Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 The economy will not grow without supply-side reforms Source - Daily Telegraph 17/11/23 Patrick Minford As the Autumn Statement bears down on us, Britain’s economic prospects look grim indeed. On consensus forecasts, including my group at Cardiff, growth of GDP will hardly rise above zero. This has two implications. First, that household incomes will stagnate. Second, given minimum demands for rising public services, public finances will deteriorate, with the debt-to-GDP ratio rising steadily over the next decade, after a brief decline fuelled by massive recent tax increases.  This Government was warned by a broad range of economists that their policies would damage growth and they would have done much better by keeping taxes down and putting growth first. This would have meant borrowing more in the short run but far less in the long run. This was the position of the Truss government, which was heavily opposed by a coalition of Left-leaning economic commentators, the Treasury...

Ever since Disraeli, the Conservative Party has been a coalition of clashing factions. They may no longer be able to live together Source - Daily Telegraph - 17/11/23 Is the Conservative Party on its deathbed, lingering on until electoral demise? This prospect is no longer unthinkable. Political parties do disappear or dwindle into irrelevance. In France and Italy the once mighty Socialists, Communists, Gaullists and Christian Democrats have faded away. Established parties are declining in Germany. Rebellious movements are rising in Holland and Sweden. Even in the United States, whose parties are comparable in age and history with ours, the system has stalled. The Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most successful political parties in history. But that cannot guarantee survival. There is a global political pandemic from which it is not immune, and indeed its characteristic features make it susceptible. The disease is a general disillusionment with conventional politics caused ...

 How long will you continue to take the blame for a failed prime minister who no one voted for? Source - Daily Telegraph - 16/11/23 Everyone has a tipping point. For many Conservatives, theirs came when Suella Braverman was sacked. Any hope that Rishi Sunak believed in true conservative values, principles and policies was dashed. Sunak and his cabinet turned their backs on thousands of loyal Conservatives who no longer recognise their own party, and on the tens of thousands of Red Wall voters who delivered their 2019 victory. I have only sympathy for those who feel betrayed. Like us, they once thought an 80 seat majority would see a proper Conservative government that would speak for them and stand up for Britain.  I also wonder how those Red Wall MPs are feeling right now. They already know their seats are gone. How long will they continue to take the blame for a failed prime minister who no one voted for? How long will they defend a government that has broken promise after p...

The former PM embodies the very worst of the technocratic politics that reigned before Brexit. Source - Spiked 12/11/23 Link If any more proof were needed that Rishi Sunak is a bloodless technocrat cosplaying as a political leader, then look no further than his appointment today of ex-prime minister David Cameron as foreign secretary. Yes, that David Cameron. Chillaxing Dave. The leader of the Cameroons, arguably the dullest political tribe in UK history. The man whose greatest achievement as PM was to announce a referendum he was convinced he could win, only to discover that the majority of Brits had very different ideas – about the EU, about democracy and about Cameron himself. Sunak has clearly not brought Cameron back in from the cold for his political acumen then. He has done so, above all, because Cameron is very much a politician after Sunak’s own technocratic heart. It’s an appointment that will no doubt go down well among Remainer Tories and smug centrist commentators (‘Daddy’...

 It deserves to be wiped out Source - Daily Telegraph 15/11/23 The Conservative Party, once famed for a streak of ruthlessness that helped it meet the needs of the political moment, is now little more than a donkey sanctuary for especially unimpressive animals.  Anyone who has attempted to carry out anything remotely resembling a serious agenda over the past few years has either failed, been overridden or simply been expelled. Liz Truss’s great experiment with deregulation lasted all of five fraught minutes, but at least she had a vision. “Levelling up” has been quietly left in the back of a cupboard, gathering dust. Suella Braverman was forced out after a year of attempting to deport criminals and illegal immigrants without success.  The government has only one policy – inertia. In the new programme of unmanaged decline our leaders simply sit there, staring glumly at our crumbling country, and let their ideological enemies run riot through every major institution. The fl...

 The trendy contempt for the Jewish State is a gross betrayal of Enlightenment values. Source - Spiked - 14/11/23 Link Can we criticise Greta Thunberg now? For a time, anyone who raised even the mildest objection to the pint-sized prophetess of doom risked being damned as a bully. Surely this moratorium on Greta-scepticism will end following her platforming – to use woke lingo – of an activist with very iffy views. An activist who has trivialised the Holocaust and seems pretty chilled about Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. Calling out Greta for her fact-lite blather about the planet being ‘on fire’ may have been forbidden – pulling her up for hanging out with Holocaust relativists must not be. Thunberg has made waves by switching her focus from saving the planet to saving Gaza. Like every other Gen Zer with a TikTok and an insatiable urge to signal his / her / zir virtue to the world, she’s become an overnight authority on Israel-Palestine. She posed with a placard saying ‘Stand with G...

 With the sacking of Suella Braverman, the Tory party has finally given up on key Conservative policies Source - Daily Telegraph 13/11/23 David Frost How quickly the world moves on. This weekend, we saw appalling scenes of aggression, incitement and anti-Semitism on our streets once again. Today, the one Cabinet minister who called these out for what they were and criticised soft-touch Met policing was unceremoniously dismissed from the Government.  The confected row over whether Suella Braverman cleared her newspaper article with No 10 is obviously not the real cause. I’ve seen plenty of ministers sidestep Downing Street “suggestions” on speeches and articles. It’s about unity and authority. But if you have to establish your authority by killing off your supporters, then you better get every judgment right.  Yes, maybe Suella did occasionally express herself imperfectly, but it is hard to feel she has made as many errors of judgment as those in charge of the Conservative...