https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/2230105/sadiq-khan-peerage-house-of-lords
Monday, July 20, 2026
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Great Advice From Dan The Man To Our New PM.
From car tax to Chagos, nine ways to boost growth without spending cuts:
Daniel Hannan is President of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and sits in the House of Lords as an independent peer
What can Andy Burnham actually do? He inherits an economy which is, in many ways, still in lockdown. Public sector productivity is below where it was when the pandemic hit. One in four working-age Britons claims to be disabled. We pay more to non-working adults in benefits than we raise from working adults in income tax.
Taxes are higher than since the late 1940s, when we were winding down from full mobilisation; yet, incredibly, we still borrow £23bn a month – half of which goes on paying interest on previous loans.
Indeed, we spend considerably more on servicing past debt than we do on defence. Interest payments are our biggest budget after healthcare and social security. All three are ballooning with nothing to show for it.
The new PM will know by now what is coming in the Autumn budget. I shouldn’t be surprised if he calls a snap election rather than having to face the country as a Labour PM who was forced into cuts. Yes, I know Burnham has ruled out an early poll, but so did Theresa May and Boris Johnson, right up to the moment when they called one.
Let’s assume, though, that Burnham is telling the truth when he says he won’t go to the polls yet. What, then, are his options?
What, to be more precise, can he realistically do to restore growth without alienating his MPs and his core electorate? There is no point in urging him to slash spending, in the way that Margaret Thatcher is imagined to have done. His whole shtick is that he hates Thatcherism. The Iron Lady may have taken Britain from being the slowest-growing economy in Europe in the 1970s to the fastest-growing in the 1980s, but Burnham will never let anyone accuse him of copying her.
Nor is there much purpose in pointing out that public spending has shot up since his first election to Parliament in 2001 ,from 35 per cent of GDP to 44 per cent. If Burnham sees that rise as “neoliberalism”, our definitions are so far apart that meaningful dialogue is difficult. Plainly, the new PM is not going to shrink the state. Nor is he going to privatise healthcare or scrap net zero or reduce the civil service payroll or do any of the things that would properly kick-start growth. What, then, does that leave?
I want Britain to succeed – which necessarily means wanting Burnham to succeed. So I asked my brilliant boffins at the Institute of Economic Affairs to suggest ways that the new PM could stimulate growth in ways that are compatible with what he calls his unashamed Labour values – in other words, without cutting public spending.
Here is what we have come up with – nine ideas to expand the private sector without shrinking the government, nine policies that can be implemented by the end of the year without costing the Treasury a penny.
- Release green-belt land within walking distance of railway stations. That change alone would free up space for two million homes, which would significantly bring down the cost of living. The savings people made would then drive growth in every other sector. Burnham made the case for green-belt release as mayor of Greater Manchester. Within weeks, he could amend the National Planning Policy Framework to designate some land as “grey belt”. Since much of that land, even now, is represented by Tory MPs, it would have the added bonus of dividing the Opposition.
- Raise nursery staffing ratios to European levels. One of the major constraints on growth is the cost of childcare, which prevents young parents from taking jobs. Although defenders of the regulation claim that it is about safety, the truth is that it is a racket whereby existing providers raise barriers against possible competitors.
- Remove identifiably useless regulations. The Nuclear Regulatory Task Force proposed 47 changes to streamline the rules and clear away needless stipulations. All 47 proposals have been accepted, paving the way for the generation of clean and reliable energy. Why not take the same approach across the board – from financial services to planning? Lift the rocks and let the grass grow.
- Lure back non-doms. Ministers have been privately shocked by the amount of revenue that has been lost as mobile wealth-creators have migrated to friendlier tax jurisdictions. This is a change Labour can make more easily than other parties, because no one accuses it of being in the pockets of foreign plutocrats. Undoing Rachel Reeves’s changes might slow the loss of wealth and wealth creators. But to draw them back in, and boost the Treasury’s receipts, we need to go back to where we were before Jeremy Hunt announced his expensive changes in 2024.
