Daniel Bell

Another socialist policy backfiring, when will @RachelReevesMP be reshuffled out of the cabinet?

This is a Britain-specific problem. via @julianHjessop

I don't know what school this is, but unless the headteacher has invited a Reform UK politician (and others) to rebut this disinformation and to give a balancing view, this electioneering is a blatant contravention of Part V, Chapter IV, Sections 406-7 of the Education Act 1996.

@KarlTurnerMP @timspencer1 @BiztheBuz @BorisJohnson He is literally stood there in a picture with his niece…. 🙄

@timspencer1 @BiztheBuz Nobody told @BorisJohnson how many kids he has. 🤷🏼‍♂️

I’m sick to death of the right wing press to be honest. I suspect that Keir didn’t even know he had a niece and this wouldn’t have crossed his desk. Why is he getting the blame for selections that he has absolutely no involvement with whatsoever? 🤷🏼‍♂️

“Apprehending violent and dangerous criminals is a full contact and messy task which may appear shocking to observers with little experience of policing in the real world.” Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley writes to Zack Polanski.

Keir Starmer perfectly summing up Keir Starmer

“The Prime Minister lied. It’s now in the national interest he goes.” Keir Starmer’s words…not ours. We’re only holding him to the standards he set himself.

When Labour won the general election Rachel Reeves promised ‘a new era for economic growth’. Growth, she declared, was her “number one mission.” She vowed to “fix Britain’s economic foundations” and make “every part of the country better off.” Today, that promise lies in tatters. The UK has just been slapped with the biggest growth downgrade in the G7 - a damning verdict on the Chancellor’s record. On a per-person basis, the International Monetary Fund (@IMFNews) say our growth prospects for this year are now bottom of the table. Far from leading a new era of prosperity, Britain is now lagging behind because of Rachel Reeves’ choices. It’s an utter humiliation for the self-styled ‘Iron Chancellor’. And Reeves can’t say she wasn’t warned. From the very start, the signs were there. Her first Budget didn’t back business - it battered it. A National Insurance hike that punished job creators. Business rate increases that squeezed the life out of hospitality. And now, the looming threat of the first fuel duty rise in 15 years. One bad decision might be misfortune but this is a pattern. What we’re seeing now is the inevitable result of Labour’s mistakes. Inflation driven higher. Unemployment heading skyward. Businesses closing their doors. Families feeling poorer. Britain stuck with the highest inflation in the G7 just as a fresh shock hits our economy from the conflict in the Middle East. And still Reeves and Ed Miliband refuse to row back on their net zero obsession that leaves us reliant on imported energy while our own oil and gas sits untapped. Incredibly, Reeves is telling the world to “follow my plan”. But why would anyone want to replicate what she has done to Britain’s economy? Because if this is the blueprint, it’s a masterclass in how to stall an economy. Tax more. Spend more. Get poorer. It’s not just misguided - it’s economically illiterate. The truth is simple. You cannot tax your way to growth. You cannot regulate your way to prosperity. And you certainly cannot rebuild confidence by hammering the very businesses that create jobs and wealth in the first place. Reeves must own this. Every downgrade, every closure, every squeezed household budget - it all traces back to choices made in Downing Street. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Under Kemi Badenoch, the @Conservatives offer a better path - one built on backing business and those who work. We would rein in the ballooning welfare bill, get more people into work, drill the North Sea and restore discipline to the public finances. We would back British business, not bash it - cutting taxes, easing the burden of regulation, and unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit that has always driven this country forward. Because Britain’s best days can still lie ahead of us. What’s needed now isn’t more of Rachel Reeves’s failed plan. It’s a change of direction, a return to sound economics, and a government that actually understands how growth happens. The world doesn’t need to follow her plan. International partners need to see Rachel Reeves as a cautionary tale of what happens when a politician does not understand the economy or business.

Starmer wanted to surrender British sovereignty. We said no. And Britain is much safer for it.

@jdpoc @ltg1810 But it’s the example that Kemi has used- her maths is correct on this one!

@ltg1810 This is one example, and it’s an outlier. It is not representative of all the four-day week schemes currently being operated, all of which have been successful, and where 92% of employers have stated that they will continue the practice.

4x10 hour days is 40 hours, just the same as 5x8 hour days. This is the ‘Leader of the Opposition’. And she can’t do basic mathematics.

When it comes to defence, Keir Starmer is all talk and no trousers. The Defence Investment Plan is nine months late. We literally have no plan for rearming our country - no plan for our equipment and munitions purchases. This is a national scandal.

