Category Archives: Government

Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Labour’s true manifesto is being revealed

BRITAIN

NOW he’s safely in office, Sir Keir Starmer continues to reveal his real manifesto – attacks on pensioners, higher fuel bills, and a whole array of excuses for other flops and errors that he has not even made yet. With apparent gusto, he will tell us shortly that things will get worse before they get better and that he will not shy away from tough and unpopular decisions.

Such rhetoric has often been a favourite warning from Prime Ministers nearing their end of time in office, usually an attempt to claim that their difficulties will one day produce a happy outcome. But it is highly unusual for newly elected leaders with a full five years ahead of them to use language like this. If he starts in this way, what will it be like a year hence?

This is a government in trouble within weeks of being elected to office.

Beguiled by Labour’s legendary skills at spin and planning, many expected and hoped that Sir Keir would ride smoothly into power. It has been anything but. Apart from proposing to concrete over the Green Belt, abandoning any attempt to control illegal migration, splurging taxpayers’ money on extravagant public sector pay claims, and mauling independent schools with VAT, there has been little for the PM to boast about. The chief turn of phrase of his opening few weeks, along with that of his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has been: “The Tories left a huge black hole in the national finances.” Labour claims that the outgoing Conservative government left a £22bn black hole that Labour has exposed following an audit of the books when they took over. Anyone who understands economics, whether Labour supporting or not, will know the claim to be untrue.

Absurdly, and in a similar vein, Labour has even started blaming the previous government for the recent violent disorders. No doubt the Tories have not been as tough as their voters would have liked on law and order, but Labour, for more than half a century has been the party of soft sentencing and politically correct policing, can hardly blame the Conservatives for the “cracks in our society”.

This is a government in a mess. The removal of the winter fuel payment to pensioners looks more than ever like a classic political bungle, now made even worse by the ten per cent rise in the energy cap that has just been announced by the energy regulator. It will hit many elderly people hard. Is this what Starmer calls a “government of service”? It increasingly looks like the sort of administration in which the people serve the state, and the state is above our heads in ways that aren’t normally associated with socialism.

Britons can feel the wind blowing and will know that things aren’t right. Expect some heavy hitting changes.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Ingratiating the unions will lead to ruination

BRITAIN

DURING the election campaign, one of the very few things Sir Keir Starmer was clear about was that the Labour Party had “changed”. He said this even more often than reminding the nation that his father had been a toolmaker.

Anyone listening to this pledge must have assumed that he meant the party had changed for the better: less militancy, more readiness to tackle immigration, being tougher on crime, no rapid resort to higher taxes, and more consideration for the squeezed middle class.

Well, it has been far from that. The “changed” Labour Party has immediately resorted to traditional Leftist policies, from a penal VAT levy on independent schools to promises of higher taxes, based on highly dubious claims of a hitherto concealed £22bn black hole in the national finances. It has begun to sidle up to the EU, giving every sign of stealthy plans to undo much of Brexit. On top of that, it has cynically cut pensioners’ heating allowances, launched a frenzy of green spending, and lit a bonfire of the planning protections which have for many decades helped to keep the suburbs reasonably green and spacious. It all sounds pretty “unchanged”.

But above all Labour has remain unchanged in its treatment of trade unions and their excessive pay demands. There is hardly a militant union which has not received a large bag of taxpayers’ golden mint in the past few weeks, which is why Chancellor Rachel Reeves is now complaining that she does not have enough of our money and will soon be demanding more.

With amazing abandonment, within just a few short days of Labour coming to power, intractable disputes were cheerfully resolved. This was easy to do if you do not care how much it costs. The political benefits to Labour are considerable, especially now it has ended the very unpleasant and dangerous junior doctors’ dispute in England.

Such a primrose path which has started merrily will end in tears and trouble. That is a given. Perhaps Sir Keir and his government ministers have forgotten their party’s own history, and the story of how it was undone in the 1960s by an unstoppable round of pay claims, one group leapfrogging another. This did huge damage both to private industry and the great nationalised concerns which took up so much of the landscape.

Unions today, it is worth remembering, do not have the power, wealth, or strength of their 1960s and 1970s forbears. They tend to pester and annoy the public with short and frequent protest strikes, rather than marathon walkouts lasting months at a time. We should be grateful we are not contending with that.

But even so, strikes do great mischief. They slow down the economy, they can wreck the education of the young, they can get in the way of the very necessary movement of getting people away from “working from home”, and they keep inflation and prices on the boil.

