News Round-Up

• “Winners and losers from Labour’s Budget” – Telegraph Money reveals whether the Chancellor has left you better or worse off. Take a wild guess?
• “This budget may end up dooming Labour’s election chances” – Rachel Reeves’s statement, leaked in advance by the OBR, presents her party with two big dangers, reports the Times.
• “The pointlessness of removing the two-child benefit cap” – Addiction, chaos and learned helplessness don’t vanish because the monthly bank transfer gets a little fatter, says Rosie Lewis in the Spectator.
• “The Budget has created a £2 million house-price limit” – The UK has had some spectacularly badly designed taxes over the decades, writes Matthew Lynn in the Spectator. But the new mansion tax looks set to prove one of the worst.
• “The EV charging tax is the coward’s way out for Rachel Reeves” – In the Spectator, Ross Clark calls Rachel Reeves’s new 3p-per-mile EV tax a coward’s cop-out that will hit all drivers, kill EV sales and simply kick the can down the road towards a full-on road-pricing nightmare.
• “I fear there is worse to come after Reeves’s cruel Budget” – Be in no doubt: Rachel Reeves’s second Budget, which will tax the so-called “working people” of this country until the pips squeak, is condemning us all to an ever-accelerating economic doom loop, warns Alex Brummer in the Mail.
• “Rachel vowed a ‘Budget for workers’ – but we got a shameless Budget for shirkers” – So that was a Budget for Rachel Reeves’s fabled “working people”, was it? Shirking people, more like, says Ross Clark in the Sun.
• “Labour’s victory is total. Socialism is back” – In Rachel Reeves’s brave new world, meritocracy is out – redistribution, welfarism and enforced equality are in, writes Allister Heath in the Telegraph.
• “Welfare is now a £2 trillion runaway train. Enough is enough” – People who set their alarm clocks and go to work are being asked to pay record amounts in tax, accept appalling public services and pay for a record number of people to not work, writes Zia Yusuf in the Mail.
• “Dear Rachel, do you have any clue how much hard-working people are struggling?” – In the Telegraph, Allison Pearson has written an open letter to the Chancellor on behalf of Britain’s strivers.
• “I am a farmer facing ruin. This is why I came to London today” – In the Telegraph, Graham Potter, a fourth-generation Yorkshire farmer, warns Labour’s harsh inheritance tax changes risk wiping out family farms like his.
• “One rule for farmers, another for the Left” – Labour’s war on farmers has reached London’s streets, writes Jamie Blackett in the Telegraph.
• “Farmers urge Labour rethink on ‘biggest threat to shooting in a generation’” – Labour’s planned overhaul to gun ownership laws has been branded the biggest threat to shooting in a generation by rural communities, reports the Telegraph.
• “Military chiefs go to war with Labour” – In the Spectator, Tim Shipman reveals there is another major headache on the horizon for Keir Starmer – a new confrontation with the armed forces over defence spending.
• “Starmerism was always doomed to fail” – The new Government was woefully underprepared, and in opposition did little in the way of planning for power, writes Ed West in the Spectator.
• “Labour peer dismisses plan to scrap jury trials as ‘old party trope’” – Moves to ditch juries are an example of an “old Labour trope” that assumes ordinary people “are not up to” determining guilt, according to Baroness Kennedy, as reported in the Times.
• “I was a judge for two decades. Plans to scrap jury trials are extremely disturbing” – This ancient right is under threat from David Lammy’s proposals – it must be protected at all costs, says a former judge in the Telegraph.
• “Peer on Islamophobia task force ‘hosted extremist in parliament’” – A peer shaping the Government’s definition of Islamophobia has been reported to the parliamentary watchdog after inviting a restaurant owner who cheered attacks on Israel to an event at the House of Lords according to GB News.
• “NHS doctor who praised Hamas attacks is suspended” – Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, 31, has been stood down over a series of alleged anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism comments she posted online, reports the Mail.
• “The BBC’s relentless war on Britain’s past has reached another horrible stage” – We need a public broadcaster that provides a fairer and more honest account of our national history, says Rakib Ehsan in the Telegraph.
• “The depressing truth about the BBC? They’ll get away with it yet again” – The circled wagons have held firm and, yet again, the enemy is retreating in disarray, writes Robin Aitken in the Telegraph.
