Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 The question is not if he was wrong – everyone, including him, accepts he was – but if someone else would do better Source- Daily Telegraph - 15/01/21 England is now the freest place in Europe. Shops and schools are open, vaccine passports have been dropped and the last lingering Plan B restrictions should go later this month. Nightclubs remain mothballed in Malmö, Mullingar and Munich, but they thump out their hypnotic beats in Manchester. What Boris Johnson once called “the inalienable free-born right of people born in England to go to the pub” is again, well, inalienable. British blood cells are brimming with antibodies: 95 per cent of us carry them, according to the Office for National Statistics, making us, as Professor David Heymann of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine puts it, the best-placed population in the northern hemisphere to get past the pandemic. Our economy is surging commensurately: new figures show we regained our pre-pandemic GDP in November, b...

 Germany's comparative struggles are an extraordinary reversal of fortunes Source - Daily Telegraph - 14/01/22 Link The UK has regained its pre-pandemic levels of GDP long before Germany, Italy, and Spain, and slightly before the eurozone as a whole. It is ahead of Japan and Canada. This is a remarkable outcome when you think that the OECD forecast a year ago that Britain would limp into 2022 with output still 6.4pc below its pre-Covid peak, an economic basket case languishing along with Argentina at the bottom of the developed world's league table. The International Monetary Fund also predicted that the UK would be left behind in perma-slump through 2021 and into 2022. The global institutions got it seriously wrong. Why? It certainly looked terrible in the blackest days of mid-2020, when the UK seemed to be suffering the worst economic contraction of the major western economies, even as it was recording (or seemed to be recording) one of the worst tolls of excess deaths from C...

Duke of York will also no longer use his HRH title and will defend his sexual abuse case as a 'private citizen' Source - Daily Telegraph 13/01/22 Link The Duke of York has been stripped of all military titles and patronages and will no longer use his HRH title, Buckingham Palace has said. He will continue to defend his sexual abuse case as a “private citizen,” declaring it a “marathon not a sprint.” A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said: “With the Queen’s approval and agreement, the Duke of York’s military affiliations and Royal patronages have been returned to The Queen. “The Duke of York will continue not to undertake any public duties and is defending this case as a private citizen.” A royal source said all of the Duke’s roles had been handed back to the Queen with immediate effect for redistribution to other members of the Royal Family. They will not be returned to the Duke. Prince Andrew, 61, will no longer use the style “His Royal Highness” in any official capacity. The d...

 The fastest way to defuse this situation is to end checks and paperwork   Legal proceedings over the Irish Sea border could have profound consequences   Checks at the Irish Sea clearly run counter to Stormont's power-sharing rules Source - CAPX - 11/01/21 Link In an article in this week’s Sunday Telegraph, Foreign Secretary and Brexit negotiator Liz Truss reiterated that the UK will trigger Article 16 if the EU does not make rapid concessions on the Northern Ireland Protocol. For more than six months, ministers have directed this threat at Brussels, as the Government tried in vain to dismantle the internal economic border between Great Britain and Ulster that it signed up to in 2019. Political leaders in Northern Ireland offered standard issue responses to Truss’s remarks. Unionists applauded her apparent resolve, while nationalists and pro-EU liberals criticised her tone as ‘unhelpful’. That may have inspired a pronounced sense of déjà vu, but as it happens developments...

Former Labour leader is being urged to upgrade his charity and run under its banner at the next election Source - Daily Telegraph - 10/01/22 Link Jeremy Corbyn is considering establishing his own political party after privately accepting he will never be reinstated as a Labour MP, The Telegraph understands. The former Labour leader has been urged by many in his inner circle, including his wife Laura Alvarez, to upgrade his charity into a political party, and run under its banner at the next election. If the party is established, it could tempt the defection of Left-wing MPs who are disaffected with the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer, and could take the name of the Peace and Justice Project, which Mr Corbyn established to coordinate his political activities after he was suspended from Labour. Mr Corbyn sparked outrage in October 2020 after he responded to a formal inquiry into Labour’s unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination against Jewish people by saying allegations of anti-Sem...

 11 years after voters booted him out, Labour are still taking their lead from Gordon Brown   Brown and co's position is to keep giving away powers to the devocrats and hope for the best   Gordon Brown can't bear to admit how totally wrong his big calls on devolution have been Source CAPX - 10/01/22 Link Ten years after losing office in 1997, the Conservatives were two years into David Cameron’s root-and-branch reform effort. More than ten years after voters booted him out in 2010, Labour are still taking their lead from Gordon Brown. Sir Keir Starmer has appointed the former Prime Minister to head up a commission on Labour’s approach to the constitution. And unsurprisingly, the stories coming out of it are abysmal. Naturally, the headlines have been stolen by suggestions that Labour might run pro-independence candidates in Scotland, as they already have in Wales. But whilst the national party’s failure to crack down on this is deeply concerning, this time at least it loo...

Britain prepared to overhaul post-Brexit agreement unilaterally, says Foreign Secretary ahead of her first meeting with Brussels' negotiator Source - Daily Telegraph - 08/01/22 Link Liz Truss will insist on Sunday that Britain will overhaul the post-Brexit agreement over Northern Ireland unilaterally if she cannot reach a “negotiated solution” with the EU. Writing in The Telegraph in her first intervention as Boris Johnson’s new Brexit negotiator, the Foreign Secretary states that the Article 16 “safeguard clause” in the Northern Ireland Protocol was “explicitly designed ... to ease acute problems because of the sensitivity of the issues at play” on the island of Ireland. The warning, which is likely to inflame tensions with Brussels, comes ahead of Ms Truss’s first face-to-face meeting with Maros Sefcovic, her EU counterpart, at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s country residence, on Thursday. In early November, Mr Sefcovic warned of “serious consequences” if the UK triggered Art...