- “Emmanuel Macron calls shock snap national election after being hit by disaster in European Parliament vote” – Emmanuel Macron has called a snap national vote and dissolved parliament after his party was projected to come a distant second to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the European elections, according to GB News.
- “The European elections and the ascent of the Right” – The Right is winning. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally will win twice as many votes as President Macron’s Renaissance, says Freddy Gray in the Spectator.
- “Scholz’s party faces defeat at EU elections in Germany” – The Mail reports that Germany’s leading party has suffered losses, while French hardliner Marine Le Pen is set for a massive win in the European elections.
- “German Right triumphs on bloodbath night for ruling coalition” – Members of Germany’s traditional parties in Germany will not sleep well following the results of elections to the EU Parliament, says Ralph Schoellhammer in UnHerd.
- “The European election revolt is real, but is it sustainable?” – The emerging picture from the 2024 EU Parliament elections seems to confirm earlier predictions of significant but not decisive “hard Right” gains, writes Gabriel Elefteriu in Brussels Signal.
- “Private school VAT may swell state school class sizes, admits Thornberry” – Emily Thornberry admits that Labour’s plan to charge VAT on private school fees risks increasing class sizes in the state sector, reports the Telegraph.
- “Suella Braverman urges Tories to embrace Nigel Farage” – The former Home Secretary Suella Braverman says there is “not much difference” between Reform’s policies and those of the Conservatives, according to the Times.
- “Starmer’s history of Left-wing views revealed” – Questions remain over the extent to which Keir Starmer has abandoned his Trotskyist beliefs, writes Gordon Rayner in the Telegraph.
- “Rishi Sunak losing will be a blessed relief” – The Conservatives should be put out of their misery, says Tim Dawson in the Critic.
- “Nigel Farage is wrong: if the Tories move Right, they will be out for 20 years” – The Conservatives cannot afford to turn ‘Faragiste’. As Labour learnt to its cost, elections are won from the centre, writes Kamal Ahmed in the Telegraph.
- “‘Why I’ll be voting Reform (reluctantly)’” – “I won’t be voting for Reform with any of the sense of joy that I did when I switched parties in 2019 to back Boris Johnson,” says Julie Burchill in the Spectator.
- “Meta to focus on censoring ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ ahead of U.K. election” – As the U.K. prepares for its General Election, Meta has announced a series of measures aimed at combating “misinformation” and “hate speech” on its platforms, writes Cindy Harper in Reclaim The Net.
- “The Observer view on Baillie Gifford sponsorship row: writing is on the wall for book lovers” – Now the investment fund Baillie Gifford is pulling out of literary festivals, what other sponsors will dare expose themselves to the scrutiny of Fossil Free Books? asks the Observer.
- “Spain is now Europe’s most despicable nation” – Madrid’s anti-Israel stance is shameful, rewarding Hamas and tying the hands of the Jewish state. Britain under Labour would follow suit, warns Richard Kemp in the Telegraph.
- “In the very best of hands” – On SteynOnline, Mark Steyn comments on the D-Day debacle and Europe’s looming demographic crisis.
- “How Sweden became a ‘haven’ for mafia gangs” – Over the course of one night last year, three people were killed in separate attacks in Sweden. The violence made global headlines, but to many in the country, it was no surprise, writes Chris Jewers in the Mail.
- “Narendra Modi is sworn in for a third time as India’s Prime Minister” – Narendra Modi has been sworn in for a third term as India’s PM after worse-than-expected election results left him reliant on coalition partners to govern, reports the Mail.
- “Starmer risks losing support for fighting climate change” – Labour’s plan for ‘cheap renewables’ means more pain for squeezed households, says Liam Halligan in the Telegraph.
- “New Zealand to lift oil drilling ban amid blackout fears in blow to Starmer” – New Zealand is expected to revoke a ban on drilling for oil and gas amid fears of blackouts, as Labour plans to impose a similar crackdown on the North Sea, reports Reuters.
- “Did the Aussie opposition leader just call for cancelling the Paris Agreement?” – Does “there’s no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving” translate to a commitment to dump Australia’s Paris obligations? wonders Eric Worrall in WUWT?
- “Reclaim the rainbow!” – Christians and social conservatives have been too slow in defending the ideas, traditions and culture which created the society we know and value, says Dr. Campbell Campbell-Jack in TCW.
- “The average age of my staff is 61 – they are dependable and trusting” – In the Mail, a businessman reveals that all the staff at his firm are above the age of 50, as he believes older workers have more “sense” and know how to get things done.
- “The radical Left website sabotaging research” – Aporia takes aim at the radical Left-wing website RationalWiki, which exploits its suspiciously high Google ranking to demean anybody who researches controversial topics and gets the “wrong” answers.
- “The EU is over-regulating AI” – In the Critic, Pieter Cleppe warns against prioritising caution and control over the economic and technological opportunities presented by AI.
- “David Boaz (1953-2024) – Champion of liberty” – The Cato Institute pays tribute to David Boaz, who turned Cato from a small organisation with a handful of employees, to a leading think tank in Washington with a global presence.
- “Green leader’s nuclear disaster” – On LBC, co-leader of the Green Party Carla Denyer gets mauled by host Lewis Goodall defending her party’s position on nukes.