• “Does ‘fish disco’ show we’re dancing to the wrong tune on regulations?” – In the Times, Tom Whipple explains how a plan to scare fish from Hinkley’s cooling pipes spiralled into a £700 million symbol of regulatory madness.
• “International Energy Agency publishes climate era’s obituary” – The end is nigh – not for the world, but for the climate industrial complex, says Vijay Jayaraj in WUWT?
• “COP30 fumbles the hard issue into the future” – On CFACT, David Wojick sums up COP30 as a bit of a letdown, dodging the big fights like US funding and fossil fuels.
• “Claim: President Trump’s fault CO₂ emissions are still rising” – In WUWT? Eric Worrall argues that despite people blaming Trump for rising CO₂ emissions, global emissions are set to plateau soon – driven largely by China’s renewables boom.
• “Newsom’s war on energy is crippling California and undermining our military” – California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s energy policies have driven over 360 companies from the state, causing gas prices to soar and oil production to plummet, writes Vince Fong for Fox News.
• “1880–2020 trends in ocean heat uptake, thermal expansion challenge human forcing claims” – On NoTricksZone, Kenneth Richard shows that ocean heat uptake and sea level rises haven’t tracked rising CO₂ emissions as expected since 1980.
• “Stop spreading false alarms, Al Jazeera, Fijian oyster production is doing well” – Al Jazeera says Fijian Oyster production is being damaged by climate change, but data on weather and oyster harvests tell a different story, says H. Sterling Burnett on Climate Realism.
• “Covid lockdowns ‘stopped babies learning how to speak’” – Covid lockdowns have been linked to a surge in babies and toddlers suffering from speech and other developmental issues, reports the BBC.
• “Pfizer’s mRNA flu shot failed its pivotal clinical trial in adults 65 and older” – Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine for influenza failed when tested against the standard flu shot in a 27,000-person trial of older adults – a failure Pfizer has not announced for years, writes Alex Berenson on his Substack.
• “Academic bias and corruption: the case of the Royal Statistical Society” – A single Bayesian critique of Obama’s memoir unleashed a storm that, Professor Norman Fenton argues on Substack, revealed how swiftly academia turns on anyone straying from its approved politics.
• “A visit by the German thought police” – On Substack, C.J. Hopkins recounts having his home raided and his computer seized by Berlin police as he faces a fresh criminal probe for publishing a banned book.
• “Palestinian Authority ‘defies’ Labour calls to remove anti-Semitism from textbooks – Allegedly anti-Semitic “propaganda” is still being taught in Palestinian schools despite the UK Government’s calls for education reform as part of its recognition of statehood, reports the Telegraph.
• “National Guard soldiers ‘are shot’ sparking White House lockdown” – Two National Guard troopers have been shot dead in an ambush-style attack just 800 yards from the White House, sparking a lockdown at the President’s residence, according to the Mail.
• “Nigeria’s mass school abduction is its worst yet – but the West doesn’t seem to care” – More than 2,500 students have been taken in at least 70 raids on schools in Nigeria over the last decade, writes Kunwar Khuldune Shahid in the Spectator. Why no protests in the West?
• “National Trust bans Christian from filming at religious site” – The National Trust has been accused of anti-Christian discrimination after banning a Roman Catholic from filming at a religious site, according to the Catholic Herald.
• “Kate Forbes orders civil servants to stop using ‘birthing person’ in briefings” – The SNP’s deputy leader Kate Forbes has ordered her civil servants to stop using the term “birthing person” instead of “woman” in SNP Government documents, reports the Telegraph. 
• “Kate Forbes and others who stand up to SNP trans lobby are being ‘disappeared from view’” – Director of Free Speech Union Scotland Fraser Hudghton has warned that SNP figures who oppose “trans activist gaslighting” are being “disappeared from view”, says the Scottish Express.
• “World’s Strongest Woman disqualified for being ‘born male’” – The winner of the World’s Strongest Woman contest has been disqualified for allegedly being born male and failing to declare it, according to the NY Post.
• “Graham Linehan is a hero for our times” – Graham Linehan’s campaign against trans ideology puts to shame all the hundreds of artists who’ve been too cowardly to speak out, says Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.
• “All we’ve had from her is wallowing” – On X, Crewkerne Gazette’s latest AI-generated gem sees Kemi Badenoch unleash a devastating broadside at Rachel Reeves after the Budget disaster.

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