Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Hard-working families can only take so many tax rises before they reach breaking point Source - Daily Telegraph 13/06/24 Link Britain is at its most dangerous economic juncture for decades. We are living so far beyond our means that we’re becoming detached from reality. GDP flatlined in April and our best case scenario for 2024, a full two years after the pandemic ended, is around 1pc growth. Total government revenues from taxes and other sources are scheduled to reach 41pc this year compared with 37pc in 2019-20 and 32pc in the 1990s. Yet still, politicians are in denial. How else to explain the insistence that the problems facing the country can be resolved with the old saw of “taxing the rich”? They’re all at it: the Greens with their wealth tax and the Lib Dems with their plan to impose a 500pc council tax surcharge on second homes. In their 80-page manifesto, the Tories failed to mention “success” once, other than in self-congratulatory references to their own, questionable record...

Sir Keir Starmer’s coming supermajority could be the last hurrah of the failing, neo-Blairite political order Source - Daily Telegraph 12/06/24 Link Be in no doubt: the next few years are going to be calamitous for Britain. Almost everything that is bad today will get worse, and everything that, for now, is still working will be vandalised or destroyed. The public is clamouring for change, but there will be no great rupture under Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, no break with the dismal status quo, just a further acceleration in our national decline.  We should be grateful for small mercies. Jeremy Corbyn would have imposed full-on socialism; many of his allies wanted to ban private schools altogether and savagely expropriate wealth. Starmer will misinterpret his likely super-majority as an endorsement of technocratic rule, giving him carte blanche to double-down on the neo-Blairite consensus that has been hegemonic in the UK since 1997, with an added dollop of class warfare, punitive ta...

The EU’s punishing climate policies are facing an almighty public backlash. Source - Spiked 11/06/24 Link In 2019, Green parties achieved their best ever European Parliament election results. They even topped the polls in some member states, including Germany. Europe’s cultural and political elites could barely conceal their delight at the time, viewing the rising support for the Greens as an endorsement of their own managerialist mission to tackle the so-called climate emergency. The EU’s technocrats seized their chance. Within months of this alleged ‘green wave’, Brussels pushed through its Green Deal, which committed all member states to Net Zero, or carbon neutrality, by 2050. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hailed the Green Deal at the time as ‘Europe’s man-on-the-moon moment’. Things look very different today. As the results of last week’s European elections show, support for Green parties has dropped off a cliff. There were exceptions, such as in Denmark, wher...

 Even when the end was nigh, both the Thatcher and Major governments had records to defend   Recent Conservative policies don't tackle what's actually wrong with our political economy   It's little wonder that right-wing voters are unenthused about turning out for the Tories on election day Link Has there ever been a general election campaign like this? People with longer memories than I might be able to think of one, but I can’t. Even a couple of weeks ago, warnings that the Conservative campaign might collapse altogether felt like hyperbole; such a prospect is now entirely plausible. Britain has seen parties decisively ejected from office after long periods before. There was the Conservative victory in 1979, albeit that was truly cemented in 1983; New Labour’s then-historic rout of the Tories in 1997. Even David Cameron in 2010, while falling short of a majority, picked up almost a hundred seats. What those elections had in common, however, is that the government went d...

 The Labour leader is a creature of the managerial state. Source - Spiked - 09/06/24 Link Who is Keir Starmer? It’s the question that has launched a thousand comment pieces over the past few years, as pundits scrabble around trying to work out what exactly the Labour leader and presumed next UK prime minister stands for. Well might they ask, too. As Tom Slater has explained on spiked, this is a politician who has shredded virtually every principle he professed to hold dear and broken almost every policy promise he has ever made. He is a u-turning machine, a master of the reverse ferret. Pledges made to Labour members in 2020 to nationalise public services or abolish tuition fees were unceremoniously dropped a couple of years later. Talk of raising income tax for top earners has been replaced by a commitment not to implement tax rises. Trying to work out who Starmer is, and above all what it is he stands for, is like trying to catch smoke. There is no ideology, no guiding principles...

  The seaside town represents a Britain that’s going nowhere. The future belongs to places with more ambition and drive Matthew Parris Saturday September 06 2014, 1.01am, The Times Link At Stratford railway station in East London they’re a bit sheepish about the line to Clacton-on-Sea. Directed to platform 10a, the intending passenger easily finds platform 10; but of 10a there is no trace. It transpires that 10a is elsewhere, down a staircase at the far end of the platform. On 10a there are no train indicators and no staff. But you may just spot a “Clacton” sign on the train as it pulls in. By the time you get to Clacton, most passengers have fled at intermediate stops. You walk almost alone through a well-kept station built for busier times, past a tidy canteen with a good range of meat pies at £1.50, and past a welcome-to-Clacton artwork constructed sweetly of glazed tiles picturing the resort. A red plastic litter-bin is prominent in the composition. This is not a dirty or un-se...

Live Telegraph poll puts Reform leader far ahead, as Penny Mordaunt struggles to keep up and Angela Rayner flops Daily Telegraph 07/06/24 Link They say you should never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, and that adage should now include never picking a fight with someone who has their own TV show. Nigel Farage, unleashed into a live debate for the first time this election, was polished, pugnacious and popular. Penny Mordaunt, the Leader of the Commons, made a decent fist of trying to keep up with him, but hamstrung by the reality of 14 years in Government, she was elbowed into second place by the charismatic Reform UK leader. A live Telegraph online poll of who was up and who was down put Mr Farage far ahead throughout the 90-minute BBC show, with a net positivity rating more than twice as large as Ms Mordaunt’s. The big loser on the night was Angela Rayner. Sent out with a mission to be the sensible voice in the room, she struggled to think on her feet, was skewere...