the highest number of young people in this category since the records began in 2001. This figure is out of a total 1.01 million young people classed as not in education, employment or training (Neet) in January to March this year, the highest level in more than 12 years. Alan Milburn, a former health secretary under Sir Tony Blair who led the review into youth worklessness, said that ...

The King of the North’s reputation as Manchester’s saviour is undeserved. He offers no solutions to any of Britain’s biggest problems Daily Telegraph 20/05/26 There are great political leaders, men of integrity and principle, and then there is Andy Burnham, that most over-hyped of Labour apparatchiks. There is no substance behind the fake bonhomie and easy charm, just more mediocrity, and yet his King of the North act appears to be taking in millions. One poll suggests he would propel Labour into the lead were he to become leader, a catastrophic development. Yet his achievements as mayor of Greater Manchester range from the grossly exaggerated to the non-existent. He has presided over a series of disasters, including wasting £100m on a Ulez-style assault on motorists and his police force being placed in special measures. His class-war-infused analysis of Britain’s problems is ahistoric and economically illiterate; his cod municipal socialism would kill off what is left of our pros...

Labour leadership frontrunner makes fifth policy reversal since becoming by-election candidate Daily Telegraph 28/05/26 Andy Burnham has dropped his support for migrants being given immediate access to benefits in the UK, in his latest about-turn on policy. Mr Burnham repeatedly voiced his opposition to the no recourse to public funds (NRPF) policy that bars migrants from the benefits system until they obtain permanent residence. But The Times reported that Mr Burnham’s team stated he no longer stood by the policy. NRPF has been UK policy since 1999, and means that migrants on work, study or family visas cannot access public funds such as housing support, Universal Credit or disability benefit. Only when a foreign citizen has been granted indefinite leave to remain (ILR), allowing them to live, study and work in the UK permanently, is the ban on benefits lifted. The Mayor of Greater Manchester still features a call on his website from 2019 calling on Boris Johnson, then prime ...

Labour has left the nation sleepwalking into a welfare state that punishes work Daily Telegraph 24/05/26 How far have we travelled down the British road to socialism? We now live in a country where a family living on benefits in London can be better off than a household earning £70,000 per year, according to analysis by the Centre for Social Justice. For much of Britain, the link between how much you work and what you can afford has been broken. If Labour has a core ideological belief, it is that fighting inequality is a moral crusade that trumps everything else. Economic growth must play second fiddle to this sacred cause. Conservative politicians of recent decades have been too frightened to challenge this mantra, for fear of being seen as heartless. There was, of course, the Thatcherite interregnum in the 1980s, when wealth creation was openly celebrated, and rising inequality was seen as a price worth paying for the country becoming richer. But that was an aberration from ...

Behind the SNP’s years of electoral dominance lay a tightly controlled partnership brought down by scandal and infighting Daily Telegraph 25/05/26 Early in the morning of April 5, 2023, dozens of officers descended on the suburban home shared by Nicola Sturgeon and her husband, Peter Murrell. They set up an evidence tent on the driveway while large blue sheets were used to shield the view of the garage and back garden. In astonishing scenes beamed on to television screens across Britain, police searched the house, using the tent and sheets to shield the items they removed from the watching cameras. Ms Sturgeon, who had been Scotland’s first minister only two months before, later said her house looked “like a murder scene”. Her husband, who had been the SNP’s chief executive for more than two decades, was arrested as part of the police investigation into embezzlement. He admitted to embezzling £400,000 from the party over 12 years at Edinburgh’s High Court on Monday. It is an ex...

Allister Heath - Sunday Telegraph The prospect of a new Labour leader should fill us all with dread. Amid the uncertainty surrounding Sir Keir Starmer’s replacement, there is one inevitability: taxes will increase, regardless of who’s in charge. If you are already sick of the crippling taxes levied on anything that moves (and much that doesn’t) in today’s Britain, I have grim news. The war on wealth has only just begun. There is very little hope of any improvement, at least under this Labour Government. The state of play is even bleaker than it was during the 1970s, when a class-war obsessed Labour Party dedicated itself to taxing the rich until the pips squeaked (as the then socialist Chancellor Denis Healey didn’t quite put it), levied confiscatory rates on high incomes, targeted “speculators” and sent the country into the arms of the IMF as a result. This time around, it’s not just the very wealthy that are in Labour’s sights, but almost anybody with assets or who wants to i...

