Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Labour suspends Azhar Ali from party after anti-Semitism row but it’s too late to replace him on ballot paper for Feb 29 by-election Source - Daily Telegraph - 13/02/24 The Conservatives labelled Sir Keir Starmer a “moral vacuum” after his U-turn on support for Labour’s Rochdale by-election candidate. Labour withdrew its support from Azhar Ali on Monday night and suspended him from the party after he was embroiled in a row over anti-Semitism. Sir Keir initially backed Mr Ali despite growing protests from Jewish community leaders and within his own party after the aspiring MP claimed Israel had deliberately let Hamas massacre its citizens on Oct 7 to give the “green light” to the bombardment of Gaza. But the Labour leader was forced into an about-turn after the Daily Mail reported Mr Ali blamed “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” for criticisms of a pro-Palestinian politician and said Israel planned to “get rid of [Palestinians] from Gaza”. Richard Holden, the Conservativ...

 Both Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves want to insulate economic policy from democracy. Source - Spiked - 12/02/24 Link The budget isn’t what it used to be. Not that long ago, a UK chancellor’s budget statement was one of the big set-piece parliamentary events of the year. It felt like it genuinely mattered. In the run-up, its contents would be shrouded in secrecy. The chancellor and other cabinet ministers would refrain from even hinting at its contents – a practice known as budget purdah. On the day itself, the chancellor would show off the famous red budget box on the steps of No11 Downing Street. Then, having made his way to a packed House of Commons, he would read out the eagerly awaited budget statement. This was the only date on the parliamentary calendar that a minister could consume alcohol at the despatch box. Today, many of these customs have long since fallen away. Chancellors now happily leak the details of the budget days in advance. They’ve stopped using William Gladsto...

Taxpayers would fund already generous pots – while their own savings are capped Source - Daily Telegraph - 09/02/24 The Chancellor’s decision to scrap the pensions “lifetime allowance” was a great day for British pensions.  The pension tax, first introduced under Gordon Brown, punished pension success and never made sense. If you restrict the amount people can pay in each year, there is no need to penalise them for building a big pension fund over time. Unfortunately, immediately after Jeremy Hunt’s announcement, Labour vowed to reintroduce this pernicious penalty, if it came to power.  The allowance capped tax-free lifetime pensions savings at a little over £1m. It was abolished after senior NHS doctors were hit with large tax bills for working overtime, due to the complexity of how their retirement benefits are calculated. Labour said under any reinstatement, NHS workers would be protected.    But we now hear they may exempt “public sector leaders” too. Public sect...

 The bloc is an economic and political disaster zone, incapable of reflecting the opinions of Europe’s voters Source - Daily Telegraph - 08/02/24 A few days after the Brexit referendum in 2016, I sat watching Martin Schulz, then president of the European Parliament, lecturing British voters about the supposedly terrible decision they had just taken. I remember reflecting: “Thank goodness we won’t have to care very much longer what people like you think.”  Well, it took a bit longer than we wanted, and even now the job is not quite 100 per cent done, but we did it. Indeed, no one here is listening any longer to what the president of the European Parliament thinks. A decade ago, probably some voters at least were vaguely aware of Schulz, even if they couldn’t tell you who exactly he was. I shouldn’t think you could now find one in a thousand who would recognise the name of the current president. (It is Roberta Metsola, from Malta, by the way. There, I told you so.) I am not writ...

 The great irony is that voters are likely to punish Labour’s total lack of ideas with a landslide majority Source - Daily Telegraph - 08/02/24 Link Spending £28 billion a year on green investment was Keir Starmer’s flagship policy, an ambitious and supposedly revolutionary plan to put Britain on a fundamentally different economic track. Rachel Reeves flew out to Washington to compare her agenda to so-called “Bidenomics”.  The US has been running a similar borrow-and-spend programme, but she called her version “securonomics”. It was Labour’s solemn pledge to business: no more Tory chop-and-change. We’re stable. They’re not. You can take our promises to the bank. Any business tempted to do so would be regretting it now. The £28 billion pledge has been abandoned, to no one’s surprise. It became a much-mocked symbol of Labour getting its sums wrong.  Joe Biden can manage borrow-and-spend on a vast scale due to the sheer power of the dollar. If Britain tries the same, disaste...

 Source - Daily Telegraph 08/02/24 Labour has slashed its original £28bn green borrowing plan by four fifths and unveiled a new tax raid on oil and gas giants to bankroll the Net Zero drive. Sir Keir Starmer announced that his flagship clean energy policy has been downgraded to just £4.7bn a year in the biggest about-turn of his leadership. Speaking to reporters in Parliament, he blamed the Tories for “maxing out the credit card” and insisted that the original pledge was no longer affordable. Under the new slimmed down blueprint, public funding for a major home insulation drive has been reduced from a planned £6bn a year to just £1.2bn. Meanwhile the budget for Great British Energy, a publicly owned energy company that Labour plans to set up, will be handed £1.7bn a year of taxpayers’ cash. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said it will be financed by hiking tax on energy producers’ profits from 75pc to 78pc, raising £2.2bn a year. Miliband: Labour still has a world-leading cli...

 A new Race Equality Act will compound the disparities = discrimination paradigm   Discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity or religion is already illegal   Family structure and cultural values – not race – drive social and economic outcomes in modern Britain Source - Capx 06/02/24 What’s Labour’s grand idea if – as looks likely – they return to government? On Sunday, the shadow women and equalities minister, Anneliese Dodds, announced that ‘the next Labour government will go further to ensure no matter where you live in the UK, and whatever your background, you can thrive’. They will introduce a new Race Equality Act which will ‘extend equal pay rights’ to Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people. While this proposal may be well-intentioned, it risks compounding the hugely problematic ‘disparities = discrimination’ paradigm – the belief that ‘inequalities’ exist between ethnic groups because of systemic racism. While Labour politicians such as Dodds contin...