Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

From ‘wealth’ taxes to net zero, this is how the would-be PM may act should his party's huge opinion poll lead see them through an election Source - Daily Telegraph - 15/10/22 Link On the third floor of the hulking Tate Modern on the south bank of the Thames in central London, guests mingled and chatted as they were given an exclusive after-hours showing of the gallery’s Cezanne exhibition on Tuesday. Drinking English sparkling wine, Rachel Reeves exchanged pleasantries with a hundred or more of Britain’s political and financial elite. She was joined by one of the most powerful civil servants in the country – her husband Nicholas Joicey, the new head of the Cabinet Office’s economic and domestic affairs secretariat. Five years ago, deep in the Corbyn malaise, it would have been inconceivable for a Labour shadow chancellor to be swapping gossip with the world’s most influential bankers, policymakers and press barons. But for the party’s host, the US businessman, politician and phila...

 If Liz Truss fails, we will have lost our last chance to escape a future of rising poverty and compulsion Source - Daily Telegraph - 13/10/22 By David Frost. Link Readers of my generation will remember the children’s programmes Trumpton and Camberwick Green, a sweet vision of life in an English village depicted with puppets. There is almost no traffic, power comes from a windmill, nobody ever leaves the village, and the storylines involve disasters such as a water shortage or a campaign against an unwanted electrical substation. There, in a nutshell, is the view of the future held by too many of the people who rule us. Look around and you will see this world view everywhere. Labour thinks we can run a modern economy entirely on wind and solar power, to judge from Keir Starmer’s conference speech. Hilary McGrady, the director-general of the National Trust, is behaving like a throwback 1980s trade union leader, fighting the Government’s supposed “war on nature”, whether her 5.7 mill...

The West should not give into blackmail, but see the Russian president’s rants for the bluster they are Source - Daily telegraph 13/10/22 Link The longer Vladimir Putin persists with his disastrous campaign in Ukraine, the mor apparent his military impotence becomes. Of the many setbacks the Russian leader has had to endure since he launched his invasion eight months ago, he will have felt the attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge linking Russia to the Crimean peninsula the most keenly. The 12-mile long structure, after all, was his pride and joy, the symbol of his conquest and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, one of the few tangible achievements of his two decades in power. To see parts of it reduced to a billowing cloud of black smoke, as it was after being struck by a series of explosions last weekend, must have been enough to reduce the Russian despot to tears as he celebrated his 70th birthday. His response, to fire a barrage of cruise missiles and drones indiscriminately at vari...

 Truss is being blamed for the collapse of the debt-fuelled Jenga society that she was trying to replace Source - Daily Telegraph - 12/10/22 Link For years now, the world economy has resembled a ludicrously high-stakes game of Jenga. Politicians and central bankers kept taking it in turns to remove blocks from the tower, adding them back to the top of the stack and congratulating themselves on their brilliance, wilfully blind to the fact that the structure was becoming ever more unstable. Some genuinely believed that the tower, like the economy, was getting taller; others secretly knew it was an optical illusion, but enjoyed fooling the voters. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been doubly unlucky. While almost everybody else in Britain remained in denial, they correctly identified this absurd game for the con-trick that it truly was, warned that it was about to implode and pledged to replace it with a more honest system. Instead of a zombie economy based on rising asset prices and...

 Afternoon, “How long do you think she’s got?” Source  - Daily Telegraph - 11/10/22 Link Questions about Liz Truss’ future are on the lips of MPs here in Parliament as they return from their extended holiday. Grant Shapps, the former transport secretary, gave the new Prime Minister 10 days to prove herself last week at the Conservative Party conference. However, a new date has emerged which has given Truss’s supporters cause for hope: November 8, which is when a major shake up of constituencies is published. The publication of details of the new seats for the next general election will trigger a dash for safe seats by MPs, eager to ensure they have a berth after the next general election. For the Conservatives, it will trigger battles to move to a neighbouring constituency: the rules dictate that if an MP loses a significant proportion of a seat to a neighbour, they can ask to replace them as their MP. And if a Tory MP faces losing their seat altogether they have to throw them...

 The state is now locked into huge outlays on welfare and public sector salaries   In 1997, government debt stood at 35%, now it is nearer 100%   The next government will have little room for manoeuvre on spending Sourcec- CAPX - 10/10/22 Link “History does not repeat itself but it rhymes” is an aphorism usually attributed to Mark Twain. It certainly holds true this week; the present is rhyming with the mid-1990s like William McGonagall on a particularly bad day.  An exhausted, fractious, wildly unpopular Conservative Party is crawling over broken glass towards a seemingly inevitable crushing defeat by a rejuvenated Labour Party, shorn of the troublesome left-wingery that they indulge themselves with from time-to-time. Keir Starmer, for one, is leaning hard into this story. His exhumation of the turgid Blair-era catchphrase ‘the political wing of the British people’ is testament to this, as is the swagger and the belief in winning that suffused the recent Labour conf...

 Falling wholesale prices offer hope that the cost of the energy bailout will be far lower than feared Source - Daily Telegraph - 09/10/22 Link Plummeting global gas prices have slashed the cost of the UK’s energy price cap and may ultimately reduce the monthly subsidy to zero, greatly alleviating the strain on Government borrowing. NatWest Markets estimates that the price guarantee would cost approximately £30bn over the first six months based on current futures contracts, half the £60bn figure assumed by the Treasury and the rating agencies. “Markets are currently signalling that the cost of the Energy Price Guarantee may be much lower than budgeted,” say authors Joann Spadigan and Imogen Bachra.  The spot price of wholesale gas in Europe is even lower than December futures. If it remains at today’s level, it will fall below the strike price where the state subsidy kicks in. This would eliminate the burden for the Exchequer “entirely”. While NatWest remains wary of gilts aft...