Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 The old order of globalisation and industrial decline has failed working-class Americans. Spiked 9th April 2025 Link It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s haphazard tariff barrage as silly and self-defeating, especially after so many days of global market turmoil. But critics among liberal Democrats and Republican free traders still need to address the overriding goal behind the seeming madness. The key strategic objective of Trump’s approach is simple: restoring American industrial power. Opponents of the US president ignore this at their peril. It is true that the American economy continues to outperform those of Europe and the UK, especially in terms of tech, communications and finance. Yet the situation for blue-collar professions and working-class communities has not improved with the pace of globalisation. Between 2004 and 2017, the US share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 to 10 per cent. Since 2000, notes an Economic Policy Institute study, China’s export barrage has co...

 Britain’s inheritance tax raid and non-dom reforms accelerate wealth exodus 08 April 2025  Daily Telegraph 08/04/25 Link London is losing its millionaire residents at a similar rate to Moscow, with 30,000 gone in the last decade, analysis shows. Britain’s capital was home to 245,100 millionaires in 2014, according to figures compiled by analytics firm New World Wealth for advisors Henley & Partners. But this number had dwindled by 12pc to 215,700 in 2024, as an increasingly hostile tax environment drove wealthy individuals abroad. The only city that lost a higher proportion of its millionaires was Moscow, driven primarily by Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Russian capital saw a 25pc fall in the number of residents with liquid assets over $1m (£857,475) – from 40,000 to 30,000. London and Moscow were the only cities where the number of millionaires fell. The cities that experienced the highest growth in millionaires were Shenzhen (142pc) and Hangzhou (108pc)...

Labour has dropped plans for grooming gang inquiries, making the announcement on the final day before Parliament breaks up for Easter recess. GB News 08/04/25 Link In January, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced £5million to fund five local inquiries into grooming abuse gangs, but today it has been updated to a “flexible” £5million fund. Instead of funding five locally-led inquiries, Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips said they would back “locally-led work on grooming gangs”. Tory MP Robbie Moore said that the five local inquiries had “been kicked into the long grass.” He added: “That is a complete and utter disgrace.” GB News understands Parliament was given just 45 minutes’ notice before the Government made the update. It comes after the government announced plans to establish a new Child Protection Authority aimed at improving national oversight and consistency in child protection practices across the country. The new body will prioritise the protection of children as part of a ...

 Prosecutions are still being pursued for minor Covid violations whilst real criminals face lax justice Isabel Oakeshott Daily Telegraph  Link At the height of lockdown madness, Matt Hancock casually announced the introduction of ten year jail terms for breaching certain Covid regulations. The then health secretary’s proclamation was greeted with a combination of derision and disbelief. The idea that anyone would ever be incarcerated for a decade for some harmless muddle over the ludicrously complex, ever changing and often arbitrary rules and regulations seemed totally outlandish.  Behind the scenes however, the then Tory government was plotting to “get heavy with the police,” to ensure anyone who stepped an inch out of line felt the full force of the law. As the pandemic dragged on, thousands of decent people would be hauled before the courts over trivial – and often genuinely inadvertent – failures to abide by restrictions that were ever less justified by what Hancock ...

There’s only a slim chance his plan will work. But at least the US President is trying to change history, rather than just caretake it Tim Stanley Daily Telegraph  Link First, an apology. I wrote weeks ago that Trump’s tariffs are a bargaining tool, but they’re not. They might rise or fall, but they’re here to stay – to boost US manufacturing and raise revenue while domestic taxes go down (on welfare cheques and tips). If I was taken by surprise, so was Israel – for it offered to abolish all its tariffs, assuming Trump would respond in kind, which he didn’t, for reasons I’ll try to intuit.  Also in the dark was Washington. Officials reportedly prepared Trump with various tariff options; he chose the simplest and harshest, three hours ahead of his announcement, following a meeting with a handful of his biggest fans. “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” a source told The Washington Post. In fact, Trump is correcting a 50-year misdirection in US life, and one tha...

The Foreign Secretary asks if the Tory leader would be equally dismissive of MPs from her own party banned from China Daily Telegraph  Link David Lammy has attacked Kemi Badenoch over “cheerleading” for Israel, after it denied entry to two Labour MPs. Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed were deported on Saturday, after the Israeli immigration ministry said they planned to spread “anti-Israel hatred”. The decision was labelled “unacceptable” by Mr Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, who said he had raised it with his Israeli counterparts. But Mrs Badenoch defended Israel’s right to deny the MPs entry in an interview on Sunday and said that she had not been surprised. The Conservative leader told Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “I think that every country should be able to control its borders, and that’s what Israel is doing, as far as I understand. “They gave reasons why they didn’t believe that those people should come in based on their laws. And it’s really important that we respec...

One day, politics students will study this farrago as an object lesson in self-defeating policymaking Daily Telegraph  Link We always suspected that Labour’s VAT raid on private schools was motivated by spite. One term in and the vindictiveness of this tax grab is now plain to see. Contrary to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s claim that it is all about levelling the playing field, the policy has been exposed for what it really is: an ideologically driven assault on aspiration. And before the left leaps on my privately educated past – I speak as the mother of three children, one of whom attends a state school. This week, we learned two facts that confirm slapping a 20 per cent levy on school fees was not done with children’s best interests at heart. The High Court learned that the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, forged ahead with the plan despite being warned by her own civil servants that it would harm poorer families. As Lord Pannick, the KC representing private schools suing t...