Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 Libertarians praising the Swedish response simply don't understand the country's politics   Technocratic failure, not liberalism, lies behind Sweden's doomed Covid experiment   My homeland's dire Covid response has lessons for the world about the perils of idealism Source CAPX - 14/12/20 Link In Sweden, it seems a long time since February and March, when government ‘experts’ believed herd immunity was only weeks away. Here was the only nation in the world tackling the coronavirus crisis “scientifically”, without the strict lockdowns hobbling other economies. In doing so, Sweden became an unlikely cause célèbre for libertarians the world over, who saw this apparent success as a damning riposte to heavy-handed statism elsewhere. When the virus started hitting Sweden much harder than the other Nordic countries, the narrative shifted: those same public sector experts started peddling the politically convenient idea that the high death rate would pay off later on – after su...

The starkest example of the dark heart of the European Union is its brutal neo-colonial relationship with the Third World, particularly Africa. Source - Trade Unionists Against The EU Link The most obvious and damaging exhibit is, of course, the Common Agricultural Policy which takes up half the EU budget and lavishes subsidies onto the EU’s biggest landowners at the expense of millions of the poorest farmers in Africa. The criminal £30 billion-a-year subsidy regime allows the EU to dump thousands of tons of heavily-subsidised food into Africa every year. As a result local producers cannot export their products because they compete with the lower prices made possible by the CAP. For instance EU farmers are guaranteed a price for their sugar which is three times higher than the world price. Mozambique loses more than £100 million a year because of restrictions on importing into EU coupled with the dumping of cheap exports at its door, while many thousands of workers in Swaziland have lo...

 The proposals include resilience deals for sheep farmers, fishermen, car manufacturers and chemical suppliers Source Daily Telegraph - 12/12/20 Link Cabinet ministers are drawing up a multibillion-pound bail-out package to bolster industries hardest hit by a no-deal Brexit, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose. The proposals, compiled by Whitehall departments, include resilience deals for sheep farmers, fishermen, car manufacturers and chemical suppliers who face trade disruption or being hit with punishing EU tariffs after Jan 1. Two sources involved in drawing up the plans say the package is expected to involve between £8 billion and £10 billion of funding and is inspired by Operation Kingfisher, a support package originally drawn up last year ahead of a breakthrough on the Brexit divorce deal. At least four areas of the economy are understood to have been identified by ministers as “sectors hit hardest”. They are agriculture and food producers, chemical suppliers, the automotive i...

With the EU playing power games in the middle of a pandemic, we must show the world why we left. Source - Daily Telegraph - 11/12/20 Link Negotiations are the way each side works out what the other really wants. That is obvious. Slightly less obvious, but equally important, is the fact that they also force each side to work out what it wants. In most Brexit matters, Boris Johnson is guided by the principle that one should study Theresa May’s example – and then avoid it. Although she publicly stated early on that “No deal is better than a bad deal”, Mrs May accepted the framing and sequencing of negotiations which Brussels proposed. She did not know what she wanted. So the EU understood from the start that she did not mean what she said. A bad deal was therefore inevitable, and duly arrived. That is why she was forced from office. As foreign secretary, Boris watched these events unfold, and resigned. He then became party leader and Prime Minister. He got the first half of a Brexit deal,...

 Public understanding about the limitations of an FTA presents a big headache for Johnson   If there is blinking to be done on Brexit, history suggests it is Boris who will do it   Should Johnson go for 'no deal', expect an avalanche of Brussels-blaming Source - CAPX 10/12/20 Link After four years of grand statements, red lines, ticking clocks, and all the rest of it, it is extremely easy to be cynical about the theatre of the European negotiations. Michael Gove’s arriving in Parliament, brandishing a shiny-looking but suspect deal on the vexed question of trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, might have signalled that London and Brussels had finally reached a larger breakthrough. Instead, we learned yesterday evening that there is apparently still lots of clear blue water between the two sides, who have set themselves a new deadline of Sunday to work out whether or not there is a deal to be done. How much of this is pantomime is impossible to tell from outsid...

 As de Gaulle recognised, it would have been better for everyone if we had never joined the European Union. Source - Daily Telegraph - 09/12/20 Link Allister Heath Charles de Gaulle was right: Britain should never have joined the EU. Thanks to his turbulent years at Four Carlton Gardens, he understood us better than our own establishment ever did. We stood apart, a free-trading, Atlanticist and global island with a very different conception of Europe’s future. We were never going to fit into the Jean Monnet model of EU state-building or even his own more nation-centric version, De Gaulle argued when he gloriously vetoed our application twice during the Sixties. And so it turned out. Our approach was exactly what Brussels was seeking to stamp out.  Why didn’t we listen? Why did we waste 47 frustrating years as ambivalent members? To future generations, the opportunity cost will look staggering. If anything, Le Général underestimated how hard it would be for the UK to become Eur...

 Indecision on the great issues of the day is a major, possibly incurable, headache for Labour   For Starmer, abstaining on a Brexit deal would just highlight his own flip-flopping on this issue   If he makes the wrong call on Brexit, Starmer risks being just another footnote in political history Source - CAPX 08/12/20 Link No Labour leader can easily escape his record. This is true of all the holders of that office. Even Tony Blair had to contend with observations (that did him no political harm, ultimately) that he had campaigned, as a Labour candidate in 1983, for a manifesto committing a Labour government to withdrawing from the EEC and to unilateral nuclear disarmament. The electorate, which is always more sensible and rational than many observers give it credit for, understood the circumstances under which Blair fought that election and allowed him the space to shape his own policies. A degree of opportunistic cynicism is hardly a fatal flaw in any politician, they ...