Seven Afghan nationals, alleged to be part of grooming gang, accused of 40 offences in total Daily Telegraph 22/05/26 Seven Afghan nationals who came to Britain via small boats and lorries have been charged with rape and child sex abuse offences. The refugees, allegedly part of a grooming gang, are accused of sexual offences committed between August 2023 and May last year, according to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). They have been charged with a total 40 offences altogether as part of an investigation into group-based child sexual exploitation in Norwich. Police arrested seven men during raids on seven different addresses, six in Norwich and one in Dumbarton, Scotland. The men appeared before Norwich magistrates’ vourt on Friday. A courts service officer said that all seven were remanded into custody until a plea hearing at Norwich Crown Court on June 19. Jamil Khalil, 20, Ahmadin Ahmadzai, 21, Qais Kaker, 20, Fazal Auryakhel, 20, Mohammed Farooq Sinwary, 23, Ali Ahamad...

Spiked - E mail 21/05/26 Can a woman have a willy? This staggeringly simple question – to which the only acceptable answer is No – is still tripping up even the most seasoned of politicians. This time, it’s Andy Burnham, Labour’s prince over the water, who seems befuddled by the concepts of women’s rights, women’s spaces and biological sex. Footage has emerged from 2022 of this supposed no-nonsense northerner saying that ‘transwomen’ (ie, men) should be let into the ladies’. Worse, he brushes off rational objections as coming from a ‘small minority’ of culture-warring troublemakers. Whatever Burnham really believes, a politician who can’t tell the truth about men in dresses can never be trusted as prime minister.

Former deputy PM denies involvement after police arrest five people over claims that fake independent candidates were entered in poll Daily Telegraph 21/05/26 Angela Rayner has become embroiled in a row linked to alleged electoral fraud at her local council. Four men and a woman, all aged between 23 and 47, were arrested on Thursday morning on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud, Greater Manchester Police said. It follows claims that fake independent candidates were entered on the ballot for Tameside borough council, in the heart of Ms Rayner’s constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne, to split votes for opposition parties. The alleged plot was reportedly carried out by people associated with Tameside Labour group, with one discussion said to have taken place in Ms Rayner’s kitchen. Labour candidate Atta ul-Rasool, the former vice-chairman of the Ashton-under-Lyne Labour branch, was elected after beating the second-placed candidate, Ahmed Mehmood, an independent, by 177 votes. The two...

Andrew Bailey joins retail bosses in opposing the Chancellor’s ‘unsustainable’ plans Daily Telegraph 20/05/26 Andrew Bailey has warned Rachel Reeves against capping supermarket food prices. The governor of the Bank of England said freezing the price of essentials would be “unsustainable” and risked backfiring. The intervention comes after grocers were asked to cap how much they charge shoppers for staple items such as bread, eggs and milk amid growing alarm in Government about soaring prices. Addressing MPs on the Treasury select committee, Mr Bailey conceded that there could be reasons in the “short run” to control prices. However, he added: “I think the question you have to think through with this sort of thing is: are you doing it for some well-grounded, very temporary reason? “I think if you start doing it as a matter of course, then you’re effectively artificially moving prices relative to costs, and that’s not a sustainable thing in the long run.” Another official at the ...

Daily Telegraph 20/05/26 Sir Keir Starmer’s failures will put Nigel Farage in power, Wes Streeting has warned. The former health secretary used his resignation speech to declare that the Labour Government must change course or risk handing Reform UK the keys to No 10. Mr Streeting, who quit Sir Keir’s Cabinet last week in the wake of Labour’s dire local election results, insisted he had “no regrets” over his resignation. He told MPs: “I left the Government because we are in the fight of our lives against nationalism, and it is a fight that we are currently losing. Unless we change course, we risk handing the keys of No 10 to Reform, and I do not want that on our consciences.” Mr Farage is on track to become the next prime minister, with Reform having enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls for more than a year. The party won more than 1,450 council seats on May 7, taking control of 14 councils – nine of which it gained from Labour. Mr Streeting’s speech will be seen as the bas...

