Economical, With The Truth

The unrepentant plagiarist Rachel Reeves has been further confirmed to have fabricated her CV. She has never been an economist. In Reeves's first quarter as Chancellor of the Exchequer, economic growth, which at the start of the calendar year had been the highest in the G7, was a mere 0.1 per cent, while GDP per capita went down. "Schoolchildren from struggling families have pretended to eat out of empty lunchboxes to save their embarrassment at having no food."

Moody's has downgraded to junk the debt of Macquarrie Capital Private Equity's Southern Water, which we all used to own, but which we are about to bail out, meaning that it should never have been in the private sector. A hat factory or a florist's shop would not be bailed out. The Armed Forces and the Police have been buying drones from Autel Robotics, a Chinese company that Britain sanctioned last week for having supplied unmanned aerial vehicles to Russia. Reeves has even been pictured playing with those drones. Leave aside anything else. Why do we buy these things from anyone? Why do we not make them? And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

Yet on top of the two-child benefit cap, the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment, the out-of-control energy prices in a winter that has now begun, the 50 per cent hike in workers' bus fares that will more than cancel out the increase in the minimum wage five months later, the assault on family farms, the forcible injection of benefit claimants with weight loss drugs, the sending of "work coaches" into psychiatric wards to harangue the patients to "pull yourself together and get a job", the open desire of Liz Kendall to introduce assisted suicide in order to save money on the sickness and disability benefits that she wanted to replace with shaming vouchers, the three billion pounds to Ukraine every year for as long as something entirely unspecified might take, and the rising prices but frozen wages as a result of the increase in employers' National Insurance contributions, we may look forward to a five per cent increase in council tax, with a pointed failure to rule out the abolition of the single occupier discount. The Government's Water Commission is forbidden to consider the massively popular renationalisation that would bring England back in line with almost everywhere, including two of the other three parts of the United Kingdom, while water in the third is also not-for-profit.

And in the hope of clinging on to his job, Olaf Scholz is now negotiating directly with Vladimir Putin. Volodymyr Zelensky, whose own electoral mandate ran out long ago, can like it or lump it. That is what the German electorate is demanding even before the return of Donald Trump, who has turned out to have been such a "Fascist" that he has been welcomed back in front of the roaring fire of the White House by a man to whom he himself never extended the same courtesy. As for the EU, in the words of Ursula von der Leyen, "I warmly congratulate Donald J. Trump on his election as the 47th President of the United States of America. I look forward to working with President Trump again to advance a strong transatlantic agenda." Such sentiments have issued from all the chancelleries of the Old Continent. Think on.