Chris Whiteside for the North

 

I welcome the belated conversion of Cumbria's leading Labour figures to calling for exactly the sort of devolution agenda that I and other Conservatives have been calling for for a decade, and which the county could have had years ago, had not local Labour politicians repeatedly opposed it. We now read in the Whitehaven News and other local papers that " Labour leaders call for Cumbria to embrace the 'devolution revolution' ." What a shame they were so vehemently opposed to it in 2017 and 2022 when a very generous scheme of devolution was on offer, but the Labour led Cumbria County Council and other Labour local authorities opposed it. Other areas like North Yorkshire which were made similar offers at the same time jumped at it, and North Yorkshire got £700 million pounds and a Mayoral strategic authority which is now up and running with significant powers. Cumbria could have had this too. A few years ago I was a guest on the weekly local political panel programme...

No apologies for repeating this important piece of wisdom.  

The Times newspaper was once nicknamed "The Thunderer" for its' willingness to publish hard-hitting leader articles which put the boot into anyone who deserved it, from the government down. The paper's first leader of 2025 is in that mould. It addresses Elon Musk's criticism of the anti-business policies of the Starmer adminisration and concludes, rightly in my humble opinion, that although not everything Musk says about Britain is accurate, the fundamentals of his critique of Starmer's anti-business approach are spot on. The paper says that "His numerous detractors will be pained to admit it but Mr Musk is, on this, right. Sir Keir's government has claimed to be unashamedly pro-growth and pro-business. The reality could not be starker. During it's first six months in office, ministers have seemingly gone out of their way to discourage investment." "Mr Musk's attack grasps all that wrong with the Starmer government. instead of embrac...

 

 Forty years ago today, at the end of a year which had been bad for a number of reasons which had nothing to do with the novel which made it infamous long before it arrived, my late mother said to me,  "I will be glad to see the back of 1984." So was I, but I will be even more glad to see the back of 2024. Let's work together to make 2025 better.

 

  "How do you know whether a politician is actually going to do what it is they say they'll do?    You can only look back on their track record.    Making promises is easy but if you really want to know what someone is going to be like, look at what they did when they had the chance.  I'm speaking to all of you today not just as leader of the Conservative Party, but as a former business secretary.   Many of you would heard me talk about how we needed to deregulate and you would have seen examples of how I tried to lift the burden off businesses often arguing with other parts of Government or trying to stop them bringing in yet more well-meaning but burdensome regulation.   I saw myself in that role as your champion around the Cabinet table.  It is because I know that it is not government that creates growth. It is business.   Government often needs to get out of the way.     But this is a very diff...

"There are few columnists with whom I disagree more than I do with the Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson. Yet, I welcome the decision by the police to drop their investigation into her alleged tweet.  This should never have been a matter for the police." ( Kenan Malik , in an article calling for the right to free speech to be defended regardless of who is expressing their views and who is offended,  I’ll defend Allison Pearson’s right to be obnoxious – as she should defend mine | Kenan Malik | The Guardian )

I posted yesterday about the petition calling for a fresh general election on the grounds that the Labour government has gone back on the promises they made during the election campaign. It was put up a few days ago but suddenly took off yesterday and the number of signatures has been rocketing up over the last 24 hours. Yesterday it passed the 100,000 threshold to be considered for a debate in parliament. This morning it passed the half million mark, early this afternoon three quarters of a million and at twenty to three it stood at 860,573 You can see the current total which by the time anyone reads it will already be higher than shown above, and sign it if you are a UK elector and wish to do so, at Call a General Election - Petitions POSTSCRIPT AT 5PM The number of signatures is now over 1.1 million.

 

Under the rules for online petitions submitted to the House of Commons, if a petition gets 100k signatures it has to be debated in parliament. Well, here's a petition which has bee getting a lot of signatures this evening and hit that milestone in the last hour. As at 9.58 pm this evening the petition and signature count looked like this: You can see the current tally, and sign it if you so wish, at Call a General Election - Petitions

"If you don't try you've already failed." ( Michelle Yeoh , speeking on the BBC's Weekend Woman's Hour this afternoon.) BBC Woman's Hour on Instagram

"Liberals are not the only ones who suffer from blurred vision. But we are especially prone to wishful thinking." Self-confessed liberal  Alan Catzeflis  in an article about the US election result which you can read  here. For the avoidance of doubt I have published this quote because I found Catzeflis's views interesting, not because it represents my own, There was an awful lot of wishful thinking from most of those people on all parts of the political spectrum who were hoping for a different result in that election. The word "liberal" should also be treated with great caution because it can mean diametrically opposite things on different sides of the Atlantic - in Britain to call someone an "economic liberal" usually means that they believe in free markets and a small state while in the USA it usually means the exact reverse. I do think that many people on what you might call the liberal left, on both sides of the Atlantic, are indeed especially pron...

"This, then, is the time for European leaders to take responsibility for their own defence. Sir Keir Starmer should waste no time in announcing a major increase in defence spending. Last week’s Budget is already out of date. The idea that Britain’s armed forces should be further reduced is for the birds. At the very least, the Prime Minister should announce that the UK will immediately move to 2.5 per cent of GDP — a figure for which Rachel Reeves gave no firm timetable. Right now, Poland (a poorer country) is spending twice as much on defence as the Starmer government has even talked about. The Poles have the example of Winston Churchill to heart, while British politicians sound more like Neville Chamberlain. Sir Keir must move fast not only to reassure our Nato allies that Britain is standing firm, but that Ukraine too can count on increased military support. It is vital at this critical moment to send a clear signal to Moscow that the West is not falling apart. On the contrary,...

No party which suffered the sort of defeat the Conservatives went though earlier this year can afford to complacently assume that it is coasting back to power on the basis of a couple of polls with tiny leads, well within the margin of error - no matter how hard the new government is straining every sinew to make everyone who voted for them regret it and has notched up the largest and most catastrophic precipitous drop in support in polling history. Nevertheless, the first poll of Kemi Badenoch's leadership does show a lead over Labour. The Independent reports that "the Conservatives have taken a two-point poll lead over Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in Kemi Badenoch’s first week as leader. The new Tory leader has taken the party to 29 per cent of the vote, according to pollsters More in Common, with Labour behind on just 27 per cent. It is the highest rating for the Conservatives since February. It marks a remarkable fall from grace for Labour, which in July was elected to ...

 

I have just taken part in a very well attended commemoration for Remembrance Sunday in the centre of Egremont. This is not a day for scoring political points: I discussed how well attended the commemoration was with one of the Labour councillors in Egremont and we were both pleased to see so many people old and young and from such a wide variety of community groups and backgrounds there. My wife and I will be attending another ceremony later today at Moor Row memorial at 1pm. We won't have to use the car to get to that one - it's 20 seconds walk from the front door of our flat! As a quote for today here is the Kohima epitaph:

  What is it with Labour governments? The first thing they always do  - is  slam pensioners in the kidneys With Gordon Brown and Tony Blair it was a £5 billion a year raid on pension funds which, as was accurately described by the late Frank Field, one of the few Labour MPs I ever had any time for, transformed Britain from having some of the best-funded peNsions in Europe to one of the worst. With Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, it was adopting a policy on pensions which Labour themselves had argued in opposition would lead to 3,850 pensioner deaths each winter.   The second thing they always do  -  is  bash the countryside With Tony Blair it was crippling policies on small farms combined with the ideological application of a rigid approach to country spots which showed a grave lack of understanding of the countryside. With Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, it's a tax and inheritance policy which appears guaranteed to result in the break-up or cl...