Manchester Mayor’s push for public ownership relies on taxes and borrowing Daily Telegraph Published 19 May 2026 During the 2024 general election campaign, I worked as an adviser to Jeremy Hunt and remained at the Treasury to help ensure the basic machinery of government continued to function. But as the outcome of that election was pretty obvious, it was clear Treasury officials were starting to prepare for Labour. Now that Andy Burnham has a reasonable shot at quickly becoming prime minister, something similar will be happening at 1 Horse Guards Road. Civil servants will already be asking themselves what a Burnham premiership would mean for the next Budget, the fiscal rules and the tax system. The bond markets appear to have given their verdict. Ten-year gilt yields have remained above 5pc for days, prompting increasingly awkward attempts at reassurance from the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He first offered a vague commitment to “fiscal rules” in general before aides later c...

Starmer’s party is caught between Rejoiner instincts and Leave-voting heartlands it cannot afford to alienate Daily Telegraph 18/05/26 Brexit is an issue that divides us, both as a nation and as political factions within that nation. Europe was the key fault line within the Conservative Party from the late 1980s until our withdrawal from its political structures was finally achieved in January 2020. The downfall of at least four Tory prime ministers – Thatcher, Major, Cameron and May – can be attributed to internecine conflict about our place in Europe. Today it is Labour’s turn to suffer. The party has a problem that cannot be squared. Sir Keir Starmer and all his leadership rivals seemingly believe that Brexit was a colossal mistake and that they must do all within their power to reverse it in spirit if not in name. But natural Labour supporters in the party’s traditional heartlands overwhelmingly voted to take back control, to regain our sovereignty, in 2016. Most would do so a...

Labour must grasp markets, incentives and the Government’s part in our economic malaise Daily Telegraph 17/05/26 This week promises to be a significant one, both politically and economically. The news and political sections of just about all the media are, of course, dominated by the wranglings over who, if anyone, will succeed Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. But this subject has come to dominate the economics and business pages as markets try to assess the significance of the various candidates for economic and market performance. The truth of the matter is that there is probably not a cigarette paper to be put between them. On what we have heard so far, their different posturings correspond to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The fundamental reason is that all of the leading candidates for the top job are, unsurprisingly, shot through with Labour’s basic ideology, namely that fairness and the distribution of income are the main issues before us. And state-led acti...

You cannot endlessly tax and borrow your way to prosperity, no matter how worthy the spending sounds daily Telegraph 15/05/26 The King of the North is assembling his troops, preparing to march on Westminster. Andy Burnham has finally found a seat for his long-awaited chicken run, hoping Labour’s National Executive Committee selects him as the candidate for Makerfield after Josh Simons stepped aside in the Wigan constituency. Simons was once touted as a Labour rising star before allegedly attempting to smear journalists investigating questionable accounting at Labour Together, the think tank he used to run. Simons says he is making way for a leader with the “radicalism, energy and immense courage to meet the moment”. Burnham certainly thinks he is the country’s saviour. He claims Labour has already “made changes to make life better” during its first two years in Government. Really? Voters appear unconvinced. At last week’s local elections, Reform secured 50 per cent of the vote ...

Politics is supposed to be about ideas and visions for dealing with the country’s challenges. Where is the great debate about these? Daily Telegraph 15/05/26 Winston Churchill famously wrote of the role of prime minister: “The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.” Good advice. And we all now know that Keir Starmer is no good at being Prime Minister. When he trips, he blames others. When he makes mistakes, it’s in the full glare of daylight. He’s a dud. Yet even now the Labour Party seems reluctant to conclude that he has to go. Even now Wes Streeting can’t quite bring himself to launch a leadership challenge and calls instead for a transition timetable. Personally I’m convinced Starmer is done for, but who could blame him for trying to tough it out against opponents so infirm of purpose? Things could ge...