News Round-Up

• “Keir Starmer faces Cabinet backlash over budget cuts” – Ministers including Angela Rayner may revolt over plans to slash departmental spending by as much as 20%, reports the Times.
• “Ryanair threatens to axe hundreds of U.K. flights if Reeves raises taxes” – Ryanair has warned it could axe hundreds of U.K. flights if Rachel Reeves raises aviation taxes in her Budget, according to the Telegraph.
• “Starmer poised to grant more than 60,000 people asylum after scrapping Rwanda scheme” – More than 60,000 migrants will be granted asylum in the U.K. in the next year after Keir Starmer scrapped the Tories’ Rwanda scheme, according to an analysis by the Refugee Council, the Telegraph reports.
• “Meloni’s migration strategy is working – and the rest of Europe is watching” – Giorgia Meloni’s Italy has become the first European nation to successfully offshore illegal migrants to a non-EU country, and the rest of the EU is taking note, says Nicholas Farrell in the Spectator.
• “David Lammy’s disdain of the West is degrading Britain on the international stage” – The international order is under siege from the destabilising agendas of authoritarian regimes and diluting Britain’s influence by expanding the UN Security Council will not help, says Samuel Ramani in the Telegraph.
• “Keir’s landed Foreign Sec in quicksand over reparations” – Sir Keir Starmer has landed his Foreign Secretary David Lammy in Caribbean quicksand by ruling out paying slave reparations, says the Mail‘s Ephraim Hardcastle.
• “Labour to send 100 party staff to U.S. to help Democrats in swing states” – Republicans described Labour’s plans to send dozens of volunteers to help the Democrats as an “outrage” and warned they would damage the U.K.’s relationship with the U.S. should Donald Trump win the Presidency, the Telegraph reports.
• “Councillor’s wife jailed for inciting racial hatred online” – Lucy Connolly, the wife of West Northamptonshire Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly, has been jailed for inciting racial hatred on X on the day of the Southport attacks, the Mail reports.
• “Bungling Keir Starmer calls Rishi Sunak ‘Prime Minister’ again at PMQs” – Keir Starmer has repeatedly appeared muddled over whether the Tory leader is still in power since his crushing election victory in July, says the Mail.
• “Who won the Tory leadership hustings?” – The result was clear. It’s Badenoch who will allow Tories to once again feel good about themselves, says Tim Stanley in the Telegraph.
• “It’s Kemi Badenoch’s to lose” – Were Kemi Badenoch not to be unveiled as the next Conservative party leader in a couple of weeks it would now go down as a very notable upset following Thursday’s GB News leadership special, says Patrick O’Flynn in the Spectator.
• “Kemi Badenoch is wrong about Labour and race” – The Telegraph‘s Michael Deacon says Kemi is wrong to suggest Labour won’t call a black woman prejudiced: the identitarian Left loves nothing more than hounding a “race traitor”.
• “Liberals are starting to panic. Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide” – It’s becoming increasingly clear that Democrats are getting desperate, says Roger Kimball in the Telegraph.
• “The real reason black and Hispanic voters are abandoning Kamala for Trump – driven away by the Democrats’ delusional obsession with race” – The first flutter of panic is beginning to grip the Harris-Walz presidential campaign, writes Andrew Neil in the Mail.
• “Kamala Harris’s Fox interview: our experts are united in their verdict” – Harris’s Fox interview with Bret Baier was a disaster, say the Telegraph‘s pundits.
• “Yahya Sinwar’s killing is an immense victory for Israel” – The impact of the Hamas leader’s death cannot be underestimated, says Limor Simhony Philpott in the Spectator.
• “We need to be far more sceptical of Hamas’s propaganda” – Horrific viral footage from Gaza is not by itself evidence of Israeli war crimes because it often doesn’t tell the full story, says Andrew Fox in Spiked.
• “Ukraine’s NATO fantasy” – Zelensky is understandably hankering for NATO membership, but legally and politically it’s impossible, says Owen Matthews in the Spectator.
• “The strange timing of Jacinda Ardern’s damehood” – It’s standard for ex-New Zealand PMs to be knighted, says David Cohen in the Spectator. But Ardern’s investiture comes as New Zealand is knee-deep in a Royal Commission of Inquiry into her Government’s controversial response to the pandemic.
• “Jacinda Ardern deserves scorn, not a Damehood” – The former leader of New Zealand is a stout republican. So why is she accepting the honour, asks Patrick O’Flynn in the Telegraph.
• “‘Debunking’ Port Hedland Council” – On the Dystopian Down Under Substack, Rebekah Barnett is not impressed by journalists who claim, without citing any evidence, only authority, that vaccine cancer worries have been “debunked”.
• “Does passive smoking cause lung cancer?” – A recent American Cancer Society study reports a negligible risk from passive smoking, shedding new light on the uproar over a 2003 paper, writes Geoffrey Kabat in Reason.
• “The U.S. state will regret waging lawfare against Elon Musk” – Making the ability to play the Left’s political games a condition for enjoying economic success will backfire, says Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph.
• “The rise of anti-Elonism” – In the Spectator, Douglas Murray says he finds anti-Elonism to be a fascinating trend, because it seems mainly to affect people who have really never done anything very much with their lives.
• “Elon Musk is a ‘promoter of evil’, says EU official” – Věra Jourová, a Czech politician who is in charge of the European Commission’s work on online “misinformation” and “hate speech”, called Elon Musk a “promoter of evil” and X “the main hub for spreading antisemitism”, the Telegraph reports.
• “Poor at risk of being coerced into assisted dying in Canada” – Assisted dying is used by patients in Canada because they are poor and lack housing, a major official report has found, the Telegraph reports.
• “‘Not all suffering can be relieved’: A debate on assisted dying” – The former Justice Secretary Lord Falconer and the Spectator’s Chairman Lord Moore debate assisted dying.
• “English cricket to ban transgender players at elite level – but not community game” – Transgender women are to be banned from professional and semi-professional women’s cricket in England – but controversially not from the grass-roots game, the Telegraph reports.
• “ECB’s dismal transgender fudge makes you want to scream” – The England and Wales Cricket Board has on the one hand banned players who have gone through male puberty from competing as female, but on the other, restricted this rule only to the elite level, leaving the grass-roots game as a dangerous self-ID free-for-all, says Oliver Brown in the Telegraph.
• “Should we prioritise the LGBTQI community when disaster strikes?” – Following Hurricane Milton, Rod Liddle ponders one of the pressing questions of Left-wing disaster management in the Spectator.
• “Conductor sacked over his ‘use of pronouns’ wins unfair dismissal case” – A veteran conductor whose student complained about his “use of pronouns” has won an unfair dismissal case after he was sacked following a bullying investigation, reports the Mail.
• “Iranian border guards ‘massacre’ dozens of Afghans trying to enter country” – Iranian border guards have reportedly killed dozens of Afghans in a massacre as they attempted to enter the country, reports the Telegraph. I imagine the Left-wing protests over this atrocity will hit the streets any day now…
• “Labour MP pushes for new laws to ban fireworks louder than a lawnmower” – Sarah Owen, a former Shadow Minister, claimed a change to the rules around fireworks was “long overdue”, the Mail reports.
• “OMGAWD these just keep getting better!” – If the thing missing in your life in a video of Trump surrounded by cute kittens, you’re in for a treat.

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