Free trade unions are an integral part of any open and proper free country. But with freedom comes responsibility, and a combination of militant-led unions and an increasingly spendthrift Labour government does not encourage such responsibility.

If he is not careful, the PM will soon find that he has made a rod for his own back. He may think that he can pass on the costs of this policy to hard-pressed taxpayers. But experience shows he will instead destroy the very businesses he needs to pay for his largesse. We need real change before the bad times start rolling again.

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Britain, Government, Internet, National Security, Politics, Society, Technology

Put social media bosses in the dock

INTERNET AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Intro: Lies and disinformation on social media is fuelling violence and the breakdown of society

The violent thugs and bigots rampaging through the streets of UK towns and cities in the dreadful days since the Southport killing of three young children deserve severe punishment for their appalling crimes.

The giant businesses that enable the lies and exaggerations that fuel the riots should also be in the dock – as should the people who own them.

For the online anonymity they facilitate allows anyone in the world the chance to say anything they want, however incendiary, and to escape responsibility.

Built into the internet from its inception decades ago, anonymity is hugely profitable for tech billionaires, but the horrendous price for this free-for-all is paid by the rest of us: mostly law-abiding, peaceful people who respect the truth. Internet anonymity is the default setting when you set up an email address or a social media account. You can pretend to be anyone, anywhere.

The anarchy and chaos unleashed after Southport highlights the danger. An anonymous account on X (formerly Twitter) called Europe Invasion first spread the incendiary lie that the suspect in the stabbing case was a Muslim immigrant. That post – completely invented – was viewed a staggering six million times.

We have no idea who is behind Europe Invasion, with its relentless and misleading crimes, and doom-laden commentary about ethnic strife. It gives no contact details or any other explicit clues about its funding, staff, location, or aims.

For those who have spent decades dealing with Russian disinformation, it may well smell and look like a Kremlin propaganda outlet in an attempt to sow dissension and mistrust in Western societies – a Russian tactic for many years.

Moscow has unwitting accomplices. Look at the man in charge of X, Elon Musk. A self-declared “free speech absolutist”, Musk closed the departments responsible for dealing with disinformation when he first acquired Twitter. And he has made it far harder to report abuse. The result has been to intensify the toxic mischief coursing through the veins of our democracy.

When Musk took-over the ailing Twitter platform two years ago, accounts with verifiable owners still benefited from a “blue tick” – an award which prevented pranksters and fraudsters impersonating public figures, mainstream media outlets, and businesses. Not any more.

One of Musk’s first moves was to offer blue ticks to anyone willing to pay for them.

That’s why, at a cursory glance, Europe Invasion looks like a regular media outlet – with the “blue tick” stamp of authenticity for which someone, somewhere, has presumably paid. Musk has also lifted the ban Twitter had imposed on such divisive figures as the far-Right firebrand Tommy Robinson who has been blamed for helping fuel violent disorder with his social media posts.

Musk contributes directly to the toxic atmosphere he has helped create. Adding insult to injury he is now embroiled in a war of words with Sir Keir Starmer saying that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain.

The sensible citizens of our land will conclude Musk is not just the wealthiest man in the world, but also the silliest. He knows nothing about this country – and is not ashamed to show it. But among his 200 million followers there will be many who believe him, with untold consequences for this country’s image abroad, and stability at home.

There is even a greater danger to our national security. The internet is the central nervous system of our civilisation, used in everything from finance to health care and transport.

It is horribly susceptible and vulnerable to carelessness (as we saw recently in the massive global disruption from a faulty software update). Yet it is being attacked by malevolent state actors such as Russia and China.

The reason for our plight is simple: greed. Checking identities costs money. So too does nailing lies, running a proper complaints system, and installing proper security.

For the tech giants, it is far simpler to let chaos rip, and watch the profits roll in.

Yet the answer lies in our own hands – and those of our elected politicians in parliament.

As a first step, our regulators and lawmakers should demand that tech bosses immediately remove material that constitutes incitement to riot. Unless they do that, they are aiding and abetting serious crimes.

The tech giants’ titanic lobbying efforts have cowed politicians for years. Curb the internet and you hamper innovation, the argument goes.

But the price now is too high. An American court has just handed down a landmark ruling that the online search giant Google is a monopoly that systematically crushes its rivals.

We need the same spirit here in the UK, with the media regulator OFCOM and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) working together to curb the power of these monstrous companies.

They behave like medieval monarchs, treating us as their digital serfs. It is high time to remove their neo-feudal protections and privileges and make them legally liable for the extraordinary harm they do.

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