- Park the uncommenced provisions of the Employment Rights Act. Keir Starmer came to understand, too late in the day, that his Employment Bill was going to become an Unemployment Bill. So he paused the more job-destroying elements of it. Dropping those elements permanently will give companies the confidence to hire. Halting the continuing and unaffordable rises in the minimum wage will tackle the crisis that has left a million young people out of work and is killing the hospitality sector.
- Recognise trusted foreign regulators. If a new drug is approved by the European Medicines Agency, or Japan’s Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency, or the US Food and Drug Administration, that should be good enough for us. To sell the policy to the Labour base, explain that it allows us to align with the EU without giving up the freedom to innovate. That should be our approach across the board, not just with medicines. Allow British companies to follow either EU or UK standards: regulatory competition will itself stimulate competitiveness.
- Scrap tariffs on things we don’t produce. I mean, we should scrap tariffs across the board, since they always and everywhere harm the country that imposes them. But voters never believe this, and politicians are never brave enough to explain it to them. Even the most protectionist numbskull, though, will surely struggle to explain why we have tariffs on rice, olive oil, oranges and the like, driving up costs for British firms that import them as raw materials without even any imagined benefit.
- Replace Vehicle Excise Duty with a road charge. We have woven a cat’s-cradle of taxes around vehicles – a levy on owning them, duties on petrol, a new mileage charge for electric cars, various congestion tolls. Burnham says he wants more localism. Well, letting local authorities run their own road pricing schemes is a way for them to raise revenue while ensuring that our transport infrastructure is funded.
- Drop the Chagos Scheme. For a fraction of what Starmer proposed to pay Mauritius, Britain could provide infrastructure for Chagossians to return to their ancestral lands. Quite apart from the monetary saving, the reversal would be a practical realisation of Burnham’s talk of national resilience, his aspiration to govern as a plain-speaking northerner rather than as a human rights lawyer.
I could go on. A Labour government could introduce market mechanisms into the NHS while retaining the principle of free treatment. It could remove benefits from illegal immigrants. It could replace the most expensive elements of the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act. It could do all these things without being accused, as other parties would be, of victimising the vulnerable.
Let’s stick, though, to the reforms that offer the best ratio of effort to outcome. The things that can be secured through simple bills or secondary legislation, where the opposition will be limited, and where the gains are immediate. While these things will not restore the levels of prosperity that we used to take for granted when the state was spending one pound in three rather than one in two, they will at least allow for some growth and ease the immediate pressure.
Will Burnham do any of them? We will know soon enough. And if you want detailed plans on how to do these things with the smallest short-term costs and the largest long-term gains, Prime Minister, the door of the IEA is always open.
Daniel Hannan is director of the Institute of Economic Affairs. DT.
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1 Thessalonians 1. From Paul The Apostle.
4) For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, 5) because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction.
AI: How many more deaths caused by communism than fascism?
AI Overview:
Comparing the death tolls of these two ideologies is heavily debated among historians, making exact numerical comparisons difficult.
The seminal, though debated, The Black Book of Communism attributes roughly \(80\) to \(100\) million deaths to communist regimes (such as the USSR, China, Cambodia, and North Korea) through executions, man-made famines, and forced labour. [1, 2, 3]
Conversely, fascist regimes (primarily Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) are widely estimated to have caused roughly \(40\) to \(50\) million deaths. This figure is largely driven by military casualties and systemic genocides like the Holocaust.
Sunday, July 19, 2026
The Apostles' Creed.
The Apostles' Creed.
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
Philippians 2.
5) In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
6) Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7) rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8) And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
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Clearly, you have not shared my life experiences! (Blogger.)
The hill I will die on: Parisian waiters are not rude – they’re just badly misunderstood.
Grauniad.
Please Support Sarah.
17,000 sign petition in support of sacked pro-life teacher Sarah Morse
“If a teacher can lose their job simply for answering a pupil's question according to their conscience, then every teacher of faith receives the same message: Hide your beliefs - or risk losing your career," says SPUC, which is supporting the teacher. CT.
Not Before Time.
Calls for diversity of opinion to be respected after Ann Widdecombe's death.
Peers called for greater tolerance and respect for differing opinions during tributes to Ann Widdecombe in the House of Lords this week.
UN Warning.
 |
Dear All.
