Keir Starmer today unveiled his brand spanking new small boats solution. Which just happens to be the same as government policy launched last year… At the same time Michael Fabricant reminisced about his now ex-colleague Natalie Elphicke on Sky: “I was at a Christmas do with her and she was telling me that she thinks the Royal Navy if necessary should open fire on the French Navy if they don’t accept our pushing boats back into French territorial waters and I was saying to her ‘well hang on these boats are pretty unstable if you nudge them people will get drowned’… I actually remember saying ..read more

One month ago the UK was confirmed as the world’s fourth largest exporter. Exports to the EU are stable and those to non-EU countries are proliferating. Not that Labour wants to hear it… The International Monetary Fund predicts that the UK will grow by 8.3% by 2029, higher than France, Germany, Japan, and Italy.[…] Read the rest ..read more

Entries in the comments…[…] Read the rest ..read more

Newly re-elected London mayor Sadiq Khan has scored himself a £6,000 pay rise to £160,976. Almost quadruple the average London salary and well above the Prime Minister’s… Khan isn’t the only one doing well – his close aides’ pay packets are seeing a bumper hike.[…] Read the rest ..read more

The Tory whips have decided it’s time up for Reform defector Lee Anderson on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Anderson is now getting kicked off by motion, as is the government’s prerogative, to be imminently replaced. Lee’s direct questioning has become a staple of otherwise dull Home Affairs committee meetings. […] Read the rest ..read more

It’s got to be a tough week for someone who finds it “really hard losing cases”. The Good Law Project and Stonewall’s two-year campaign against the Equality and Human Rights Commission has ended in dismal failure. The EHRC in 2022 called for more “detailed consideration” from the SNP when it attempted to make it drastically easier to legally switch genders, something that Jolyon’s outfit insisted made it a “cheerleader for the Government rather than an independent monitor.[…] Read the rest ..read more

UnHerd is reporting that the Foreign Secretary has acted in response to concerns raised by the Business Secretary, Kemi Badenoch, highlighting a Foreign Office-funded NGO – the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) – manipulating legitimate counter-disinformation efforts to provide cover for the undermining of right-of-centre online publications by blacklisting them with advertisers.[…] Read the rest ..read more

It’s happy news for Sunak and Hunt as new figures from the Office for National Statistics show that GDP grew by 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2024, after two quarterly contractions. Confirming the recession was short… Hunt is on the airwaves this morning celebrating the news and touts that UK growth is predicted by the IMF to beat France, Italy, Germany, and Japan.[…] Read the rest ..read more

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The Guardian has put up a fawning interview with Miatta Fahnbulleh, Labour PPC for Peckham and senior economic adviser to Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband. The paper bills her as a “rising intellectual star in Labour’s ranks” who is “juggling campaigning in her own patch, charity work, and school pick-ups for her 10-year-old and her five-year-old twins.[…] Read the rest ..read more