News Round-Up

• “Labour lurches Left as Wes Streeting demands a ‘wealth’ tax” – Wes Streeting – once seen as the Blairite candidate – has called for a levy on the “rich” that he imagines will bring in £12 billion a year, according to the Mail.
• “Wes Streeting’s wealth tax ‘would kill the AI boom’” – Tech entrepreneurs are warning that Wes Streeting’s wealth tax proposal will “kill the AI boom in its tracks” and damage investment, says the Telegraph.
• “My encounters with Wes Streeting” – In the Spectator, Douglas Murray warns that Labour is heading for a down-market beauty pageant, recalling Streeting when he was a student leader who refused to condemn Islamists.
• “Now flip-flopping Burnham ‘backs tough immigration crackdown’” – The Greater Manchester Mayor is said to be behind a move by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to double the time it takes legal immigrants to qualify for indefinite leave to remain, reports the Mail.
• “Rupert Lowe could be about to make Andy Burnham Prime Minister” – In trying to replicate its success in Great Yarmouth, Restore threatens to split the Right-wing vote in Makerfield, warns Stephen Pollard in the Telegraph.
• “I’m worried about Andy Burnham” – If Burnham does to Britain what he has done to Manchester, we are in big trouble, says Marlowe in the Critic.
• “Andy Burnham’s trans virtue-signalling is coming back to bite him” – The Manchester Mayor once said only a “small minority” have a problem with gender ideology, but voters are no longer buying it, writes Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.
• “Define a woman! Burnham blasted by ally over trans stance” – Rosie Duffield MP says the Manchester Mayor is “just reading the lines” when it comes to his views on single-sex spaces and gender ideology, according to the Telegraph.
• “Labour’s day of trans reckoning arrives” – Despite Labour’s long-awaited 342-page trans guidance finally getting over the line, it can hardly be deemed a coup for Phillipson or the Labour Party, says Noa Hoffman in the Spectator.
• “I stood up against trans extremism at the Cambridge Union” – Trans activists deify fetishistic men as “marginalised”, deny women the most basic of rights and harm vulnerable children, writes Maeve Halligan in the Telegraph.
• “Labour’s spiteful mansion tax is completely unworkable” – This Government is bafflingly committed to a tax that will cost more to administer than it will raise for its coffers, says James Baxter-Derrington in the Telegraph.
• “Labour prepares £1 billion stealth tax on family holidays” – Rachel Reeves announces that entry prices for theme parks, zoos, museums and other family attractions will be cut while a new levy on overseas holidays will raise nearly £1 billion, reports the Telegraph.
• “Rachel Reeves’s economic farce is about to become a tragedy” – Watching Rachel Reeves – the woman who spends £1.3 trillion of your money each year – rise in the Commons to fix bus fares for 10-year-olds is a spectacle that should alarm every taxpayer, writes Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph.
• “Young Britons turn their backs on Starmer’s high-tax UK” – Record numbers of young Britons are turning their backs on the UK, with an estimated 136,000 more British nationals leaving the country than arriving, reports the Telegraph.
• “The bleak truth about falling net migration” – The Home Secretary’s boast that “net migration is down 82%” conceals a far gloomier reality about who is leaving and who is staying, writes David Shipley in the Spectator.
• “Secret deal to keep ‘temporary’ migrant camp open until 2030” – A camp for 600 asylum seekers is to stay open until 2030 despite assurances it would operate for no longer than 12 months, reports the Mail.
• “Culture Secretary urged to investigate Southbank Centre boss” – Sixty-four MPs and peers have written to Lisa Nandy urging her to investigate the Green-supporting, pro-Palestinian chairman of the Southbank Centre following allegations that he compared Reform UK’s electoral success to the Holocaust, according to the Jewish Chronicle.
• “Green Party candidate in Makerfield quits hours after being unveiled” – The Green Party’s Makerfield by-election candidate Chris Kennedy was announced on Thursday morning, posed for pictures in the afternoon and dropped out shortly afterwards for what the party said were “personal and family reasons”, according to the Mail.
• “Start-up run by Blair’s son put on naughty step by Ofsted” – Ofsted inspectors have given the apprenticeship company run by Tony Blair’s son a “needs attention” rating after finding “too many” students are dropping out, says the Telegraph.
• “We’re flooded by complaints from Britons” – Sarah Rogers, a senior member of the Trump administration, says British citizens are flocking to a website set up by the State Department to bypass online-safety laws because they’re living under a government “hostile to freedom of speech”, according to the Times.
• “The German political establishment is losing its mind as the AfD cements its dominance over the electorate” – It’s squeaky bum time for defenders of ‘German democracy’ after a new poll showed Alternative für Deutschland a full seven points ahead of the centre-Right Union parties, writes Eugyppius on Substack.
• “STI tsunami: England revealed to be worst hit in Europe for infections” – England is the capital of Europe for the number of sexually transmitted infections, new data suggests, according to the Mail.
• “Blowing hot and cold” – The outlook for Britain’s Net Zero energy strategy is bleak, says Mark Hodgson at Cliscep.
• “Attenborough’s ‘facts’ seven years on” – On his Substack, Paul Homewood revisits David Attenborough’s 2019 broadcast Climate Change – The Facts and finds his claims of climate doom have not aged well.
• “Chefs see red as Michelin axes ‘green star’ for sustainability” – The Michelin Guide has abruptly retired a prize for eco-friendly restaurants and said chefs will no longer be able to advertise that they have won it, reports the Times.
• “Climate change apocalypticism was a fashion, not a cause” – Democrats have discovered that end-of-world rhetoric doesn’t win elections when voters can’t pay the bills, notes Noah Rothman in Climate Change Dispatch.
• “RCP 8.5: when the spherical cows escape the barn” – The discredited worst-case emissions scenario is being wheeled out of the lab and presented to bank regulators, judges and the public as if it were real, writes Charles Rotter in Watts Up With That?
• “The US AI rebellion is gaining momentum” – Data centres driving up energy costs and fear of job losses have become major public concerns in the US, reports Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?
• “Driving up the cost of energy while claiming to promote ‘affordability’” – On the Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton argues that politicians pushing Net Zero policies are engaged in political lies that go far beyond mere spin.
• “Don’t challenge trans women about their gender, says Phillipson’s guidance” – New government guidance says that transgender people should not be asked what sex they are before they use toilets or changing rooms, according to the Telegraph.
• “On the ground in Makerfield, Andy Burnham doesn’t feel like a winner” – The constituency is a microcosm of the Britain that Labour has abandoned, writes Tim Stanley in the Telegraph.
• “I thought being a climate activist would atone for being white” – On Triggernometry, ex-climate activist Lucy Biggers explains how newsroom culture, identity politics and guilt-based ideology pulled her into believing she was a white supremacists, and why she eventually rejected toxic, Left-wing ideology.

If you have any tips for inclusion in the round-up, email us here.