Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 If the Conservatives compete with Labour in the politics of envy, it will never end well   Non-doms must be welcome in an open, outward looking economy   Ending non-dom status will cost Britain money Source - Capx - 11/04/24 Link Both the Labour and Conservative parties are engaged in an unedifying bidding war as to which of them will tax rich foreigners the most. The war on non-doms makes for crude politics and dire economics.  This is a rather small number of people. There are 68,800 non-doms living in the UK under a permanent, settled arrangement. That means an opportunity – which 37,000 out of the 68,800 make use of – to claim the special ‘remittance basis’ tax status. Under that arrangement, they still have to pay UK tax on their UK income. But they can pay tax on their foreign income in the country in which they are domiciled – their permanent, long-term home country. If this is a ‘scandal’, it has been going on for over three centuries without any secrecy. If...

The ECHR’s net zero judgment shows why the UK must now leave the court without delay Source - Daily Telegraph - 10/04/24 Democracy is dying, and we are running out of time to save it. The theft of power and influence from ordinary citizens, and its transfer to unelected, unaccountable lawyers and technocrats is accelerating.  The populist backlash, when it comes, will be devastating, but in the meantime the Left-wing elites are doubling down, using every possible justification to expand their empires.  In an incendiary judicial coup this week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) greatly expanded its own remit while downgrading democracy another notch. In a ruling that would almost be funny if it weren’t so serious, its Grand Chamber ruled that countries that don’t reduce carbon emissions fast enough are violating their citizens’ right to private and family life.  This risible decision is bad news for anybody who questions the rush to compulsory electric cars, or hea...

 Afternoon! Source - Daily Telegraph - 10/04/24 Link Rishi Sunak has issued a fresh plea to Reform voters, but is it too little, too late? Sunak: Vote Reform and get Starmer The Prime Minister did not have the best start to this morning’s phone-in on LBC. Introduced to a caller named Louise in the Rhondda Valley, Sunak cheerily exclaimed “hi, Rhonda!” before correcting himself: “Oh sorry, Louise, missed that, hi.” Thankfully for Downing Street, Sunak’s message to those planning to back Reform at the election later this year was significantly clearer. On the line to a man intending to abandon the Tories for Richard Tice’s party, he said: “If you vote for Reform, all you are going to do is put Keir Starmer in power, and then we are going to get no action on those things that you care about.” PM is right to worry about Reform It is little wonder Sunak is worried about Reform and trying to stem the tide of lifelong Conservatives joining a growing revolt on the Right. Leave voters are n...

The MP admitted to responding to messages on gay dating app Grindr and sending on numbers of colleagues Source - Daily Telegraph 09/04/24 Link   William Wragg has given up the Conservative whip after admitting handing over colleagues’ phone numbers in the Westminster honeytrap scandal. It means he will now sit as an independent MP, rather than a Tory MP, for his constituency of Hazel Grove, Greater Manchester. The party whips’ office said that Mr Wragg gave up the whip “voluntarily” after relinquishing his roles in the 1922 committee and the Public Accounts committee on Monday.  A spokesman said: “Following Will Wragg’s decision to step back from his roles on the Public Accounts and 1922 committees, he has also notified the Chief Whip that he is voluntarily relinquishing the Conservative Whip.” Mr Wragg last week admitted to responding to messages on gay dating app Grindr and sending on numbers of colleagues.

Federation chairman says officers are not prepared for ‘unsustainable’ task of dealing with thousands of reports under new law Source - Daily Telegraph  08/04/24 Police Scotland “can’t cope” with a deluge of hate crime reports made under the SNP’s new law, frontline officers have claimed. David Threadgold, chairman of the Scottish Police Federation, also said that officers remained confused about when charges should be made, because of inadequate training. Around 8,000 hate crime reports were made in the first week of the legislation coming into force, with Mr Threadgold warning that the law was being exploited to fuel personal and political vendettas. “Police Scotland have gone public and said that on every occasion, reports of hate crime will be investigated,” Mr Threadgold told the BBC. “That creates a situation where we simply cannot cope at the moment. “Officers have been brought back in to do overtime shifts, and the management of that is simply unsustainable. “When you have ...

 The tragic, accidental killing of those aid workers has revealed the depths of Israelophobia. Source - Spiked - 04/04/24 Link Israel’s unintentional killing of seven aid workers in an airstrike in Gaza on Monday was undoubtedly a calamity. However, the frenzied discussion of the tragedy suggests that, for many prominent commentators at least, there is more going on here than meets the eye. A new version of the blood libel has taken hold, and it is warping how the Israel-Hamas war is being discussed and understood. Israel is erroneously accused of conducting a genocide against the Palestinian people – of attempting to eliminate them. The fact that Israel is fighting a war of self-defence – against an enemy, Hamas, that openly wants to destroy Israel, and mercilessly murdered and raped civilians on 7 October – seems to have been forgotten by many onlookers. There is also little recognition that Hamas is currently engaged in a vicious guerrilla war against Israel, using the extensive...

A new report outlines the massive costs. Sinn Fein seems to imagine the British will pay them Source- Daily Telegraph 04/04/24 Yesterday brought yet another report on the potentially enormous costs of Irish unification, this time from a Dublin think tank, the Institute of International and European Affairs. Soberly titled Irish Northern Ireland Subvention. Possible Unification Effects, it was parodied in a headline on the Sluggerotoole.com website: “Reports estimate Irish Reunification to cost somewhere between 37 pence and 44 trillion pounds …” But the authors, Professor Edgar Morgenroth and John FitzGerald, are well-regarded economists. It is more than five decades since FitzGerald’s father, Garret, (who would first become Taoiseach in 1981), also an economist, tried to introduce some reality to the debate with his book Towards a New Ireland, which confronted some of the challenges of unifying Ireland very early in the blood-soaked years of the Troubles. He warned that tax levels wou...