Britain cannot take four more years of Labour. Is there NO way to get rid of Starmer and his utterly useless crew? A howl of despair from DANIEL HANNAN
Four more years of talking tough on immigration while doing nothing to deter it. Four more years of street crime. Four more years of jailing people for posting the wrong opinions while releasing muggers and sex offenders early. Four more years of rising prices, rising taxes, rising unemployment.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
5 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Anyone with a brain is jumping off HMS Britain
A piece was recently published about five Oxford graduates. All of them are struggling to find work more than a year after getting good degrees. The article provoked a spate of online mockery about the young people's supposed sense of entitlement. Not for the first time, social media reminded us that we are what GK Chesterton called 'veneered vandals', savages under the thinnest of layers. In fact, the five Oxonians came across as ambitious and determined. They were making ends meet through temping, tutoring and working summer jobs while firing off hundreds of application letters. They were simply finding out, like so many people of their age, that three years of study and tens of thousands of pounds in student debt no longer get you onto the first rung of a career ladder. This discovery shocked them, as well it might. Theirs was the generation that was yanked out of school in March 2020, thinking that they would be back to take their A-levels after three or four weeks of lockdown. In fact, it wasn't just their schools that they never went back to; it was the way of life of pre-pandemic Britain. Before lockdown, the UK budget was on its way to surplus. Now, the Government is borrowing nearly £150 billion a year, two thirds of which must go to pay interest on past borrowing. No one has a plan to undo the supposedly emergency spending of 2020. The only debate is over whether taxes must rise to meet the new commitments, or whether we carry on borrowing. Did we imagine that we could pay people to stay home for the better part of two years without suffering an economic hit? As a matter of fact, I think a lot of us did. The same people who spent lockdown howling down attempts to loosen restrictions as 'putting the economy before lives' are now angry and bewildered because prices, taxes and unemployment have risen. Britain has reached the end of a long run of structurally high employment. For more than 30 years, our jobs market was the envy of Europe. Yes, we could be hit by external events, notably the global financial crisis. But we bounced back quickly, because we understood that the best way to encourage employers to hire people was to make it easy to fire them. A moment's thought reveals why. In a country with light employment regulations, firms take on staff during upswings, knowing that they can always drop them if things go wrong. But in a country with restrictive regulations, every employee is a potential liability, and companies hang back warily. In such countries, unemployment is structurally high, especially among young people. That has been southern Europe's tragedy for decades. British governments used to understand this. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown tried to undo the labour reforms of the 1980s. Both knew that, if they wanted revenue for public services, they needed a buoyant economy. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, by contrast, seem to struggle with the concept of cause and effect. Never mind their tax-and-spend policies. They appear not to grasp that raising the costs of employing people leads to fewer people being employed. Four months ago, they hit businesses with a double tax. Employer National Insurance contributions rose from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent, and at the same time kicked in on earnings above £5,000 instead of £9,100. What did they think would happen, for heaven's sake? If tobacco taxes reduce smoking and carbon taxes reduce emissions, what did they suppose jobs taxes would do? Sure enough, the number of employees on payroll plunged by 109,000 the following month, and has declined further in every month since. Britain's overall unemployment rate is now at its highest since lockdown. The really striking figure, though, is youth unemployment. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, the jobless rate has reached Mediterranean levels: over 14 per cent in recent months. Why? Again, because of our refusal to acknowledge that actions have consequences. Pushing up the minimum wage (which applies from age 16) and the national living wage (which applies from 21) makes MPs feel righteous. They have voted to raise minimum remuneration for 20-year-olds by 55 per cent since 2020. The trouble is that these repeated hikes end up punishing young people, not helping them, by closing off job opportunities and condemning many to welfare. Around 60,000 students a year go straight from university onto long-term sickness benefits. MPs with a basic knowledge of economics tend to keep quiet, because they are terrified of being asked how they would like to live on £10 an hour. It is an irrelevant question, but it nonetheless terrifies them. I was, I think, the only parliamentarian to speak out against an above-inflation hike in the minimum wage during the pandemic, at a time when wages were falling across the private sector. Everyone else wanted an even bigger rise. Ignorant voters, self-righteous journalists and cowardly politicians make a potent combination. This year, the minimum wage rose by 18 per cent for 16- and 17-year-olds and by 16.3 per cent for 18-, 19- and 20-year olds. Result? Fewer jobs for young people. Openings in the hospitality sector are down by 22,000 since last year, and graduate postings have fallen by an almost unbelievable 33 per cent. To repeat, policies have consequences. I sometimes think that the readiness to acknowledge trade-offs is the real dividing-line in politics. And I don't just mean among politicians. Among voters, too, there are those who look at the costs of policies, and those who go to the polling station humming 'I'm just a soul whose intentions are good'. Hikes in the minimum wage are the least of it. The open-ended extension of equalities laws is an even greater deterrent. When retail workers can be compensated for being paid less than warehouse workers on supposedly sex discrimination grounds, even though the retail workers were refusing to be redeployed to warehouses, employers can hardly be blamed for being reluctant to hire. And that is before we get to Angela Rayner's package of employment laws, the most far-reaching since the mid-1970s. The Employment Rights Bill, currently before the House of Lords, is a regulatory omnibill that covers sick pay, paternity leave, bereavement, privileges for new employees, a right to demand flexible working, new holiday entitlements and extra powers for trade unions. As Tony Blair put it, early in his premiership: 'There is almost always a case that can be made for each specific instrument. The problem is cumulative. All these good intentions can add up to a large expense, with suffocating effects.' Quite so, and it is more than a little scary that we are governed by people who can't see it. Here is a paradox. Labour – the clue is in the name – is meant to be the party of the worker. Yet every single Labour-majority government has left office with unemployment higher than when it began. Every. Single. One. This one, unlike some of its predecessors, has wasted no time. Already we can see where it is going: more and more workers' rights, fewer and fewer workers. We are in a vicious circle. Higher unemployment means fewer people paying taxes into the system and more drawing benefits from it. Since Labour has already proven that it cannot cut spending – not even mildly to slow the rise in benefits claims – that can only mean even higher taxes, prompting more disinvestment, slower growth, higher unemployment and lower revenue. According to a survey by the British Council, 72 per cent of Brits under 30 are thinking of working abroad, and who can blame them? We are pulling off the extraordinary double of simultaneous emigration and immigration crises, exporting our entrepreneurs and replacing them with people who go onto benefits. And, God help us, we have another four years of it to come.
