News Round-Up

• “Lee Anderson joins Reform U.K. and as many as nine other Tory MPs could follow” – Lee Anderson has announced his defection to Reform U.K., declaring “I want my country back”, according to GB News.
• “Why Starmer shouldn’t celebrate Lee Anderson’s Reform defection” – With Lee Anderson’s defection, there’s a real prospect of the Tory vote share in Red Wall seats switching to Reform in bulk, writes Patrick O’Flynn in the Spectator.
• “Rishi Sunak has time on his side to save both economy and Tories before election” – Rishi Sunak may need to sack his Chancellor but it is not too late for him to rescue the country and his party, says John Longworth in the Express.
• “Welsh First Minister frontrunner admits ‘embarrassment’ over deleted WhatsApps” – Vaughan Gething, the Wales Health Minister during the pandemic, told the Covid Inquiry it was a matter of regret his messages had not been kept, according to the Telegraph.
• “Vaughan Gething ducks and weaves like a boxer at the Welsh Covid Inquiry” – You would be hard pressed to find a single moment at the Covid Inquiry where Mr. Gething admitted to getting a single thing wrong, says Will Hayward in WalesOnline.
• “Four million at risk of abandoning work permanently as benefits surge” – A think tank warns that nearly four million people are at risk of permanently abandoning work amid a post-lockdown surge in benefits, according to the Telegraph.
• “Harvard tramples the truth” – When it came to debating Covid lockdowns, veritas wasn’t Harvard’s guiding principle in spite of being the university’s motto, writes Martin Kulldorf in City Journal.
• “Are you being sold your own watch?” – Dr. Tom Jefferson and Prof. Carl Heneghan question the UKHSA’s transparency, accountability and use of public funds.
• “The ‘can we’ and the ‘should we’ of science” – On Substack, the Twilight Patriot discusses how scientific knowledge can be put to absurd and harmful uses.
• “Why can police sue for being asked to do their jobs?” – We seem to be entering a more litigious era, one in which tragedy becomes industry, remarks Gus Carter in the Spectator, reflecting on the class action suit being brought by police officers who attended the Grenfell Tower fire.
• “Labour comes out against Emirati bid for Telegraph” – The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson heralds Labour’s recent conversion to the view that foreign governments should not own national newspapers.
• “Cambridge to scrap ‘unjust’ state school targets” – Cambridge University is scrapping its state school target for undergraduate admissions amid accusations of bias against independent school applicants, reports the Telegraph.
• “Universities may reduce British student numbers as financial collapse looms” – One university in England is facing bankruptcy as frozen tuition fees, high costs and falling international numbers bite, according to the Telegraph.
• “Did we really need Warsi and Baddiel’s podcast?” – A Muslim and a Jew Go There is yet another podcast from the centrist industrial complex, argues Lloyd Evans in the Spectator.
• “Irish voters have delivered a stunning blow to the establishment” – Ireland’s rejection of the family and care amendments reminds us why direct democracy matters, says Frank Furedi in Spiked.
• “A new referendum has exposed the woke cause. Labour should tremble” – Few thought Ireland would reject its elites’ attempt to change the constitution. It could be a prophetic result, argues Tim Stanley in the Telegraph.
• “Macron has spied an easy win with his assisted dying bill” – Macron is swimming with the tide of popular opinion with his assisted dying bill, says Jonathan Miller in the Spectator.
• “Trudeau demands life in prison for speech crimes” – Canada’s Liberal Party is seeking incarceration for crimes that haven’t even been committed, writes Stephen Moore on the Public Substack.
• “It may now be too late for the West, a corpse that cannot be galvanised” – Elected governments no longer have the power or will to do what is needed to save our free societies, laments Robert Tombs in the Telegraph.
• “Britain risks losing out to Germany in £16 billion Net Zero scheme” – The developer behind a £16 billion cable that will link Moroccan solar and wind farms to Britain has threatened to instead send electricity to Germany, reports the Telegraph.
• “The ‘elephant in the room’ that risks exposing Britain’s Net Zero agenda” – The U.K.’s ‘hidden’ carbon emissions fail to show the bigger picture, says Jonathan Leake in the Telegraph.
• “Net Zero costs to hit poorest households hardest, warns Ofgem” – Ofgem warns that the costs of hitting Net Zero could hit the poorest households hardest, according to the Telegraph. No, really?
• “We must end the Net Zero delusion before it’s too late” – Net Zero threatens our economy, society and democracy, and we urgently need a change of direction, writes Annabel Denham in the Telegraph.
• “Doubts raised over Sadiq Khan’s clean air claims” – Sadiq Khan has been accused of concealing the real impact of expanding the Ulez scheme from voters ahead of the mayoral election, say the BBC. Yes, the BBC!
• “EVs have one third less range than advertised, magazine test finds” – According to tests, electric cars have up to a third less range in reality than advertised, reports the Telegraph.
• “Diversity row erupts after Alan Turing Institute hires male scientists” – The U.K.’s national AI institute has been riven by a diversity row after staff signed a letter questioning the appointment of four male senior scientists, says the Telegraph.
• “Starmer finally says ‘common sense has to prevail’ as he backs trans athletes ban” – Keir Starmer has backed the banning of biological men from women’s sport – after previously refusing to do so publicly, according to GB News.
• “Police ‘broke rules by logging misgendering complaint against J.K. Rowling as hate incident’” – A woman’s advocacy group says that police broke freedom of speech rules by recording a ‘misgendering’ complaint against J.K. Rowling as a ‘hate incident’, says the Telegraph.
• “Dylan Mulvaney calls out Bud Light for failing to stand up to bullying” – Trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney has revealed he wanted to win back Bud Light customers by doing a commercial with a cowboy and a trans person, according to the Mail.
• “Can Australia endure the woke onslaught?” – Australia appears to have been infected with the same mind virus as the rest of the Anglosphere, says Konstantin Kisin on Substack. Yet all is not lost because Australia is about 10 years behind Britain and America.
• “Woke big tech has launched a fatal crusade against free speech” – AI has transformed the way we collect data. In the wrong hands, it could prove disastrous, warns Joel Kotkin in the Telegraph.
• “Netanyahu tells Biden his ‘red line’ is ‘destroying Hamas’” – Benjamin Netanyahu has hit back at Joe Biden by laying out his own red line in Gaza, according to the Mail.
• “How the Gaza Ministry of Health fakes casualty numbers” – In The Tablet, Abraham Wyner explains why the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers should not be trusted.
• “London police under fire after arresting man ‘for telling the truth’ about Hamas” – In the European Conservative, Michael Curzon discusses the Met’s recent arrest of a man for holding a sign reading “Hamas is terrorist” – a statement which the U.K. Government describes as fact.
• “‘We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness’” – Oscar-winning writer and director Jonathan Glazer decides to feed the Hamas crocodile in his Oscar acceptance speech by declaring, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict.”

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