POLITICS in the UK has been a lot livelier than the economy, the prospects of which under this Labour administration look increasingly deathly. But has all that MSM and establishment excitement over Labour’s freefall into chaos a year on – revolting back benches and tearful front ones – been all ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’?
Two British politicians are doing their best to signify something the MSM predictably has little time for. They are Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe MP. On consecutive days they made two important announcements. The first was the launch of a new political party called Advance UK, positioned to the right of Reform UK, and the second a new political movement, Restore UK.
The latter is the baby of the former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe who insisted it was not a new political party and encouraged people to join. On its social media page, Restore Britain has expressed support for net-negative immigration, for reinstating the death penalty, for banning the burqa and niqab in public, defunding the BBC and deporting all illegal aliens. It pledges to initiate private prosecutions, legal challenges, and judicial reviews, as well as launch a DOGE-like task force to ‘expose government waste’.
It says: ‘As a member of Restore Britain, you will have the opportunity to vote on the policies and principles that you believe in. With this data, we will put pressure on the Government and other political parties to recognise and act on the will of the British people. Initial policies will be released over the coming weeks to be approved by you, our members.’
Just twelve hours after its launch, the Restore Britain X account had accumulated more than 50,000 followers.
Ben Habib’s new party, Advance UK, is similarly committed to direct democracy. He launched it on X where he was, in reply, congratulated by Elon Musk. At the bottom of quite a long statement you can watch his video message.
Advance UK’s mission statement by comparison with Restore is more ‘principle’-based than action-based. But they are compatible and would seem to offer two sides of the same coin.
You can watch Rupert Lowe being interviewed about his new political movement by Mahyar Tousi here.
And you can watch Mahyar interviewing Ben Habib here.
Britain’s broken economy is impossible to escape. Always brilliant Daniel Jupp gives a new insight into Reeves’s tears and Labour’s economic policy charade that disguises its punishment of ordinary voters as the Government serves other interests.
The brutal fact is that Britain is about to go broke, if it is not already. Economics and finance ‘educator’ Alasdair Macleod explains why he thinks that Britain is on the verge of bankruptcy. In his view, the rising and unfunded welfare obligations which are leading to financial collapse in Britain should be a lesson for all G7 nations. There is no escape, he says.
Given this impending catastrophe, the question that intrigues the chatterati – is Starmer on his way out? – is discussed by the Duran.
Is the US economy in any better shape? Will Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, so denigrated by Elon Musk, make it better or worse? Musk, who formerly led Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), began his public spat with the administration and Republicans in general over the Bill which slashed billions of dollars in electric vehicle (EV) tax credits. He has backed a post by Senator Rand Paul who said the Bill’s budget ‘explodes the deficit’ and continues a pattern of ‘short-term politicking over long-term sustainability’.
One of the ideas behind the Big Beautiful Bill is to boost American energy production at the same time as ending Biden’s onerous policies that stifled domestic energy production, meaning an end to solar and wind subsidies too.
The best summary in my opinion of what the Bill does and doesn’t do is this article in ZeroHedge by Philip Marey, a senior US strategist at Rabobank. He goes through the tax cuts and the extra spending, a raised debt limit to $5trillion and a gloomy view of its impact on the US growth trajectory. He writes, however, that it marks a victory of the MAGA movement over the two traditional wings of the Republican Party, the fiscal hawks and the foreign policy hawks
Helena Glass says the Bill will drive the US economy into the abyss.
Meanwhile Trump’s foreign policy also risks getting mired. A Gatestone Institute article by Lawrence Kadish warns that Qatari involvement in the running of the Gaza Strip will be nothing short of disastrous. Trump’s idea of making Gaza into an American Riviera, together with Israel, is a far more dependable way to guarantee security.
The Gatestone Institute is also worried about Iran, saying its terrorist regime is wounded, not dead.
Lena Petrova remains undecided about the effectiveness of Trump’s policy towards Iran. Deal or deception, she asks.
Europe is not without its political ups and downs too.
The former Irish MEP and militant leftist Clare Daly caused a bit of stoClare Dalyrm in the EU parliament to which she returned recently to deliver a searing critique of the EU’s crackdown on dissent, in which she warned that the labelling of dissent as ‘propaganda’ is silencing critical voices and suppressing democratic debate. In her explosive speech, Daly defended past remarks that the war in Ukraine is a ‘Nato proxy war’ and that EU sanctions are punishing European citizens more than Russia.
Storm clouds are gathering over the Spanish government. Hard on the heels of a major corruption scandal, Pedro Sanchez’s party reshuffle has been overshadowed by new sexual harassment allegations. So far the jury is out on whether this will bring down the coalition government, but the run of events has undoubtedly weakened an already beleaguered Sanchez. He is said to be fighting for survival as the crisis reaches fever pitch.
All this comes against a background of chaos in Spain where last week crowds were shot at, beaten and kicked by police outside a migrant centre near Madrid after a 21-year-old Malian man was accused of raping a Spanish girl.
And finally – cloud seeding, the Kerr County floods and what the science shows.
Following the catastrophic July 4 flash floods in Kerr County, Texas which have claimed over 100 lives, speculation has turned to Rainmaker, a private firm engaged in cloud seeding, as the supposed instigator. ‘Amuse’ on 𝕏 admits that the theory sounds tantalising: ‘a high-tech plane, a deliberate act, and a short causal chain from silver iodide to tragedy’. However the facts, ‘when assembled and analyzed rigorously’, don’t back up this narrative. In an article in American Liberty News ‘Amuse’ states that not only was Rainmaker’s final seeding operation ‘far removed in both time and space from the eventual storm, but the physics of cloud seeding, the direction of water flow, and the sheer volume of the rainfall make any connection logically and scientifically untenable’. Also there were no flights. His evidence of ‘no foul play’ is comprehensive, detailed and convincing. But don’t trust me. You can decide for yourselves if you read the rest of the article here whether the argument adds up. But what is indisputable that inter alia the researcher reveals is the considerable number of rainmaking (or rain enhancement as they call it) projects operational across the State. Itself food for thought.
