News Round-Up
- “PM is too weak to sack man who tried to orchestrate his downfall as he gathers what’s left of his government” – Keir Starmer has been forced to turn a blind eye to Cabinet ministers accused of plotting against him as his grip on power becomes increasingly shaky, writes Jason Tapsfield in the Mail.
- “Starmer’s spectral security adviser backed Mandelson. So why is Jonathan Powell still at the heart of No 10?” – Why is Jonathan Powell still pulling strings, wonders Quentin Letts in the Mail.
- “Starmer’s former spin doctor suspended over links to sex offender” – Sir Keir Starmer’s former media chief, whom he’s just ennobled, has been suspended by Labour over his past links to a convicted paedophile, says the BBC.
- “PM voiced ‘pride’ his Cabinet is ‘working-class’ as he lurches Left” – Keir Starmer has talked up his Cabinet’s working-class roots as he shifts leftwards in an effort to shore up support, reports James Tapfield in the Mail.
- “Labour’s 1976 leadership candidates were intellectual giants. Now we have pygmies” – The Lilliputian calibre of hopefuls to replace Starmer speaks volumes about the steady decline in British public life, argues Philip Johnston in the Telegraph.
- “Why Starmer is still doomed” – Keir Starmer has bought himself time but is increasingly trapped by Labour’s Left, says Daniel Martin in the Telegraph.
- “Now Labour drops ‘His Majesty’ from official Government comms” – Labour has quietly ditched references to “His Majesty” in official Government messaging in favour of the “UK Government”, reports the Mail.
- “Reeves misled public on pubs tax raid, says watchdog” – Rachel Reeves has been accused of glossing over the real impact of a pubs tax change, says the Telegraph.
- “Birmingham bin workers to strike for another six months” – Birmingham residents have been warned to brace for more chaos after bin workers announced another six months of strikes, reports the BBC.
- “Inside ‘the most unBritish place in Britain’” – One Birmingham area has been painted as a grim case study in division, decay and radical politics by Robert Hardman in the Mail.
- “Muslim housing association boss ‘tried to bribe councillor’” – The boss of a Muslim housing association tried to bribe a councillor over a £10 million property deal, according to Mortgage Introducer.
- “School stabbing terror probe” – A boy of 13 launched a stabbing rampage in a school on Tuesday, leaving two children fighting for their lives in a suspected terror attack, reports the Mail.
- “Asylum-seeker guilty of raping 12 year-old girl” – An asylum seeker has been convicted of a catalogue of horrific crimes against a 12 year-old girl, according to the BBC.
- “Small boats ‘one in, one out’ scheme faces new legal challenge” – The Government’s “one in, one out” small-boats scheme has been hauled back to court, with migrants claiming it breaches modern slavery laws, says the Mail.
- “Reform leader Nigel Farage would end WFH culture, insisting people are ‘more productive being with other fellow human beings’” – Nigel Farage has told supporters that Britain has gone soft on work and needs to ditch working from home, reports the Mail.
- “Keir Starmer accused of ‘monumental diplomatic failure’ as China jails British citizen Jimmy Lai for 20 years” – China has thrown Jimmy Lai behind bars for 20 years, fuelling claims that Starmer’s Beijing talks have achieved nothing, according to the Mail.
- “If only our pitiful politicians had such determined faith in freedom as this brave man” – Jimmy Lai’s extraordinary life is a rebuke to timid Western leaders, says Ian Birrell in the Mail.
- “US rejects British pleas to allow Hamas to keep weapons” – Washington has flatly turned down a British plea to allow Hamas to hang on to its weapons as part of a Gaza deal, reports the Telegraph.
- “How Sweden defied liberal outrage to smash the gangs” – Sweden has pushed through tough new police powers to smash gang crime despite liberal fury, writes James Rothwell in the Telegraph.
