Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 When Keir Starmer gave a field to his parents, he used a “life interest trust”. This meant that, as its value grew from £20k to £300k, it was outside his parents’ inheritance tax estate. Tax Policy Associates 28 September 2025 Link UPDATE: 10am Sunday 28 September. Mr Starmer just told Laura Kuenssberg that he didn’t create a trust. That is hard to understand when The Sunday Times has been asking Mr Starmer about a trust for a month, and he at no point denied there was a trust. It also makes it hard to explain the form of words Mr Starmer used in his letter to the Parliamentary Commissioner: “I immediately gifted the land to my parents for so long as they should live”. To a lawyer, that means a trust. In 1996, Keir Starmer bought a seven-acre field behind his parents’ house so they could keep rescue donkeys. But the arrangement wasn’t quite as simple as a gift. The wording he later used suggests he created a life-interest trust: his parents could use the field for the rest of thei...

Pressure on PM to loosen purse strings threatens to squeeze public finances 26 May 2025  Daily Telegraph  Link Sir Keir Starmer risks blowing a £5bn black hole in the public finances after U-turning on benefit cuts in the face of a backbench rebellion. The Prime Minister will cost the Treasury as much as £1.5 billion by bringing back winter fuel payments for most pensioners, while up to £3.5 billion more will be lost if he axes the two-child benefit cap. A planned reduction in net migration could cost the Treasury £7 billion more, according to Britain’s fiscal watchdog. It comes as Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, braces for another bleak set of forecasts amid speculation that she will be forced to raise taxes in her autumn Budget. Left-wing Labour MPs are clamouring for the Government to loosen the purse strings, with whips seeking to head off a potentially major rebellion. Meanwhile Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, will this week attempt to outflank Labour on welfare by cal...

 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...

With two months left until we are scheduled to leave the European Union – with or without a deal – the question of what the voters want to do about Brexit is a key question. However, different people have many different interpretations of what the public actually thinks. The Telegraph claimed earlier this year that “ Every region of England and Wales happy to leave the EU without a deal - except London if extension refused ”; one prominent Remain campaigner, meanwhile,  claimed that Leave voters don’t support No Deal . But what do the numbers say? And what does this tell us about how a potential second EU referendum might go? Let’s take a look. “Maybe”: would the public vote Leave again? After the 2016 referendum, pollsters began asking voters how they would vote in a re-run of that “Remain” / “Leave” referendum. They continue to ask this question (which I like to call the “generic” referendum question) today. Sometimes the question varies slightly (YouGov often asks voters whe...