Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Chancellor and Labour MPs used over £400,000 of taxpayer cash to heat their homes Source Daily Telegraph 10/09/24 Link Rachel Reeves claimed £4,400 of taxpayer cash towards her energy bills before axing winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners. In the past five years alone, she has claimed £3,700, Telegraph analysis reveals. The Chancellor and other Labour MPs spent more than £400,000 of taxpayer money heating their own homes over the past five years, with some claiming thousands a year more than a typical household spends. It comes as Sir Keir Starmer and Ms Reeves fought off a backbench rebellion over the decision to restrict the tax-free payment of up to £300 to only those retirees entitled to claim pension credit. Since 2019, 162 Labour MPs have claimed £425,000 on expenses for home energy use, according to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). However, this was £83,000 more than the average amount a similar number of households would have spent in that p...

They’re not just playing to the gallery. They believe they can interfere with prices and wages without any cost Source - Daily Telegraph 07/09/24 Link   You know what keeps me writing these columns? The salary. I’m sorry to disappoint readers who imagined that I was doing it out of altruistic zeal, but the truth is that, if I didn’t need the Telegraph’s paycheque to cover my bills, I’d stop. I might even dry up in mid... Most of us recognise the importance of market incentives in our own lives. As Frédéric Bastiat remarked, “each man is in practice an excellent economist, producing or exchanging as he finds advantageous”. But we struggle to extend that principle to the economy as a whole. We are wired to think that things have an intrinsic value, just as they have an intrinsic size. When that value rises, we see price-gouging or greed. The free market is, in the exact sense, counterintuitive. We have just been reminded of how difficult people find it to accept market forces in eith...

Our neighbour across the Channel has shown an ability to thrive against the odds. But trouble lies ahead Source - Daily Telegraph 08/09/24 Link   Barely a day goes by without some new scare story about how taxes are due to rise or some benefit is due to be cut. In fact, in our neighbour across the Channel, things appear to be just as bad, if not worse. The new French prime minister, Michel Barnier, our old Brexit adversary, has picked up a poisoned chalice. Several times in my career I have asked the question: “Why is France doing so well?” This has usually brought forth a torrent of protests from people saying that France is doing very badly. Did I actually mean what I said? I did. For all the negative comments in this country about the French economy, for most of the post-war period, it has done pretty well. Its per capita GDP has at times been notably higher than ours. This is despite the frequently bizarre policies pursued by its governments. That has been the force of my quest...

Coverage was heavily biased against Israel, report into corporation’s output finds Source - Daily Telegraph 08/09/24 Link The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war, a damning report has found. The report revealed a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel, according to its authors who analysed four months of the BBC’s output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media. The research, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, also found that Israel was associated with genocide more than 14 times more than Hamas in the corporation’s coverage of the conflict. On Saturday, Danny Cohen, a former BBC executive, warned that there was now an “institutional crisis” at the national broadcaster and called for an independent inquiry into its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Two leading Jewish groups, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the National Jewish Assembly, added their voices to calls for an ind...

The rise of Michel Barnier exposes the crisis of French democracy. Source - Spiked 06/09/24 Link Whoever you vote for, the technocrats get in. That seems to be the message from French president Emmanuel Macron, who yesterday anointed Michel Barnier, a long-time Eurocrat, as France’s new prime minister. Until Barnier’s appointment, France had gone 60 days without a prime minister and without a functioning government. This was partly thanks to the ‘Olympic truce’ that had put politics on hold during Paris 2024. But it was mainly because July’s legislative elections had thrown French politics into turmoil. The results produced a hung parliament, with no one party or bloc able to nominate a prime minister who could command the confidence of the National Assembly. Those elections delivered a one-two punch to the Macron regime. The president’s party, Ensemble, won fewer votes than both the right-populist National Rally (RN) and the leftist coalition, the New Popular Front (NPF). In the end, ...

There is a refusal to acknowledge the role green policy played in this tragedy. Source - Spiked 05/09/24 Link Seventy-two people died from the fire that started in a kitchen in Grenfell Tower in west London, shortly before 1am on 14 June 2017. They died because the fire was spread by cladding that the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) ordered from the company Rydon, and was put up by Harley Facades. ‘The original facade of Grenfell Tower, comprising exposed concrete and, given its age, likely timber or metal frame windows, would not have provided a medium for fire spread up the external surface’, noted a report by the Building Research Establishment to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, which was leaked in 2018. Yesterday’s phase-two report from the inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, rightly highlights Rydon and Harley Facade’s evasion of basic safety oversight, and the complicity of both Kensington and Chelsea council and the UK government’s housing ministry. ...

Housing secretary considers cutting the discount despite previously benefiting from it Source - Daily Telegraph -  03/09/24 Link Angela Rayner is preparing to rip up Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy despite previously benefiting from the scheme herself. The housing secretary is considering abolishing the scheme for newly built council houses and cutting the discount offered to existing tenants. The deputy prime minister is facing growing pressure from local authorities to reduce the cost of Baroness Thatcher’s flagship policy, and a consultation on proposals will be launched in October’s Budget. More than 100 local authorities called for the scheme to be axed on new council homes in a damning report into the state of Britain’s housing stock published on Tuesday. The report, commissioned by Southwark Council, said the policy was helping to burn a £2.2bn hole in local authority accounts and exacerbating the country’s housing crisis. Ms Rayner attended an “urgent meeting” with ...