Under this Government, energy bills have gone up - and the war in the Middle East could see them climb even higher. Yet Ed Miliband still refuses to use our oil and gas reserves in the North Sea. He says that it wouldn't make a difference, but that's nonsense. Here's why 👇 First, some context on the North Sea. As a country, we’re exceptionally fortunate to have vast oil and gas reserves under the North Sea. If we actually used them, they would be enough to meet half of our needs. The Jackdaw gas field alone has enough gas to heat 1.6 million homes, and could be up and running in a few months. But because of this Government’s obsession with Net Zero, they’ve refused to grant any new exploration licenses, meaning that companies aren’t allowed to search for new oil and gas reserves in previously untapped areas. They’re also refusing to let companies extract more oil and gas from the reserves that we already know about. Instead, they’re spending huge sums of money on intermittent forms of energy, like wind and solar, which don’t work all year round, and which can’t insulate us from shocks like the one that will result from the war in the Middle East. People like Miliband say that there’s no point using these reserves, because doing so won’t bring down prices. They say that the price of oil and gas is set entirely on the international market, which means that increasing our domestic supply would only have a tiny impact on the overall price. But this is totally misleading. First of all, let’s look at gas. It’s true that there are ‘benchmark’ prices for gas internationally. They’re based on the global level of supply and demand. If the supply goes up but demand stays the same, or falls, the benchmark price will come down. If the supply drops but demand stays the same, or increases, then the benchmark price will go up. But this is a rough, international rule-of-thumb. It doesn’t mean that all consumers pay the same price everywhere in the world. After all, if that were the case, then why do American consumers pay so much less than British consumers? To understand how gas is actually priced, you have to look at the two main ways that gas moves around the world. The first way is through pipelines. These are mostly used for moving gas over relatively short distances. Generally, the buyer and seller will negotiate a price structure, and maintain that agreement over a long time. But increasingly, the gas market relies on LNG - liquefied natural gas. This is gas which is turned into a liquid, loaded on ships, and transported globally. Ships can be directed to whoever is able to offer the best price. The further those ships have to travel, the more expensive it becomes to deliver the gas. So, if we’re relying on gas imports from a long way away, we’ll need to spend more money to bring that gas to the UK. That’s what’s happening at the moment. We currently import about half of the gas that we consume, meaning that we need to bid with other countries for the gas on ships that are travelling around the world. Michael Cembalest of JP Morgan puts it very well: “Unlike oil markets, natural gas pricing is more localised…the majority of natural gas is consumed by countries that produce it…European pipeline/LNG prices are spiking…in contrast, US Henry Hub natural gas prices have barely budged…the same is true in Australia and Canada which also produce a lot of gas.” The vast majority of homes in the UK – 87 percent – use gas for heating. If we produced more gas domestically, then it would be cheaper to buy gas, because it wouldn’t have to travel as far – meaning that heating bills would, in fact, come down. It would also make us more resistant to shocks. If we lost access to gas from the Middle East, for example, we’d be able to rely on the gas that we produce domestically. So not only would bills come down, but we’d also avoid sudden increases to bills as a result of falling supply elsewhere in the world. The oil market operates a little bit differently, but it’s just as important. 97 percent of transport in the UK - cars, lorries, planes - relies on oil products, including petrol and diesel. If fuel prices increase for these companies, it becomes more expensive for them to transport goods that we all need - like food, or clothes. In order to cover their transport costs, companies will need to put up their prices. So when oil prices go up, it not only makes it more expensive for you to drive your car - it also makes it more expensive to buy everything else. The oil price is genuinely determined by the level of supply and demand around the world. However, that doesn’t mean that producing more oil in this country couldn’t bring down prices here in Britain. The companies which extract oil pay a huge amount of tax - more than £350 billion since the 1970s. If they’re able to extract more oil in this country, they’ll make more money selling it, which means that they’ll pay more tax. And the money from that tax can be used to reduce the price that consumers pay for oil. That’s because, when you pay for oil at the petrol station, 55 percent of the money that you spend actually goes to the Government in tax. In particular, whenever you buy petrol, you pay VAT and Fuel Duty. The Government want to put up Fuel Duty, which will mean that you pay more for petrol, at a time when the global price of oil is already increasing. But if we let companies drill for more oil in the North Sea, we could spend the extra tax money that we’d raise on keeping Fuel Duty down. It could save you hundreds of pounds. And it would also mean that the companies which transport goods like food and clothes would pay less too. They wouldn’t need to put up their prices, so you’d save money on the things that you buy every day. Miliband’s claims about oil and gas just aren’t true. If we extracted more oil and gas from the North Sea, we could end up with lower household bills, lower petrol prices, and less sudden price increases on everyday essentials. It would make us all better off. But his obsession with Net Zero ideology means that Miliband would rather leave the oil and gas in the ground. He’s choosing to make us all poorer.

Let’s see who agrees with me on drilling in the North Sea: Rachel Reeves ✅ The GMB Union ✅ RenewableUK ✅ Tony Blair ✅ Octopus Energy ✅ Great British Energy ✅ But not the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband ❌ Keir Starmer…? I sense a U-turn (unless Ed Miliband is really running the govt!)

My Conservative Party will Get Britain Drilling 🇬🇧

'If he's creating a support package, that's going to be done with taxpayers' money' Kemi Badenoch was critical of Starmer's plans to address rising energy bills ahead of his chairing of a Cobra meeting on Monday 'I'm very concerned that everything they touch they make worse'

@JulianEllacott @MelJStride @NeilDotObrien Very sensible!

Interesting idea (@MelJStride @NeilDotObrien) 🤔 observer.co.uk/news/business/…

I stand with our allies in the US and Israel as they take on the threat of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its vile regime. The same regime that carries out attacks on the UK and on our citizens, that seeks to build nuclear weapons that would threaten our country and that brutally repressed pro-democracy protests only months ago and murdered thousands of its own people. Under my leadership, the Conservative Party will always put our national security first and work with our allies to make the world a safer place.

A statement on the Gorton and Denton by-election result.

If voters in Gorton and Denton want an MP who fights for what she believes, has enormous integrity and an exemplary record of public service, they should vote Conservative and for the brilliant Charlotte Cadden today.

@mcrstuart @ClaireCoutinho @WiltsAnnabelle @Charlotty That’s why it says ‘a pit stop’

@ClaireCoutinho @WiltsAnnabelle @Charlotty That statue isn’t in Gorton or Denton, it’s in St Mary’s Square, central Manchester M2. Gorton is M18 and Denton is M34. Miles away.

Thoroughly enjoyed campaigning in Gorton and Denton for the amazing Charlotte Cadden (including a pit stop with Emmeline Pankhurst). She served her country for thirty years in the police, she is courageous and principled, we need more people in politics like @Charlotty