News Round-Up

• “Why the call for slavery reparations is a scam” – The Spectator‘s Ross Clark with a masterful restatement of the case against reparations.
• “There is no case for paying reparations” – Western countries seeking to manage their new-found diversity have given moral credence to arguments they should have rejected, says the Telegraph in a leading article.
• “Do Commonwealth demands for £18 trillion of slavery reparations stack up?” – The Telegraph takes a detailed look at the claims being put forward to support the ludicrous sum supposedly owed by Britain to the governments claiming to represent the heirs of slaves.
• “Reeves warned over £50bn ‘debt fiddle’” – Rachel Reeves has been warned that interest rates will stay higher for longer after the Chancellor said she will change Britain’s debt rules to unleash a borrowing spree of up to £50bn in the latest breach of a pre-election commitment, says the Telegraph.
• “Angela Rayner’s own staff demand four-day week” – The Deputy Prime Minister champions flexible working but is resisting calls for a shorter working week in her own department, reports the Telegraph.
• “Wes Streeting could start a Labour revolt over assisted dying” – With the Health Secretary and the Justice Secretary now publicly opposed, scepticism of the idea of assisted dying appears to be growing, says Niall Gooch in UnHerd.
• “Welsh parliament rejects assisted dying in blow for campaign” – The Welsh Parliament has voted to reject assisted dying, with less than a third of members voting in favour in a blow for campaigners seeking to change the law, reports the Telegraph.
• “Private school VAT raid paves the way for other charities to lose benefits, lawyers warn” – Labour’s tax raid on private schools could pave the way for other charities to lose their benefits, the Treasury has been warned by the Charity Law Association, the Telegraph reports.
• “Kemi vs Robert: who would be the best Tory leader?” – In the Spectator, Ed West and Niall Ferguson go head to head on Badenoch vs Jenrick.
• “Labour staff campaigning for Kamala Harris were offered hotel accommodation by Democrats” – Labour staff campaigning for Kamala Harris were offered free hotel accommodation in the U.S. by the Democrats despite Starmer’s claim they “paid their way” with “their own money”, the Telegraph reveals.
• “Kamala Harris’s CNN town hall: our experts are united in their verdict” – The Vice President took questions from undecided voters in Pennsylvania, and managed to answer very few of them, say two Telegraph pundits.
• “LA Times Non-Endorsement Irks Left” – The Los Angeles Times Opinion Editor Mariel Garza has quit in protest of her newspaper’s refusal to endorse Kamala Harris, writes Thomas Buckley on Substack.
• “Moment widow tells Tim Walz to stay away from her officer husband’s funeral – as he ‘never supported the police’” – In the days after Deputy Sheriff Josh Owen was gunned down, his widow told Governor Tim Walz to stay away from her husband’s funeral as “you have never been a supporter of the police”, the Telegraph reports.
• “The ICC’s rogue prosecutor” – In the Spectator, Douglas Murray notes that Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor who has sought arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, may be motivated in his anti-Israel crusade by trying to distract from the sexual harassment allegations he is currently facing.
• “The lessons of the Chris Kaba case” – In the Spectator, Rod Liddle suggests that the straightforward lesson of the Kaba case is: don’t drive your car at a bunch of policemen, then you won’t get shot in the head. The second is: you would be mad to be an armed officer in the Metropolitan Police.
• “Row over Labour MP’s claim Kaba was ‘victim of racist gang trope’” – Labour MP Kim Johnson is facing backlash after claiming that Chris Kaba was the victim of “racist gang tropes” from the media, the Times reports.
• “Black rights charity that claimed Chris Kaba was victim of ‘racist state violence’ faces review” – The Runnymede trust, which claimed the gangster Chris Kaba was a victim of “racist state violence”, is being examined by regulators after a complaint by Robert Jenrick, the Telegraph reports.
• “Giorgia Meloni is going to war with Italy’s judges” – Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has declared war on Italy’s notoriously Left-wing judges who are trying to kybosh at birth her Albania scheme, says Nicholas Farrell in the Spectator.
