Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 The political elite seems incapable of grasping the challenge posed by legal and illegal immigration Source - Daily Telegraph - 17/01/24 Link Rishi Sunak may have defeated his rebels, but it was a Pyrrhic victory that cannot save his government. The Rwanda Bill won’t halt the boats, let alone convince exasperated voters to trust the Conservatives again.  The Tory wets who prevented Sunak from toughening his Bill have shown themselves to be pathologically unable to grasp the enormity of the challenge posed by mass migration, legal and illegal, to the Western order in the 21st century. Most voters – in Britain, and across Europe – believe immigration to be unsustainably high, and yet the pressure will be on the numbers to rise much further, especially given the West’s crippling baby-bust. Over the coming decades, tens, if not hundreds of millions of people may seek to leave Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa to flee poverty, war and chaos. This would overwhelm almo...

It’s one thing to alienate the floating voter, but they’ve been acting like they were their natural supporters’ own worst enemy Source - Daily Telegraph 16/01/24 AYouGov poll splashed across Monday’s front page foresees a shocking electoral wipeout for the Conservatives on the scale of their 1997 defeat by Labour. But were you shocked when you saw it? Is anyone really shocked? The only shocking thing about the shock poll, I think, is that it reckons the shockingly bad Tories will manage to hang on to 169 seats.  Wishful thinking, to my mind. A far superior and more reliable opinion poll – the comments under articles like this one in The Telegraph no less – has seen this asteroid coming for over 18 months. It is one thing to alienate the floating voter, but the Conservatives have been governing as if they were their natural supporters’ own worst enemy.   It is hard to overstate the sense of betrayal and anger. Back in October, I said that the Tories would be lucky to retai...

The vengeful establishment has driven Republicans even further into his corner. Source - Spiked 16/01/24 Link If you listen to the American national media, Donald Trump is beyond the pale, and no respectable person would even think about voting for him. But, based on last night’s Iowa caucus results, it seems that many Republican voters don’t care what the media think of them. After months of media debate and polls about who will represent the Republicans in November’s presidential election, the voters finally got the chance to vote. And Iowa Republicans gave Donald Trump a decisive first victory for the party’s nomination. Trump won about 50 per cent of the vote, far above Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who won about 20 per cent each. The results were in line with expectations, as Trump was well ahead in the pre-caucus polls. This outcome tells us that a solid portion of the Republican Party remains wedded to Trump. Neither Trump’s false allegations that the 2020 election was rigged no...

Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith give Sunak a headache by signing amendments to toughen legislation over flights Source - Daily Telegraph 16/01/24 Link Rishi Sunak’s authority was challenged on Monday as two deputy chairmen of the Conservative Party announced they would rebel over the Rwanda Bill. Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith revealed that they had signed rebel amendments to toughen up the legislation, effectively challenging the Prime Minister to sack them from their party posts. On Tuesday, MPs will begin two days of debate discussing amendments to the Bill, which Mr Sunak wants passed as soon as possible to get deportation flights off to Rwanda in the spring. Mr Anderson and Mr Clarke-Smith added their names to a list of more than 60 rebel MPs on the Right of the party backing measures to make it harder for migrants to challenge their deportation and automatically block injunctions of the flights by European judges. In an interview on GB News, he said he backed “90 per...

The results of this poll are stunningly awful. Whatever the strategy is – and it is often hard to discern one – it isn’t working DAVID FROST 14 January 2024 • 9:15pm Daily Telegraph David Frost You may find it hard to believe, but one of the biggest problems the Conservative Party faces at the moment is complacency.   We’ve heard a lot of it this week – that the British people will never vote for Sir Keir Starmer, that no party has ever lost a big majority in one go, that we are in a 1992 scenario where we Tories can still grind out a tight victory if we all stick to the plan. That has always involved not just an implausible leap of faith, but a deaf ear to the disdain with which many British voters now view the Tory party – the “scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt, and anything that may not misbecome the mighty sender”, to borrow Exeter’s words to the Dauphin in Henry V. Yes, it’s obviously true that Sir Keir isn’t particularly popular. He doesn’t need to be. The YouG...

Polls suggest voters want Farage to take the reins, but the leader of the former Brexit Party believes he could be the next Prime Minister Daily Telegraph 14 January 2024 • 7:00am Is Britain on the brink of a political paroxysm that could cut the string of the Tory/Labour yo-yo for good? Richard Tice is convinced that it is, and that he stands a chance of being prime minister by 2029. The leader of Reform UK is not lacking in confidence or belief, but in fairness to him there is no point being in politics if you are plagued by self-doubt. In Tice’s world view, voters are so fed up with the established order that they will vote for Reform (formerly the Brexit Party) in their millions, and if that vote share is not reflected in parliamentary seats, the clamour for change in the electoral system will be impossible to resist. A switch to proportional representation (PR) would then enable Reform to win the most seats in the next election but one, delivering prime minister Tice into Downing ...

 Diplomats fear Paris won't join anti-piracy mission as two leaders are divided over key policy issues Source - Daily Telegraph 13/01/24 Tensions between Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron threaten to derail EU action to tackle the Houthi threat in the Red Sea, diplomats have warned. Relations between the German chancellor and the French president are strained over issues including energy subsidies, Chinese electric car imports, defence policy and Ukraine. On Monday, Mr Scholz warned EU member states they were not sending enough military aid to Kyiv, in a thinly veiled swipe at Mr Macron, whose support lags far behind Berlin’s. The Franco-German “engine” has long been the EU’s most influential relationship when it comes to policy making in Brussels. Diplomats fear the strained relationship may stymie Berlin’s progress in convincing Paris to back the expansion of a French-led EU anti-piracy mission in the Straits of Hormuz to the Red Sea. One EU diplomat said: “The relationship isn’t r...