Farage and the Stamp Duty surcharge

Responding to a suggestion that he wasn’t properly representing voters in Clacton, Nigel Farage told Sky News in November last year that ‘he’ had exchanged contracts on a house in the constituency. This was, I assume, a casual lie that seemed to him perfectly acceptable at the time. The Guardian revealed in May that it wasn't true. The property was registered in the name of his partner, Laure Ferrari.  The story got little traction at the time. Then, Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and deputy Labour leader, was forced to resign over accusations she had deliberately avoided paying £40,000 in stamp duty owed for second and subsequent homes.  Farage has described her actions as morally indefensible.

Trump, ICE and grifting

Governments go to extraordinary lengths to attract foreign inward investment. It means bringing jobs and prosperity to often extremely deprived areas without laying out a cent of taxpayers' money. It’s additional funding over and above whatever the government was planning to spend. Trump is keen to see foreign firms investing in America, albeit by employing strong-arm tactics and the use of massive tariffs. How often have we heard him say, “make your products in the USA and you don’t pay tariffs” or words to that effect.  He’s recently been on TV in his press conferences, boasting about how he has forced global companies to pledge huge sums in manufacturing investment for US states.

Let's be honest, Farage IS headed for No 10

A lot can happen between now and the next general election, but I think we need to start taking seriously the idea that Nigel Farage could easily be the next British Prime Minister. If someone had suggested this last year, I would have thought them completely barmy. Now it’s odds on. Even the BBC has published a piece by Professor Sir John Curtice examining the current state of the parties and musing about Farage on the steps of No 10. The prospect terrifies me, I must admit, but we tend to follow the USA, and everything points to the phenomena that propelled Trump to the presidency (twice!) happening here eventually.

The hypocrisy of Nigel Farage

If the UK had a national award for hypocrisy, Nigel Farage would win it hands down. As he appeared before the US Senate Judiciary committee at the request of its Republican members on the topic of free speech being suppressed in Britain, journalists were coming forward to complain that they were banned from attending his party’s annual conference. In Nottingham, where Reform UK is now the ruling party, its councillors have been told not to speak to local reporters from the Nottingham Evening Post. It’s a safe bet the bans are down to fear of what they might say afterward and for no other reason.  Farage actually compared Britain unfavorably to North Korea (as did The Daily Mail yesterday)!

Trump drives India into the arms of China

John Bolton was Trump’s National Security Adviser in his first term, one of four that the president appointed. He lasted from April 2018 to September 2019 when he got fired. Bolton has subsequently become one of Trump’s most persistent and vociferous critics in the media and he's in Trump’s sights as the raid on his house in the last few weeks showed. Few people know Trump better, or understand foreign affairs better. He is no liberal, and most commentators would have seen him as a foreign policy hawk. I want you to listen to a clip of an interview Bolton gave to Sky News yesterday.

Trump's tariffs suffer a legal defeat

A US Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling by the US International Court of Trade that most of Trump’s tariffs are unlawful and have been imposed by him without any legal authority.  The judgement is 127 pages long and gives the administration until mid-October to challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court, which I assume they will do. A post on Trump’s social media platform described the Appeals court as “highly Partisan.” I’m not convinced Trump actually wrote the post since it doesn’t contain any spelling mistakes, all-caps rants or mangled grammar. It looks like someone is trying to emulate his style but isn’t quite stupid enough. More on this below.

Appeasing Trump will be America's undoing

The Heritage Foundation and the men behind Project 2025 are certainly warming to the task of dismantling the American administrative state, exactly as they promised. A tracker is keeping tabs on progress and claims the Trump administration is nearly halfway to meeting all of the 317 goals set out in the ‘mandate for leadership’, with 1240 days to go before his term is supposed to end. A total of 116 have been completed, while another 63 are in progress.  All six objectives for overseas aid have already been met 100% for example. Objectives for The White House are 92% complete.

Farage's final solution

Farage is a dangerous man. I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to suggest that he has caused more damage to this country’s wealth and well-being than any man since Adolph Hitler. And I won’t even mention the damage to Britain’s standing in Europe, which is almost incalculable. His press conference yesterday was an absolute disgrace with echoes of Germany circa 1933. Farage - a man who could be the prime minister in three or four years - pledged to deport upwards of 600,000 immigrants using a new law which Reform UK intends to pass: the Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill. He isn’t even trying to disguise the purpose in a vague title; it’s quite explicit.

Farage is following in Trump's footsteps

The other day, someone said every nation has crazy people like Donald Trump, but they're usually held in check by systems and institutions, and most of them never get elected in the first place. America’s failure is in the democratic system itself. The three pillars of government have been subverted by Trump and his cohort, with the willing, if sometimes grudging, acceptance of a majority in Congress and the judiciary. And that majority, along with the idiot himself, was voted into office by millions of ordinary Americans; there is no getting away from that. The fourth estate has been corrupted by wealth and isn’t working as it should to hold the executive to account. 

Trump has turned the Oval Office into a dementia home

The last couple of years of my mother-in-law’s life were spent in a dementia care home. Visits involved a lot of conversational repetition and meeting random people with weird, unbelievable stories relayed with all seriousness as if they were actors reading a script in a Monty Python sketch. They lived in a completely different world, often believing they were still at home or about to go to work or pop out for a bit of shopping. It was sometimes hard not to laugh. You felt you had to play along with them and join in on the understanding that we were all in their parallel universe. Trump’s press conference yesterday had a similar feel.