News Round-Up

• “Labour urged to stand aside in Clacton to help Tories beat Farage” – Labour has been urged to stand aside if there is a second by-election in Clacton in order to boost the Tories’ chances of ousting Nigel Farage, reports the Telegraph.
• “Is Count Binface ‘England’s Dreaming’?” – Facing a bleak political reality, the British establishment has retreated into nostalgic fantasy – and Count Binface may be its purest expression, says Pimlico Journal on Substack.
• “Burnham ‘bypassing’ villagers to move migrants to military sites” – Ministers want to turn RAF Linton-on-Ouse and two other military bases into asylum seeker accommodation, reports the Mail.
• “Labour MP attacks migrant barracks plan near constituency” – Labour MP Rachael Maskell has broken ranks to speak out against proposals to house around 1,200 asylum seekers at RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire, says the Telegraph.
• “Ukrainian mother who fled Russia for UK terrified of returning” – A Ukrainian woman and her three young children who fled Russia are terrified of returning after the Home Office refused their asylum claim, reports the Mail.
• “Whitehall’s latest attempt to fix its most work-shy department” – ONS staff have been rewarded with even more office space to leave empty, writes James Baxter-Derrington in the Telegraph.
• “Council sick leave costs £3 million a day” – Local authority employees in the UK call in sick an average of 10 days a year, costing taxpayers £667 million annually – equivalent to £3 million every day, reports the Telegraph.
• “Cambridge took advice from pro-BLM group before hiring Arday” – The Cambridge University department that appointed Jason Arday took advice on its hiring process from a pro-Black Lives Matter diversity taskforce, reveals the Telegraph.
• “The Jason Arday saga exposes the Met Police’s troubling pattern on free speech” – The Met Police’s repeated targeting of journalists, academics and comedians over speech reveals a deeply troubling institutional pattern, writes Max Thompson for GB News.
• “Cambridge and the stigmatisation of intelligence research” – In Quillette, Richard J. Haier argues that Nathan Cofnas joins a long historical line of academics demonised for delivering unwelcome findings about group differences in intelligence.
• “UK universities face ‘financial crisis’ amid collapse in international students” – Higher education figures are urging Labour to reverse its tax on tuition fees, warning that institutions risk “going under” as international student numbers collapse, reports the Guardian.
• “Commit the crime, serve… some of the time” – On his Substack, Jack Watson examines the ongoing prison crisis and finds offenders doing the crime but not doing the time.
• “Bishop ‘raped girl, 15, after going on pilgrimage to Lourdes’” – The Bishop of Northampton David Oakley, 70, is accused of twice having sex with a 15 year-old girl in the early 2000s following a pilgrimage to Lourdes, reports the Mail.
• “Theodore Dalrymple was right about the underclass – then and now” – Theodore Dalrymple’s 25 year-old book Life at the Bottom still offers sharp and unsettling insights into the condition of the underclass in America today, says Naomi Schaefer Riley in Deseret News.
• “Letby’s dead ‘boyfriend’ found collapsed in his car after being sacked” – Lucy Letby’s ‘boyfriend’ died after being sacked for exchanging messages with her about a baby she tried to murder, reveals the Mail.
• “What pregnant women weren’t told by Fauci” – Fauci’s newly released texts reveal a specific concern about first-trimester miscarriage, and whether uncertainty was communicated as clearly in public as it was in private, say Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson on the TTE Substack.
• “Second train derails less than 24 hours after Lewes crash” – A Greater Anglia train has derailed at Wickford in Essex less than 24 hours after a separate crash at Lewes, reports the Mail.
• “The anti-car blob is out of control. It’s trying to make driving impossible” – Motorists are crying out for a political party brave enough to fight back against a transport establishment hell-bent on making driving impossible, writes David Frost in the Telegraph.
• “BP turns to Venezuela as it rejects Burnham’s Britain” – BP has secured a licence to drill for gas off the coast of Venezuela just a fortnight after announcing plans to quit the North Sea, says the Telegraph.
• “Britain races against the world to unlock energy’s holy grail” – The UK’s quest to make nuclear fusion a reality is approaching the scale of the Manhattan Project, writes Andrew Orlowski in the Telegraph.
• “Street burned down by record heat: charred remains of six houses” – Fire chiefs are investigating whether A-level students lighting barbecues to celebrate their results started a wildfire that destroyed six homes on a millionaires’ row, according to the Mail.
• “Government issues temporary ban on disposable BBQs over wildfire risks” – Officials have declared disposable barbecues a “significant risk to the public”, reports the Mail.
• “Labour faces backlash after ‘needless’ emergency wildfire alert” – The Government is facing backlash for sending out a “needless” emergency wildfire alert to millions of people’s phones in England and Wales, says the Mail.
• “One hot summer won’t silence us climate change sceptics” – In the Spectator, James Delingpole argues that climate evangelists rely on emotional rather than intellectual arguments precisely because the science does not support their alarmist conclusions.
• “Burnham to slash electric car targets” – Andy Burnham is set to cut quotas for electric vehicle sales as drivers continue to favour petrol and diesel, says the Telegraph.
• “Porsche could axe its first electric car before 2030 as demand slows” – Porsche is reportedly planning to cull its first series-production electric car, the Taycan, by the end of the decade, reports the Mail.
• “Who can fathom the eternal optimism of EV enthusiasts?” – Issues & Insights examines the puzzling persistence of optimism among EV enthusiasts, even as automakers continue to absorb heavy losses.
• “Indonesia and India are jointly planning a hydrocarbon-powered future” – Two of Asia’s most populous and fast-growing nations are deepening ties around fossil fuel energy, charting a course that cuts sharply against the green agenda, notes Vijay Jayaraj at CO₂ Coalition.
• “Misinformation” – In Climate Scepticism, John Ridgway takes aim at the Government Office for Science’s slippery definition of ‘misinformation’, arguing it lets climate scepticism be branded misinformation even when it’s factually correct.
• “I really did believe I’d be learning about my family as slaves, not the other side, as the slave owners” – During an episode of the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, former England footballer and broadcaster Alex Scott discovers that one of her Jamaican ancestors was a slave owner who enslaved 26 people between 1817 and 1832.

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