The UN is on the verge of handing power to its most dangerous left-wing activist ever!
The race to lead the UN is happening now, in secret. It’s not televised. It’s barely in the news. But it is a massive threat to your values at home.
The current frontrunner is Chilean politician Michelle Bachelet—a radical feminist and neo-Communist who has spent every day of her career building the very machine that attacks our values.
If elected, she plans to use the UN to push abortion into the UK's laws, gender ideology into your children's schools, speech controls to silence voices like yours and mine, and Agenda 2030 into the decisions your elected officials are supposed to make for themselves.
And scariest of all … the UN’s globalist bureaucrats are desperate to hand her the keys.
This is an absolute disaster in the making for everything you and I stand for.
We are talking about the single biggest, most powerful position in the largest international organization on earth.
As it stands, the UN is already deeply hostile to our values. Can you imagine if Michelle Bachelet takes the wheel?
It will get worse. Much worse.
To fight back, we urgently need your help.
britain@team.citizengo.org
Saturday, July 18, 2026
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Crash, Bang, Wallop?
mike atherton
In Test cricket v Bazball, Test cricket won — and we should be grateful.
It is a perfect endorsement of longest format’s beauty, with its thorough examinations of wit, skill and heart, that simplified approach fell apart — despite a few notable successses. Times.
An Utter Disgrace.
Catholic teacher says she was dismissed after sharing abortion views with students.
A teacher in Scotland has said she was summarily dismissed after telling students that she was personally against abortion.
Scapegoating the Jews.
Astonishingly, in America and Britain, the vilification and scapegoating of Israel through an agenda of malice and mendacity — and with undertones of something even darker — has become a key driver of political life.
US Vice President JD Vance has ramped up his attacks on Israel by channelling anti-Jewish tropes of covert manipulation and warmongering.
TIME magazine has revealed that Israel funded an influence campaign organised by US President Donald Trump’s former presidential campaign manager, Brad Parscale.
Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan: “When I open up the pages of TIME magazine, and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and many of the people who were receiving that money were attacking me in completely dishonest ways, my response to that is, go to hell.”
Parscale denies this interpretation, saying that his campaign was intended to prevent young conservatives from drifting away from Israel but not to turn opinion against Trump’s objectives in the war with Iran.
An anonymous senior US intelligence official told TIME: “We’re talking about American influencers who are being paid by a foreign country, then trying to build momentum to change the president’s view or the views of others around him.”
Not only is there no evidence in the article for this recycled Jewish conspiracy theory, but Vance himself is reportedly close to lobbyists for the Iranian regime. Two years ago, he addressed the Quincy Institute, which Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has described as a “hotbed of pro-Iran lobbying”.
In April, Lee Smith wrote in Tablet magazine that the group of officials, journalists and think-tank experts who formed the Obama administration’s notorious “echo chamber” to give a favorable spin to the 2015 nuclear deal, which would have allowed Iran to develop nuclear weapons with only a few years delay, were trying to pull the same stunt again — this time with “structurally aligned” Vance as America’s lead negotiator pushing things their way.
The more obvious reason for the criticism of Vance is that he’s responsible for a stupid, gullible and dangerous strategy that’s now gone belly-up. He tried to negotiate with a regime whose goal of destroying America and Israel is totally non-negotiable. Vance has chosen to mask his humiliation by the time-dishonored ploy of dumping on the Jews.
This disgusting tactic was also deployed last week by someone who is not only a Jew himself but who uses his father’s record as a Jewish resistance fighter in pre-Israel Palestine to assert his devotion to the State of Israel. He has a strange way of showing it.
In a speech at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to former President Barack Obama, blamed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the fact that Israel had become an international “pariah”.
Netanyahu, said Emanuel, had “sparked a regional war,” denied food and medical relief to innocent Palestinians suffering in Gaza, and presided over a coalition that believed it could “burn Palestinian farmland in the West Bank and terrorise Palestinian families without consequence”.
These were monstrous distortions. Obviously, the war was sparked not by Netanyahu but by the Hamas-led slaughter of 1,200 people in southern Israel and the kidnapping of 251 others on October 7, 2023, which launched a seven-front war against the Jewish state to wipe it off the map.