- “The Cornish mine that could help Trump in his new arms race with China” – A long-forgotten Cornish mine has been recast as a strategic asset as the US scrambles to catch China in the minerals race, reports the Telegraph.
- “The UN is not fit for purpose, hear it from an inside man” – On the Topher Project podcast, a former insider lays out why the UN is running out of road.
- “Stop discouraging first cousin marriage, NHS staff told” – NHS guidance has reportedly told staff to stop discouraging first-cousin marriage despite the higher genetic risks, according to GB News.
- “Labour accused of sacrificing farmland as Miliband backs vast new solar and wind schemes across UK” – Ed Miliband has waved through solar farms so vast they rival major cities in size, reports the Conservative Post.
- “Duke of Westminster to fight wind farm in Scottish wilderness” – The Duke of Westminster has vowed to block a wind farm he says would disfigure a wilderness near his Scottish estate, according to the Telegraph.
- “The Industrial Revolution would be illegal now” – Britain’s world-changing industrial leap is something modern planning rules would never allow to happen, says Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph.
- “Met Office’s N Ireland rainfall dataset is worthless” – Claims of record rainfall have fallen apart as official Northern Ireland data has failed to match the Met Office narrative, writes Paul Homewood in Not a Lot of People Know That.
- “Climate change and energy: world leaders in turmoil” – World leaders have spent trillions and held endless COP meetings without shifting climate trends, reveals Steve Goreham in Master Resource.
- “Water, water everywhere – part 2” – Alarmist talk of drought has been questioned again as the evidence has pointed to anything but dangerously dry conditions, says Mark Hodgson in Climate Scepticism.
- “Why climate science is not settled” – The idea that climate science is “settled” has been challenged as models continue to diverge from reality, says Vijay Jayaraj on CO2 Coalition.
- “Trump admin to repeal Obama-era greenhouse gas finding in large-scale deregulation” – The Trump administration has set out plans to reverse a key 2009 climate ruling, reports Fox News.
- “The problem with ‘diversifying’ English literature” – Should set texts in GCSE and A-level English be selected on merit or the colour of the author’s skin? asks Clarissa Hard in the Spectator.
- “England as it really is” – England is becoming less English and more like America in all the wrong ways, argue Joshua Treviño and Kristen Ziccarelli in the Critic.
- “Carl Beech ruined my life – and I wasn’t even told when he was released from prison” – In the Telegraph, Harvey Proctor – falsely accused by Carl Beech – says the justice system has ignored victims like him even after Beech’s release.
- “It is effectively a paywall on justice” – On X, Rupert Lowe throws his support behind a petition to make all court transcripts free of charge.
- “Labour are planning to bring in a new law to enable peers to be stripped of their titles. But it won’t just be Lord Mandelson who gets the chop” – Watch Toby in the Free Speech Union podcast explaining why he’s worried about Labour’s new law to allow peers to be denuded of their titles.
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“Reform leader Nigel Farage would end WFH culture, insisting people are ‘more productive being with other fellow human beings’”
But how will the worker manage to do the school runs, a bit of shopping, an episode or two of Homes under the Hammer, and walk the dog if they’re in the office..? We used to get worried about the work/life balance, but for many it has become the life/work balance.
(Cue – “I work from home and I’m much more productive, etc etc “)
Working from home, if it’s to be done properly, requires a great deal more discipline than I had but, from those I know who do it, the danger appears to be not that life takes over from work but rather that work takes over from life.
My daughter is frequently still working at 10 at night and those she works for think nothing of texting, emailing or even phoning during evenings and weekends.
I don’t see the appeal myself, but then I’m old school, I guess?