• “The human rights crusade is running out of road” – As lawful avenues for removing people from Europe continue to close off, scepticism is likely to rise, says Michael Murphy in the Telegraph.
• “Home Office spent £400m in a year on unused hotel space for migrants” – The Home Office wasted more than £400 million in a year on unused hotel space for migrants, a watchdog has found, reports the Telegraph.
• “Ad for Israel Book Cancelled Because ‘Customers Might Complain’” – A magazine has rejected an advertisement for Bernard-Henri Lévy’s work because it will give booksellers “trouble they haven’t asked for and don’t wish to have”, the Free Press reports.
• “Vaccines and the Length of Our Lives” – In Brownstone Journal, Dr. David Bell looks at whether vaccines and other pharmaceutical products were really the miracles that made humanity healthier or if most of the health improvements preceded them.
• “Connecting yet more dots” – On Trust the Evidence, Dr. Tom Jefferson looks at the evidence that illness from the influenza virus is much rarer than you might think.
• “Global warming will be twice as bad as predicted, UN warns” – In its latest alarmist report on the emission cuts that would supposedly limit global warming to 1.5°C, the UN says the goal will “soon be dead” without a global mobilisation on a scale and pace never seen before, reports the Mail.
• “U.K. example: making car use increasingly inconvenient” – On the Freedom Research Substack, Kaspar Arro takes a look at the U.K. roadmap to a “low-carbon neighbourhood”, a.k.a how to get rid of private cars.
• “Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised” – In the Spectator, David Butterfield says he has quit his job teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge because over the last two decades the university has been steadily infantilised, “whereby challenging workloads are reduced, and robust criticism of bad writing and bad thinking is avoided”.
• “The civil service is becoming a cesspit of intolerance and censorship” – Too often speaking your mind at work now comes with the risk of being reported to HR, says Ella Whelan in the Telegraph.
• “Glasgow rape centre breaks away from charity in row over gender” – A rape support centre in Glasgow has broken away from the supervision of the umbrella charity Rape Crisis Scotland because the centre said its priority was to provide a single-sex service by an “all-female workforce”, which the charity would not accept, reports the BBC.
• “Fury as doctor refused to publish study that found puberty blockers do not improve children’s mental health” – A leading doctor has received backlash after she decided not to publish an anticipated taxpayer-funded report on the effects of puberty-blocking drugs, following suggestions it found the drugs do not significantly improve mental health, the Mail reports.
• “Trans charity Mermaids let off lightly by investigation” – Child transition charity Mermaids has been given a very easy ride from the Charity Commission, says Josephine Bartosch in UnHerd, after a 22-page report, which took two years to complete, found “mismanagement” of the charity but said this was because the “governance, culture and practices had failed to keep pace with its growing size”.
• “Boarding school teacher who admitted child sex offences spared jail” – A boarding school teacher who sexually assaulted a student and possessed images of children being abused has avoided jail, reports the Telegraph – presumably because the prisons are full of Right-wing protesters and keyboard warriors.
• “Armed forces could not stop an invasion, admits Defence Secretary” – John Healey says the British military is in a far worse state than expected when Labour took office and not ready to fight, the Times reports.
• “Proposals to ban Alternative für Deutschland gain support within the German political establishment, as our domestic spy agency prepares a new assessment of the party’s political wrongthink” – It’s now looking likely that key German CDU politicians, coordinating with the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, will try to get the German Bundestag to approve a ban on AfD before the end of the year, says Eugyppius.
• “Two Faces of Modernity” – Dr. David McGrogan’s latest Substack looks at the good and bad of the Enlightenment.
• “Who does Justin Welby speak for?” – In the Spectator, Rev. Jamie Franklin wonders why the Archbishop of Canterbury struggles to be clear about what he’s saying and on whose behalf, and whether he’s being entirely honest.
• “She Was Arrested for Praying in Her Head” – Citizens in the U.K. have been arrested, prosecuted and convicted for silently praying outside abortion clinics, and even organising pro-life meetings in your own home may be a criminal offence, writes Madeleine Kearns in the Free Press.
• “This is epic!” – Happy Halloween from all your favourite world leaders and autocrats, courtesy of AI.

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