Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 Reform leader comes out on top – apart from when voters are asked which leader is an ‘honest person’ 13 July 2025  Daily Telegraph  Link Nigel Farage is more in touch with ordinary people and pays greater attention to detail, according to the Ipsos survey Voters believe Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is better than Sir Keir Starmer in almost every respect but is less honest than him, according to a poll. Mr Farage is seen as being more in touch with ordinary people, paying greater attention to detail and being a stronger leader than the Prime Minister. A new survey by Ipsos asked respondents whether they felt certain positive characteristics applied to Sir Keir, Mr Farage or Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader. The Reform leader came out on top in every question, apart from when voters had to say which of the leaders they believed was an “honest person”. It comes as Reform continues to surge in the polls, with Ipsos finding that the party is ahead of Labour and the Conse...

After only a year in office, the PM has been painted into a corner by his disastrous policies and disgruntled back-benchers 11 July 2025 Daily Telegraph  Link A state visit is meant to demonstrate the best of British – and as far as the pomp and pageantry around Emmanuel Macron’s sejour was concerned, that was true. But let’s be honest, if Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner and Chancellor Rachel Reeves – with a side order of Foreign Secretary David Lammy – are supposed to represent the crème de la crème of UK statecraft, then we really are en difficulté. So lacking in stature are the current Labour crop that even when the pint-sized president started slagging off Brexit, none of them stepped in to defend the “once in a lifetime” democratic decision taken by this country almost a decade ago. “The British people have been sold a lie,” opined Monsieur Napoleon Complex, arguing that we were told leaving the EU would “make it possible to fight more effectively against...

Inequality is the engine of growth. Attempting to eliminate it will inevitably make everyone poorer 10 July 2025 Daily Telegraph  Link The wealth tax many in Labour are mulling after the benefits climbdown is not just practically unfeasible. It is a moral abomination. It belies their enduring commitment to the socialist principles some of us hoped had long ago been put to bed. It represents property theft, violating the individual’s right to justly acquired wealth. The fundamental problem is that since Margaret Thatcher’s downfall, and the triumph of the Tory Wets over the party’s Right, Conservatives have conceded the moral high-ground to the Left. Where the Right has pushed back against socialist policies, it has done so on practical grounds. High taxes disincentivise work, pay rises and promotions. They risk tipping us onto the wrong side of the Laffer Curve. They only made rational arguments, not emotional ones, drawing on economics, not morality. Kemi Badenoch is now trying to...

By anyone’s calculations, we are on an unsustainable path – this political cowardice must end 09 July 2025  Daily Telegraph  Link More than a century ago, the Government made a deal with us all: in return for extra taxation, we would be looked after in ill-health, old age, employment and unemployment. Spearheaded by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, the founding of Britain’s welfare state and invention of National Insurance over the first decades of the 20th century was nothing short of revolutionary. Aneurin Bevan’s NHS followed in 1948, offering healthcare free at the point of use to all UK residents. Today, the social safety net has expanded to include parental leave, winter fuel payments, child and housing benefits and income support, among many others. At the heart of this system remains the central premise from the Government that we are rich enough as a nation that nobody should live in poverty. As Lloyd George said of the 1909 People’s Budget: “This is a war Bu...

The stripping away so many of our individual liberties means few understand what it means to be free anymore 07 July 2025  Daily Telegraph  Link The stripping away so many of our individual liberties means few understand what it means to be free anymore  The stripping away so many of our individual liberties means few understand what it means to be free anymore  The ground is being prepared for a wealth tax. Landlords will be stripped of their property rights, savers will lose control of their pensions, shops will control what we can eat, and even office banter will be monitored. Add it all up, and it is becoming alarmingly clear that Britain is accelerating down what the great liberal philosopher FA Hayek memorably described as the “road to serfdom”, with the individual sacrificed to the power of the state. And the worst of it is that it may well prove too late to turn back now.  The plans from both Labour ministers and their outriders for increasing the power ...

These commemorations have been a grotesque display of moral cowardice. 7th July 2025 Spiked Link Have we learned the lessons of 7/7? So begins every trite radio and TV discussion today as we mark 20 years since four homegrown jihadists blew themselves up on London’s transport network and took 52 innocent souls with them. Going by much of the commentary, you’d think this was a purely logistical, security question. There’s a long piece on the BBC website, talking about how the police and the security services were forced to up their game after the London Bombings, the new powers they now enjoy as a consequence, the attendant concerns over civil liberties, etc. The words ‘Islamist’ and ‘jihadist’ do not appear once in the piece, even as it details the evolving ‘extremist’ threat posed first by al-Qaeda and then the ‘self-styled Islamic State’. There is often a stubborn refusal, a stammering hesitation, to mention what flavour of ‘extremism’ most menaces us – a cowardly tic that was skewer...

While pensioners and private school pupils are plundered, this Left-wing cause remains sacrosanct 06 July 2025  Daily Telegraph  Link When Sir Keir Starmer looks back at his first year in office this weekend, he may be wondering how he has moved so swiftly from winning a 411-seat landslide victory to being, by some measure, the most unpopular prime minister since records began. Labour’s management of our money has been a near masterclass in how not to do it. The job-destroying employers’ National Insurance hike, the aspiration-wrecking VAT on school fees, or the wealth-destroying scrapping of non-dom status – there are plenty of candidates for the Government’s worst economic policy. But there is one much less-noticed bailout that does neatly sum up what has gone wrong. Energy and climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, is splurging at least £1.5bn of taxpayers’ money on righting a wrong that is simply a chimera. It displays Labour’s mawkish sentimentality about workers at its w...