The Guardian
12 minutes ago
- The Guardian
How Trump is using ‘pure lies' about high crime in US cities to justify federal takeovers
When Donald Trump announced a federal takeover of the Metropolitan police department in Washington DC on Monday, he left room for the possibility of making a similar move in other cities across the US, alluding to their high crime rates. 'You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad,' Trump said. 'We're not going to let it happen, we're not going to lose our cities.' But both experts and elected officials have been quick to counter Trump's claims, pointing out how major cities are in fact experiencing dramatic decreases in violent crime rates since they peaked during the pandemic. 'Every category of crime and every population group that the FBI covers is reporting a drop pretty much nationwide,' said Jeff Asher, an analyst who studies criminal justice data, adding that there was no disparity in the trend between red and blue cities or states. The downward trend has been consistent nationally since around 2022, as the country began to recover from the pandemic, experts said. 'It's clear that a lot of what we saw during the Covid-19 era has been reversed,' said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice who researches crime trends. While it's impossible to isolate the exact causes of the spike in crime during the pandemic, several experts point to the collapse of social services as one cause. Since then, state and federal agencies poured money into communities for projects like gun violence prevention programs as well as more streetlights on local roads. These programs are the same ones being slashed as the Trump administration has prioritized shrinking federal spending. The Department of Justice canceled hundreds of grants earlier this year that funded violence prevention and victims' services programs, affecting organizations in 37 states. Elected officials were quick to slam Trump for floating a possible federal takeover of police in their cities, citing local data that matched the same trend in the FBI data showing public safety improvements as well as pointing out the recent funding cuts. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson said shootings were down by 40% in the last year alone. 'If President Trump wants to help make Chicago safer, he can start by releasing the funds for anti-violence programs that have been critical to our work to drive down crime and violence. Sending in the national guard would only serve to destabilize our city and undermine our public safety efforts,' he said. And in Maryland, local and state officials released a joint statement similarly criticizing the president for painting a false narrative about where they lived and worked. 'As leaders in Baltimore and the state of Maryland, we stand in strong opposition to the president's latest power grab, which is based on pure lies about our communities,' the statement said. Officials pointed to a 40% drop in violent crime since 2021 and said that progress was being made on public safety issues, despite the challenge of facing the Trump administration's funding cuts. Instead of calling in the national guard, Trump should be looking to partner with local officials, they said. 'We know from experience how to improve public safety: empower our community partners and violence interrupters, invest in our young people and prosecute repeat violent offenders in collaboration with law enforcement,' the statement said. In New York, officials also pushed back fast on Trump's rhetoric. 'New York is moving in the right direction in public safety,' the mayor, Eric Adams, said on Tuesday. While he added that he would be happy to accept more federal support, he added: 'We don't need anyone to come in and take over our law enforcement apparatus, we have the finest police department in the globe.' Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Even Trump's FBI director, Kash Patel, said on Joe Rogan's podcast in June that murder rates were on track to reach a historic low this year. 'If we, the FBI and our government partners, achieve the mission, we'll give the American people the lowest murder rate in decades,' he said. While crime rates are trending in the right direction, there's still work to do to improve public safety concerns, said Rachel Eisenberg, the managing director for rights and justice at the Center for American Progress. But, she said, communities are still best positioned to address these challenges rather than federal troops, echoing the concerns of local officials. 'What Trump is doing now is not about public safety,' she said. 'It's political theater.' Trump doubled down on his claims on Wednesday, suggesting that the crime statistics are a fraud, without specifying which statistics. 'Crime is the worst it's ever been,' he said. As national guard troops arrived in Washington DC this week, Thaddeus Johnson, a senior researcher at the Council on Criminal Justice, said that in the short term, it is likely arrests will go up. 'That can really capture the psyche of people and people can be sensationalized as it really plays on the fears of people,' Johnson said. Ultimately, he said, it's critical to address socioeconomic factors such as access to housing, unemployment rates and income inequity in order to improve public safety. 'Putting the feds in is not going to be the long-term answer,' Johnson said. Meanwhile, Trump has already declared his policy move a victory. 'People are feeling safe already,' he said on Wednesday. 'They're not afraid any more.'
BBC News
22 minutes ago
- BBC News
'We must return the human dimension' to talks, says Nobel Peace Prize winner
Image source, Reuters Ukrainian human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk tells the BBC that the 'human dimension must be returned to the political process' taking place over the war. 'What will happen to the dozens of thousands illegally detained citizens, men and women, and prisoners of war… this question is very urgent,' Matviichuk says. According to Ukrainian authorities, nearly 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are still in captivity in Russian prisons after being abducted by the invading army. That's not counting the nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children estimated to have been taken to Russia. In June, I spent time with families of Ukrainian civilians still detained in Russian prisons. Their fear is that their loved ones are being left out of the discussions around peace, and there is no framework in place to return them to Ukraine. Matviichuck says she has lost faith that Trump can bring a peaceful solution to the war. 'As a candidate for president, [he] said that he would finish this war in 24 hours. This is the longest 24 hours in history.'