Carla Denyer co leader of the Green Party is way out of her depth… trying so hard to defend their nuke policy.
— WeGotitBack
It’s embarrassing ! She is trying to compare it to carrying a knife pic.twitter.com/34GYxb7Qkt(@NotFarLeftAtAll) June 9, 2024
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You only have to look at which companies benefited hugely from the lockdowns/restrictions and which ones were negatively affected to see the corruption:
Big Pharma; Big Tech; Amazon; other on-line retailers and delivery companies all accumulated vast profits
Small private businesses; hospitality; high street sole traders and the self-employed were absolutely hammered.
And taxpayers have now been handed the bill. In German, the word is “rechnung” and goodness knows, we need a reckoning with the people who did this. But we’re powerless and they know it.
To be fair to Amazon, they were a lifeline for many of the locked down who were unable to go out shopping due to lockdown.
Where else could I have ordered all manner of items that were required, including over-the-counter medication, necessary kitchen utensils, hygiene supplies and all kinds of other necessities, sometimes ordered Saturday evening and delivered by Sunday lunchtime, all at highly competitive prices?
The Davos people call it public-private partnership.
The solution is simple but hard: massively shrink the state.
The reason big business “partners” with the state is because the state has massive amount of of power and resources.
The role of the state needs to be reduced. It has no business telling us what we can and cannot say online, what medical treatments we must follow, what form of money we must use, what type of car we must drive or how we must heat our houses.
As long as we as a population insist on looking to the state to solve what some of us think are problems, the state will take the power and corporations will exploit that power.
And we need to cut off its money supply, or severely restrict it (i.e.our taxes) and force the state to operate under the rules of financial discipline that every family in Britain is subject to. It can’t spend more than it earns or the consequences will be serious.
To put it very crudely, the state is like an authoritarian, violent head of family who is incompetent, screws everything up, is badly in debt and lets its friends abuse his children. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m sick of having to put up with it.
“force the state to operate under the rules of financial discipline that every family in Britain is subject to. It can’t spend more than it earns or the consequences will be serious.”
I have spouted this logic all my adult life and faced the nonsense that ‘national finances’ fall under different financial rules, yabba, yabba, yabba. NO, they do not.
Surplus national cash does not come from a few extra shifts on the printing presses. I know this, many on here know this, but somehow our “elites” know better than us although their attempts at explanation fall to the oft repeated nonsense of some Carney style logic. This is the essence of the public-private partnership.
The state i.e the public side of the nation requires ever more tax payers money to feed the insatiable appetite of the private sector. The biggest private sector companies, feeding as they do off a nation’s public companies are in reality just third party agents of taxation hiding behind government contracts written allegedly for the public’s benefit.
The revolving door between government and “private business” laid bare.
A very cosy, very profitable arrangement for a few but now hurtling to its inevitable demise as its unsustainability is confirmed.
‘But who would build the roads?!’
I agree with you; except that you forgot to add that the head of the family was off their heads on cocaine as well.
The author equates subsidies to rents and paints rents in a negative way. I think this is misguided.
Every person who aspires to not have to work until the day they drop will need to rely on rents. Rents is what will keeps us going after retirement.
Now it needn’t be that way. If there was zero inflation and we knew that one thousand pounds we put away today would be worth one thousand pounds in twenty or thirty years then we could just work out how much we felt we needed and save for it.
But because the value of money is highly unstable (mostly thanks to the profligacy of the state which is incompetent and so needs to cheat and print too much money all the time), we are all forced to become rent seeking investors. Either ourselves directly and/or handing the job over to the state who needs to run a state pension fund, typically very badly, with no guarantees or commitments beyond the certainty that it will be worse than you hope, never better.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity….
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/ technological elite.
Eisenhower, Farewell Speech as President 1961
See? There’s nothing new under the sun.
The author spoils his case by over stating it. If the state is to provide security it must provide it for all of the country’s interests which is a reason companies pay tax as well as individuals. The armed forces need equipment and it is not a subsidy to buy them from a manufacturer.
The relationship between arms producers and the state shows just how completely corrupt the public-private “partnership” is.
The state is the single buyer and the producers are several. That should in theory give the state enormous buying power. And that should translate into suppliers margins being squeezed very low and the single buyer getting an amazing deal.
In fact, in this case, for reasons that can only really be explained by massive corruption, the opposite is the case. Arms manufacturers make phenomenal profits and all you hear are instances of absurd overpayment by the state.
Society seems to have accepted that government arms contracts are licences for the companies winning the contracts to mint money.
It’s all for our protection…
Tax breaks and subsidies are not the same! The former is taking less of what has been earned, the latter is giving (public money) to that which is not earned, usually to bolster a political narrative regardless of the recipient’s value to the economy.
Corporatism is alive, prospering and nutured by the Not-the-Conservative Party.
Like the thirty-seven billion pounds – more than the quarterly turnover of Microsoft, enough to build three nuclear power stations, more than the cost of the Channel Tunnel and Crossrail put together or build a dozen aircraft carriers, donated to Dido Harding to commission a bugridden smartphone app that any GCSE IT student could have knocked up over the weekend, coupled to a back end database that could be bought off the shelf for a few hundred thousand and is now admitted not to have sold a single life, do you mean?
When is someone going to look into that ultra-rip off?