News Round-Up

• “New mega-poll gives Labour a 56-seat Commons majority” – A new mega-poll shows Labour would win a 56-seat majority if a general election were held tomorrow, reports the Mail.
• “Burnham declares £500 million war on wealthy councils” – Conservatives and Lib Dems have accused Labour of waging a £500 million “class war” on councils, says the Telegraph.
• “IMF: Healey should cut welfare spending instead of taxing banks” – The IMF is urging the Chancellor to scrap the triple lock and cut welfare rather than raid the City ahead of the Budget, according to This is Money.
• “Healey splits from Burnham over Heathrow third runway” – John Healey has insisted a third runway at Heathrow Airport will turbocharge the economy, despite the PM refusing to back the plan, reports the Telegraph.
• “Nandy considers ‘Netflix tax’ to fund BBC” – The Culture Secretary is examining whether to extend the £180-a-year licence fee to streaming platforms, says GB News.
• “Police assess comment by National Security Adviser’s wife” – Author Sarah Helm, wife of Jonathan Powell – Andy Burnham’s National Security Adviser – has sparked outrage after publicly backing banned extremist group Palestine Action, reports the Mail.
• “Olly Robbins reaches settlement over Mandelson sacking” – Former Foreign Office official Olly Robbins, who was dismissed by Sir Keir Starmer over his role in the Peter Mandelson scandal, has now reached a legal settlement, says the BBC.
• “Prison cells will remain empty for eight years” – Thousands of offenders are being released early to ease overcrowding, meaning newly built prison cells are expected to sit unused for eight years, reveals the Telegraph.
• “John le Carré’s vision of MI6 was a perverse inversion of the truth” – For all his storytelling genius, le Carré presented a deeply skewed and misleading picture of Britain’s intelligence services that endures to this day, writes Sir Richard Dearlove in the Telegraph.
• “Uni registers new externally funded Free Speech Society” – Cambridge has officially registered a new student free speech society backed by the Free Speech Union to tackle the university’s free speech crisis, reports Varsity.
• “Prevent is becoming a complaints desk for the offended” – Britain’s counter-extremism programme Prevent is being weaponised as an instrument of de facto Islamic blasphemy enforcement, argues Max Thompson in the Critic.
• “The glorious spectacle of Timothy Miller wearing a burka” – In the Spectator, Brendan O’Neill writes that the case of a British pensioner prosecuted for covering his face exposes a glaring double standard at the heart of Britain’s approach to face-covering laws.
• “Why the Battle of Ideas matters in our age of censorship” – In Spiked, Claire Fox argues that the Battle of Ideas festival remains the essential antidote to cancel culture, conformism and the state’s accelerating drive to control public debate.
• “Badenoch challenges Burnham to rule out Scottish independence referendum” – Kemi Badenoch has put Andy Burnham on the spot by demanding he explicitly rule out holding a second Scottish independence referendum during his premiership, reports the Telegraph.
• “Emily Thornberry and the arrogant Rejoiners are heading for a fall” – Labour’s renewed flirtation with EU rejoin politics is a self-defeating miscalculation that reveals precisely why voters deserted the party in the first place, says Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph.
• “The social state has become an all-devouring monster that nobody can stop and it will be the death of us” – On his Substack, Eugyppius argues that Europe’s runaway social state poses a far graver threat than most people recognise.
• “Milei adviser says UK ‘colonised by Islam’ in Falklands row” – A senior adviser to Javier Milei has claimed that Argentina needs the Falkland Islands because Britain is being “colonised” by Islam, reports the Hungarian Conservative.
• “Musk approached Trump to slow down Starlink” – Sources say Elon Musk privately initiated the move to restrict Starlink support for Ukraine despite publicly blaming Trump for the resulting chaos, reveals the Telegraph.
• “Trump sacks press secretary five days into job” – Donald Trump has ousted press secretary Katie Zacharia just five days after her turbulent debut press conference, according to the NBC.
• “Hong Kong loses record 40 kindergartens as birth rate drops, women wait to have kids” – Hong Kong’s kindergarten count has fallen to 930 as a plummeting birth rate and a record-high average age for first-time mothers shrink the student population, reports the South China Morning Post.
• “Warning as Covid hospitalisations shoot up by 40% in a fortnight” – The number of Britons being hospitalised with COVID-19 has surged by more than 40% in just two weeks, says the Mail.
• “Costa blame financial woes on climate change!” – The claim that Costa’s financial troubles are driven by climate change is yet more piss poor reporting from the increasingly unreliable Telegraph, notes Paul Homewood in Not a Lot of People Know That.
• “New study suggests large regions of the Pacific Ocean have been cooling for the last 80 years” – A new study reveals that large regions of the Pacific Ocean have been cooling for the last 80 years, according to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone.
• “Claim: Fiji pre-COP climate conference was not a flop because participants agreed to demand more money” – With just two world leaders from outside the Pacific bothering to turn up to Fiji’s pre-COP climate conference, success now seems to mean little more than agreeing to demand more money, writes Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?
• “Wrong, TIME, climate change is not ‘accelerating faster than we can respond’” – In ClimateRealism, Anthony Watts demolishes a TIME reporter’s claim that climate destabilisation is accelerating beyond humanity’s ability to respond.
• “Is climate science politicised? An exchange” – A debate over the removal of the National Academy of Sciences’ Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence has reignited questions about whether climate science has been captured by political agendas, notes Robert Bradley Jr. at Master Resource.
• “Globalism is destroying the Western nations” – The collapse of Western institutional confidence signals something far deeper than a political crisis, argues Peter Clack in Climate Change Dispatch.
• “Church takes on council over street preaching ban” – A Clacton church is fighting back after Colchester City Council served it with a community protection notice to silence its street preachers, reports the Telegraph.
• “Louis Theroux dragged into Linehan trans row” – Father Ted creator Graham Linehan has accused documentary maker Louis Theroux of ignoring the impact of gender ideology on women, says the Telegraph.
• “Jenrick reminds BBC of paedophiles it employed as it lectures Reform on vetting” – Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Robert Jenrick hit back at questions about Reform’s vetting process by asking whether the BBC could guarantee that no future presenter would turn out to be a paedophile.

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