‘The State…is a(n) entity for securing the political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation..man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation…’ Who wrote that? The government should have no role in dictating to individuals or companies the way in which they organise themselves and their lives. If individuals are not productive in their chosen mode of working, they are unlikely to prosper. The same is true of companies. Goldman Sachs has an official corporate policy of full-time office work. Citigroup is encouraging a hybrid model of mixed office/WFH working, incentivising its staff to work in the office by dramatically improving office working conditions. That is what the real world calls ‘competition’. ‘People…(are) more productive being with other fellow human beings and working as part of a team’. So many exceptions to that claim…and also so many areas of work where it holds true. With regard to the public sector, the stultifying clock watching ‘look busy’ culture of certain Whitehall departments is not a work model to which to aspire. Systemic reform of Whitehall is, without question, required. Mr Farage is running for… Read more »
Yes, Neil, I work from home and I’m much more productive like that.
There are always exceptions to any rule. Some do, some don’t, but even in the replies there are people who don’t, but also a warning about work and home bleeding together at the edges. I know several people who would happily work 9-5, yet find themselves in a juggle especially at the beginning of the day, and at the end of the day, They are doing bits of work, email, etc as the family is getting ready to go about its day, and especially in the evening, where people are expected to respond to the email or the text from colleagues or boss no matter what time it may be. You end up in a work/home hybrid where you are never 100% working, but never 100% not working either. I guess I’ve been doing this myself for 30 years, but then I am the boss, and as I am the business its normal. I don’t expect to have sub-minute responses or indeed any responses from staff outside office hours. Then there’s the other part of just normal social contact, and also business for the local sandwich shop and so on. Anyway as I hinted, I think Nigel is just dropping… Read more »
Personally I enjoyed being able to go into an office, meet and talk to other people if only about football; and would have hated only corresponding by phone/internet
I work from home and I’m much more productive. How about you? I help run a business that works mainly remotely since lockdowns and we are more profitable than ever.
“But how will the worker manage to do the school runs...”
Speaking personally, this morning with coffee I have checked a few things from overnight processes, and have a puzzling issue that I will most likely be thinking about while I do my early morning skate, then back online. But I don’t have to be present all the time. We have others who do operational support and work shifts and they don’t have that luxury. That’s life. Some of my colleagues prefer to work solidly and then switch off – I can’t/don’t do that. We’re all different.
Is there evidence people are less productive working from home? Where there is, management and leadership need to be sorting that out, either with sanctions and incentives or maybe some people need to be told to come to the office. But do I really want to employ people whose shoulders I need to look over all the time to make sure they are doing a good job?
As I’ve said elsewhere, WFH demands better discipline than I have/had.
That said, almost anything would be more productive than the daily four hour plus commute I used to endure, stacked in various drains, trains and automobiles, however enticing the buffet car and its offer of a microwaved pasty may have been.
Discipline or passion. You’d hope most employees have a dose of both though clearly that will vary with the job you are doing. For those that it doesn’t suit, we pay for a very expensive rather nice central London office in a pleasant area close to transport- the cost is borne by all of us (we are employee owned). I do worry about the physical and psychological effects on some –
people who don’t have company/nice houses/activities to do where they live. But I am not their mum.
As with all things, it is wrong to generalise. Some people can work effectively from home and others can’t.
But I do worry about how the next generation will know how to work from home if they don’t have some sort of “apprenticeship” working alongside more experienced people.
We’ve trained newbies remotely. But other jobs/firms/people may be different.
What does “alongside” mean?
…
If I want to be a carpenter, I can either teach myself, and/or by standing physically with an experienced carpenter in his workshop with his machines and tools.
If I want to be a computer programmer, I can either teach myself, and/or by screensharing with an experienced programmer while we each sit in our respective homes at our respective computers.
Civil servants should definitely not be allowed to work from home, they are paid for by the people to serve the people, and should do as instructed..servant..being the operative word. The private sector is up to the the private sector!
And of course, manual labour employees can never work from home, and that’s a lot of the workforce!
