Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 Some say it's a legacy of lockdown. Whatever it is, it has to stop Source - Daily Telegraph - 13/08/23 Link Two of the marvels of British pub culture – especially when viewed from the other side of the pond – are the almost complete non-existence of tips and the instinctive etiquette that enables people to sort of hover at the bar, waiting to be served, with no semblance of a queue. It is particularly amazing that, in Britain, a country where people join queues that don’t even exist, this counter-system works so wonderfully. People rarely push in front; everyone roughly knows when it’s their turn, and there is a degree of faith in the bar staff to choose the next person to serve fairly. Or not. Either way, it’s fate.  So the news that formal queues are springing up in pubs the country over is concerning. Some say it’s a hangover from Covid. Whatever it is, pictures on social media show gormless young folk standing in line at the bar. And people aren’t taking this trend lying ...

Our Continental friends have long been riven by serious scandals – something that Rejoiners who insist they are better refuse to confront Source - Daily Telegraph 11/08/23 Link Among the issues always concealed by Rejoiners in their campaign to force us back into the EU is the historical gulf between Britain and Europe in terms of corruption. As a landmark collection of essays published in 1997, entitled Democracy and Corruption in Europe, highlighted: “On any scale of political corruption over the past century, the UK undoubtedly features at the lower end.  “At no stage since the 1840s has the political elite as a whole either attempted or succeeded in utilizing the resources of the state for large-scale personal or party enrichment. Serious malpractice by individual parties and politicians has also been comparatively rare. Accepted standards of public conduct have been high”. This was a collection to which the arch-Rejoiner himself, Lord Adonis, contributed.  That surely rem...

 Real world data is undermining the doomster 'Bregret' narrative. There is little reason to now believe Britain is the sick man of Europe Source - Daily Telegraph - 11/08/23 Link What fun Britain’s rearguard Remainers appeared to have on 31 January when the IMF predicted that Britain was going to be the only major economy to shrink in 2023, the projected 0.6 per cent slide in output even worse than forecast to be suffered by sanctions-bound Russia.  Never mind that the UK had just finished 2022 as the fastest-growing economy in the G7; it was of course Brexit which was condemning us to poverty. “The effects of Brexit run through Britain’s last-in-class economy because they also run through its divided, exhausted politics,” declared the New York Times’ London Bureau Chief in a piece titled Brexit Turns 3: why is no-one wearing a party hat? “Brexit is the dark thread that, to some critics, explains why Britain is suffering more than its neighbours.” According to The Observer, “B...

 People are effective trapped in a property because there is so much demand for it   Flexible Right To Buy is a liberating, voluntary and eye-wateringly progressive policy   There is a magic money tree – but our politicians refuse to shake it Source - Capx 09/08/23 You know an article has really landed, for good or for ill, when your Twitter (sorry, ‘X’) feed starts sprouting third or fourth-degree of separation rows sparked by your original tweet, which you had muted days ago, and people start messaging you about how glad they are someone wrote it. So it was with last week’s piece about the thorny question of social housing in inner London. Just as those studiously tenancy-neutral wonks suspected, ‘the hue and cry (slums! banlieues!)’ very much went up. These arguments highlighted several important aspects of the debate. For example, if social housing is for people with ‘social value’, as one critic claimed, how is that value calculated, and how is that test applied to e...

Green grandstanding is starting to grate, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Source - Money week - 08/08/23 Link First Tony Blair. Then Philip Hammond. Then the floodgates. For the past decade there has been a consensus among politicians (and the general population) that the UK must reach net-zero – by 2050 and by any means possible. Not any more. In an interview with The New Statesman, Blair more or less called our efforts pointless. Hammond said his party had been “systematically dishonest” about the costs of said efforts. And Sunak promised to grant a hundred new licences for North Sea oil and gas while insisting that he is “on the side” of motorists.  Much of the media was onside, too. Columnist Camilla Long had a go in The Sunday Times for example. Who’d be a little person these days? she said. “No heating, no eating, no driving, no flying: almost everything the ordinary person enjoys is haram.” In The Telegraph, Camilla Tominey said net-zero risks “turning into a disaster for the Wes...

 The Australian system is less costly than the UK’s, but delivers significantly better outcomes   The NHS has one thing in common with the US system – no one wants to emulate either of them   We can't copy Australia wholesale, but there are obvious features the NHS could adopt Source - CAPX 07/08/23 Link Although some commentators regard criticism of the NHS as calls for ‘privatisation’ or the introduction of US-style private healthcare, there is scant indication that anyone supports this. Indeed, the one thing that the NHS has in common with US healthcare is no that other country wants to emulate either of them. Some point approvingly to features of the French or German approaches, or to how healthcare is managed in the Netherlands and in Scandinavian countries. Yet there is a system that manages to combine the best features of the NHS with a customer responsiveness that is lacking in the NHS itself – Australia. When they introduced universal healthcare, the Australians ...

The sight of a hulking great male winning a women’s trophy exposed the insanity of the trans ideology. Source - Spiked - 04/08/23 Link The sight of a hulking great male winning a women’s trophy exposed the insanity of the trans ideology. Sane people across the world owe a debt of gratitude to American swimmer Lia Thomas. This is the six-foot-one man who was first allowed to compete on the University of Pennsylvania women’s team in March last year. The sight of this hulking male, standing in first place on the winning podium at a top-level college competition, forced pundits and politicians to face the consequences of the lie that ‘transwomen are women’. The spectacle also inspired many athletes to speak out about the madness of allowing men to identify into women’s sports. This is not just a question of sporting injustice, either. As Paula Scanlan, one of Thomas’s teammates, explained in her testimony to the US congress last week, she and her fellow female swimmers were expected to get...