Israel has not denied food and medical relief to Gaza’s civilians but delivered vast amounts of aid, much of which was stolen by Hamas. As for terrorising Palestinian Arab families, this is a real problem that has been vastly exaggerated and distorted as yet another weapon to demonise and delegitimise Israel.
Such terrorism is being carried out by a few hundred mainly delinquent boys, out of the 500,000 or so overwhelmingly peaceful Israeli residents in these territories — attacks, moreover, that are vastly outnumbered by the thousands of murderous acts of violence by Arabs on these Israeli residents, which Emanuel doesn’t even mention.
That’s because he himself has a fanatical hatred of these Jewish “settlers”. In his speech, he equated “greater Israel” with the chant of “from the river to the sea”.
He thus obscenely equated Jewish residency in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, which Jews alone have the legal and historical right to settle, with the genocidal aim of writing Israel itself off the map.
Telling Dan Senor on his Call Me Back podcast that he only had Israel’s best interests at heart and that the status quo was not an option, Emanuel came up with the same old “two-state solution”.
Refusing to acknowledge that, after October 7, the vast majority of Israelis have rightly concluded that a Palestinian state can never be tolerated because endemic Palestinian Arab hatred of Jews would ensure even more deadly attacks, Emanuel blithely asserted that the solution lay in telling all 21 Arab states to deliver a state of Palestine that posed no threat.
The most charitable thing to say about this is that it’s utterly deluded.
Both Vance and Emanuel have now crossed a number of red lines. They have both suggested that the Israelis only ever want to kill people.
Ignoring Israel’s multiple peace deals with Arab states and its many offers to the Palestinian Arabs of a state of their own, Vance observed about Israel to The New York Times that you “can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national-security problem that you have”.
Instead of acknowledging the obsessional and insane nature of the lies being told about Israel, Vance and Emanuel have actually regurgitated them.
The ugly reality of a Democratic Party that’s now dancing to an anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Islamist tune was on display this week with another visitor to Israel, the possible 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna of California.
In an outrageous PR stunt cooked up with radical Israeli anti-government activists, Khanna made an unauthorised visit to a sensitive area of the “West Bank,” where he claimed to have been detained, harassed and even threatened by Israeli security forces who sided with violent settlers.
As video footage subsequently revealed, there was no violence and no harassment. It was a stunt designed to further the agenda of turning Israel into a pariah state — a situation that Emanuel blames on Netanyahu, but which has actually been created by a poisonous narrative of lies to which both Emanuel and Vance have contributed.
This unconscionable onslaught is now the driver of politics on the Western left and in parts of the American right.
In Britain, Andy Burnham, who next week will become prime minister after a bloodless coup in the governing Labour Party, made a point of threatening further punishment of Israel over Gaza as his first statement on foreign affairs.
This week, he went one stage further. Having refused to spell out to the British public his intentions for government, Burnham gave an interview to podcaster and former sports broadcaster Gary Lineker, who left the BBC after sharing a post about Zionism that depicted a rat—a Nazi image for Jews. When Lineker referred to the “genocide” in Gaza, Burnham conspicuously failed to challenge him.
For Britain’s incoming prime minister to use such an anti-Jewish dog-whistle— and as a priority — is an ominous signal indeed.
The surreal prominence of the Israel issue in domestic politics is due to a poisonous cocktail of factors, including Islamist influence, the dominance of the intersectional left and the West’s loss of its own cultural bearings, including the notion of objective truth.
What’s becoming ever more apparent, however, is that political leaders are scapegoating Israel because things are going wrong for them, both at home and abroad, and they cannot understand why. Refusing to acknowledge what they’re up against, they blame the Jews.
Israel, America’s indispensable ally, is now making plans to develop its own independent weapons supplies and nurture other alliances against the danger of a possibly hostile future US administration.
Emanuel came to Israel to lecture it that it was in danger of losing America. In fact, with the iron having entered the soul of the Jewish state as a result of October 7, America is in danger of losing Israel.
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Franklin Graham preached in Glasgow, launches new fund to defend religious freedom in the UK. Staff writer Franklin Graham preaching at ...
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