Personally, I appreciated the discipline of a manual labour working life
“Starmer’s former spin doctor suspended over links to sex offender”
Another one? I’ll ask again… how happy are we that Carl Beech’s claims of a paedophile ring ‘in high places’ are entirely the fiction they were found to be as a result of the Met’s investigation in Operation Midland? 🤔
“Labour are planning to bring in a new law to enable peers to be stripped of their titles. But it won’t just be Lord Mandelson who gets the chop”
In a system where political parties reward those useful to them, in order to stuff the upper chamber with sympathisers to their cause and ease the passage of their programme – something which will be used to thwart anything Reform might wish to do, incidentally, this is a given, surely?
“The problem with ‘diversifying’ English literature”
Well, Shakespeare was a black woman apparently, so should be safe…
“Labour’s 1976 leadership candidates were intellectual giants. Now we have pygmies”
It’s not just Labour, is it? Frankly, if you were to trawl through the lot of them, you’d be pressed to find a handful you’d finance to run a whelk-stall.
I blame the EU which, over fifty years, made national conviction politics less and less relevant as parliament increasingly became a rubber stamp exercise…
It’s also, posssibly, a factor that almost all of them at that time had seen action in the war and/or had directly lost friends and family during that time.
The role of the EU in this is somewhat overstated. The Blob has used a number of levers over the years to increase the power of the civil service and lawyers at the expense of our elected parliamentary representatives. The elected politicians were effectively manipulated through various carrots and sticks to go along with it all.
The ceding of more and more of our sovereign powers to the EU was just another facet of the same process, whereby the electorate was blind-sided as to who was actually pulling the strings. (As others have suggested elsewhere, the EU was often simply a vehicle for implementing the wider plans of the unelected and unaccountable UNECE, which is itself at the beck and call of various powerful lobbyists.)
Cause or effect?
I think, perhaps, we’d argue the same point from different positions… the results though, concerning the paucity of talent in the body politic, remain the same.
Coincidentally, there’s another piece here today, by James Alexander, which tackles this very matter.
“Stop discouraging first cousin marriage, NHS staff told”
Told by whom, and why? These things are allowed to take hold, because nobody is identified and held individually responsible for their activism.
“How Sweden defied liberal outrage to smash the gangs”
An interesting, and telling, juxtaposition between this story, and the one that precedes it:
“US rejects British pleas to allow Hamas to keep weapons”
The liberals are in charge… no wonder we won’t stop the boats.
What is it that makes these people so very keen to burn down their own houses while they are in them, I wonder?
Tuesday Morning Aborfield
“England is becoming less English and more like America in all the wrong ways”
More like America!? ..if only!
More like India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Congo and the Islamic state..but definitely not America!
Good job people don’t work from home on the buses, in shops, preparing and delivering stuff.
For those that really want to understand what is going on in the world this short article by Tom Armstrong at Freespeech Backlash explains it all.
All the strands neatly brought together.
Brilliant.
“The Grand Unifying Theory of Woke and Globalist Ideology”
https://www.freespeechbacklash.com/article/grand-unifying-theory-woke-and-globalist-ideology#:~:text=The%20Grand%20Unifying%20Theory%20of%20Woke%20and%20Globalist%20Ideology
“Starmer’s former spin doctor suspended over links to sex offender”
I’ve been wondering where all of Epstein’s vast wealth has gone, since he supposedly stepped off this mortal coil, but here’s something interesting:
Jeffrey Epstein’s Secret Bank Account Is Still Moving Millions and No One Knows Why
“A judge in the Virgin Islands has declared “there is no explanation” for why millions of dollars have been moving between one of Jeffrey Epstein’s secret bank accounts after his alleged death.”
Did Virginia guifffre really commit suicide? February 7, 2026
“No source in the provided reporting includes a coroner’s final report, an autopsy released to the public, or a completed Major Crime file, so the assertion that she “died by suicide” rests on family statements and early police characterizations rather than a publicly available, final legal finding; consequently, while media consensus and official preliminary statements point to suicide, the formal, conclusive determination awaited coroner’s findings that are not present in these sources.”
Haven’t you heard? He has a “brother”…