Nigel Farage has just posted footage of Essex Police escorting pro-migrant activists to the Epping protest against migrant crime last week, after which disorder erupted. Farage has now called for the Essex Chief Constable BJ Harrington to resign…
Staggeringly HMRC has handed its annual internal “Expert of the Year” award to the staff member who helped design Reeves’ disastrous Farm Tax. You couldn’t make it up…
The taxman’s Head of Inheritance Tax Analysis James Mee today said he was “proud and humbled,” specifying the award was “for my work in providing ministers with the analysis they needed to announce several major IHT reforms at last year’s Autumn Budget, including restricting agricultural and business property reliefs and extending IHT to unspent pensions.” All disasters…
In a fawning post Mee, who previously worked at the OBR and Treasury, added he “wouldn’t have been able to do this without the help of lots of colleagues in HMRC, HMT and the OBR… you know who you all are – so thank you.” The blob is blobbing…
The government this week published its laughable impact assessment into the inheritance tax changes which refuses to consider any negative wider economic impacts from reduced investment while claiming “the policy is not expected to have a significant impact on family formation, family stability or family breakdown.” Tell that to the farmers…
UPDATE: Director of External Affairs at the Country Land and Business Association Jonathan Roberts told Guido:
“We congratulate James on his award. To celebrate, I would like to invite him to visit one of the 70,000 farm businesses expected to be permanently damaged by this policy. Once there, I would be happy to introduce him to some of the 200,000 workers across the family business sector who will lose their job.”
Back in May, the Wikimedia Foundation – the left-wing outfit behind Wikipedia – announced it was taking the Labour government to court over the Online Safety Act. Now they’ve said unless the law is watered down, they’ll start blocking access to UK visitors…
The row centres on the so-called “Category 1” status, which imposes strict verification rules on platforms with more than seven million users. Wikimedia says that would wreck the crowd-sourced model Wikipedia is built on. If the rules aren’t changed, they’ll bring in a “quota-based” system – capping UK traffic to stay below the user threshold. Brits could be locked out of the world’s biggest encyclopaedia for their own “safety”…
In a filing to the High Court, Wikimedia’s lawyers wrote:
“Wikipedia must weigh imposing a quota-based system for Wikipedia in the UK, depressing average monthly UK users below the Cat1 user number conditions [which would] deprive many of Wikipedia’s UK users of access to the encyclopaedia as and when they want it.”
‘Online safety’ is online censorship…
The failing Foreign Office published its annual report and accounts yesterday, revealing some of the wild lurches in policy and spending under Lammy. Labour ministers are keen to emphasise that some elements of international aid spending will fall – especially after one of their own, Douglas Alexander, publicly admitted that the public no longer support it. But the true picture is not convincing…
Alongside the accounts the Foreign Office published an equalities impact assessment that admits: “…the overall proportion of spend as a share of overall bilateral ODA remains the same on equalities focused programming, social sector spend and spend in LDCs, demonstrating that disproportionate impacts on equalities have been avoided.” Translated, that means that civil servants have found ways around the modest cuts to foreign aid programmes instituted under the Tories, and will still be spending on nonsense schemes like lectures on gender equality in Kenya, studying disinformation in Ethiopia and funding feminism in Iraq. Plus ca change…
In a new commitment, British taxpayers will also be forced to cough up for the International Development Association (IDA), a fund run by the World Bank. Labour is expanding foreign aid…
Labour house rag the New Statesman drops a long cover piece on Kemi Badenoch this morning after the Tory leader’s first reshuffle. It is an utterly brutal and uncompromising read…
Badenoch’s trouble with communications is a focus, with suggestions Niall Ferguson is helping her with speechwriting and her often-cited 2017 maiden speech was written by her former boss Fraser Nelson. The Statesman’s Will Lloyd also interviewed Badenoch’s former performance coach Graham Davies who claims she is a poor PMQs performer because she “doesn’t do the process, doesn’t do the practice and doesn’t like it.” When your own coach is saying it…
Staggeringly, the NS claims to have found Kemi’s old notebook from the period in which her strident comments about Sunak’s failures at the first post-election Shadow Cabinet found themselves on the pages of the Times. Notes said to be in her handwriting replicate the words leaked to the paper and include ‘affirmations’ such as:
The piece also notes that CCHQ has been gutted by staff redundancies with issues highlighted by Guido some time ago: only two press staff (actually inaccurate as there are now three), and Pads asked to work for free for shadow ministers. Badenoch herself is said to have “a habit of vanishing into her AirPods and iPad” and is “difficult to reach before 11 am.” Meanwhile donations to the Tory operation are being used to pay off debts from the election. Her team deny all the claims made in the piece – and the magazine is, after all, Labour’s chief organ. Things can only get better post-reshuffle…
Founder of Labour YIMBY and long-time Labour supporter Chris Worrall defected to the Tories earlier this week. Guido understands he will now be Industry Fellow at Tory centrist think tank Onward, working on policy for the party. Chris Worrall told Guido:
“It’s a privilege to join Onward as Industry Fellow under the leadership of Sir Simon Clarke, a think tank where serious ideas drive real change, and where I believe we can shape a bold, credible future for Britain.”
While Onward director Simon Clarke added:
“Chris Worrall is one of the most fearless and effective housing campaigners in Britain. With a decade of private sector experience and a proven record of challenging anti-growth orthodoxy, he brings real firepower to Onward’s mission. We’re delighted to welcome him as a Fellow — and even more excited to see what we can build together.”
Worrall is also one of the most successful fundraisers in British politics. Let the good times roll…
Speaking to Adam Boulton on Times Radio about kicking the Golders Green suspect, Heidi Alexander said:
“I thought that if I was in the shoes of that police officer, then if I’m honest, given the situation, and the fact that he had a backpack on his back, and they were worried about whether that might go off, I could, if I was a police officer, frankly, I could see myself having taken similar action.”