Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

  Sacking Mel Stride and Priti Patel signals Badenoch is building a serious government-in-waiting Daily Telegraph 31/08/26 If you were leader of the Opposition, would you rather have: a) shadow ministers that the public had never heard of, or b) shadow ministers they had heard of and disliked? This week, as rumours of an imminent reshuffle swirled, those appeared to be Kemi Badenoch ’s only two options. Dame Priti Patel , for instance, suffers – rather unfairly – from a lingering association with the Boriswave, at least in the Tory assessment. At the other end of the spectrum, most voters would be unable to tell you whether Mel Stride was a man or a woman. Well, on Monday both were sacked (though Patel was handed a new “international role”). With Reform bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, this tells us something about Badenoch’s ambition for the party, not to mention her emerging strategy and determination to succeed. Both Stride and Patel were appointed in the aftermath of the ...

  Burnham says he won’t allow early release of some dangerous criminals – but this does not go far enough Daily Telegraph 30/08/26 The new Prime Minister told the BBC on Sunday that his latest plan to exclude dangerous criminals from early release does not go far enough. Quite an admission, made worse by the fact that this is Andy Burnham ’s fifth policy position on the scandal since he took office. This is meant to be a final resolution of the crisis. But we have been told that by Labour several times before. Why should we believe them now? First, we had a review of Sir Keir Starmer’s original plan, which would see thousands of criminals set loose after serving as little as one third of their sentences. Advertisement Then a pledge to exclude rapists and paedophiles, when we were told Labour had gone to the “very limits” of what was possible. Then another review, this time of grooming gang perpetrators. Then a further pause, when it became clear Pc Andrew Harper ’s killers would s...

  The PM praises unpaid placements from a supermarket that has cut 3,000 jobs Daily Telegraph 28/08/26 A million young people in this country have no job , nor are they undergoing any training or education to help secure one. This fact has become so well-worn of late you may as well put it on the side of a bus, yet successive governments have proved capable only of worsening the issue – and the latest seems intent on rubbing salt in the wound. In a remarkably tone-deaf bit of comms, our new prime minister Andy Burnham has demanded we praise a Potemkin employer in a depressing portent of how this Government will meet its goals. Just a year after it culled 3,000 jobs – a move it quietly blamed on the rise in employer National Insurance contributions – Sainsbury’s has announced 10,000 unpaid work experience placements, and Burnham has praised this as an example to follow. The move comes shortly after the Prime Minister asked employers simply to fix youth unemployment, and now we’re b...

  If progressives can criminalise Islamophobia, surely promoting child marriage in a Western country should be against the law Daily Telegraph 27/08/26 As his many followers on social media will be well aware, John Cleese has become a rather outspoken figure these days, on any number of contentious subjects. I certainly can’t say I agree with everything he posts. But I was very much intrigued by a little thought that he put forward on Tuesday morning. “I’d like to suggest,” he wrote, “that promoting child marriage, stoning, halal animal torture, wife beating, sharia courts, and other behaviour contrary to British values, should now be referred to as Anglophobia.” What an interesting idea. I wonder whether Labour MPs will take Cleese up on it. After all, they were extremely keen to draw up an official definition of Islamophobia . So why not do the same for “Anglophobia”? Admittedly, I suppose there’s a risk that some Labour MPs might think Cleese’s definition of “Anglophobia” consti...

  Dispersing asylum seekers into Britain’s poorest areas has been a recipe for disaster. Spiked 25/08/26 The British state’s decision to disperse asylum seekers to the poorest parts of the country has long been causing serious problems. Mainly accommodated in so-called migrant hotels and increasingly houses in multiple occupation (HMOs), asylum seekers’ presence has been the source of many issues, from rises in anti-social behaviour to pressure on already stretched public services. It has also fuelled higher rents as landlords remove family homes from the market to create bedsits. It seems that Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has recognised that locating so many asylum seekers in already deprived areas can’t go on. In his by-election victory speech in Makerfield in June, Burnham acknowledged that ‘HMO Britain’, particularly where it is connected to the refugee industry, is deeply unfair. Since then, the government has acted on its promise to close asylum hotels in place...