Yields on Japan 10Y and UK 30Y haven't been this high since 1996-1997

 

OF COURSE The Grauniad is DELIGHTED with a reinvention of the Odyssey which turns it into an epic ordeal of anguish and postwar disillusion

 ... arriving back to their prewar state emotionally or spiritually . . . may never happen at all ... 

Just like England. Vote Labour.

 

 

 

GILTS at 5% are OK when Labour does it

 UK’s Andy Burnham becomes PM as Trump slams Britain as ‘Poverty Stricken Disaster’

 

 

Two tier Keir calls it quits after the biggest Labour victory in decades in July 2024, had said he wouldn't and would fight

Joe Biden was once king of the heap, too, until his enemies to the left pushed him off.

That's the story in the UK, too, which CNBC doesn't tell you.

Socialist Andy Burnham led the rebellion against Starmer from within the Labour Party.

Burnham is a self-described enemy of British nationalism.

 

UK PM Starmer resigns as Britain faces its seventh leader in 10 years 

... Keir Starmer’s resignation comes almost 10 years to the day since the U.K. voted to leave the European Union. His successor will be the country’s seventh leader in that period, underscoring how political and economic turmoil continue to unsettle British politics long after the Brexit process was concluded.

 ... Starmer’s government was ultimately weakened by dwindling poll ratings, Labour infighting and growing public frustration over its failure to deliver quickly on growth and the cost of living. ...

The UK Labour Party is cracking up as socialist Andy Burnham is set to challenge Starmer

 UK minister says PM Starmer is considering ‘political realities’ amid leadership pressure

... The threat to Starmer’s position, which has been building for months, increased sharply on Friday when former Greater Manchester Mayor Burnham won a seat in parliament that will allow him to launch a formal leadership challenge.

Starmer’s unpopularity was laid bare by the ruling party’s heavy losses in local elections in May, and polls of Labour party members indicate Burnham would win such a contest.

... Starmer has previously said he would stand in any formal Labour Party leadership contest that sought to replace him.

Leadership contenders need to amass the support of 81 Labour members of parliament - a fifth of those sitting - to launch a formal challenge.

Breaking: Two broken clocks right at exactly the same moment!

 

Keir Starmer won't let America use UK bases to conduct actual war against Iran because actual war is a war crime now and he's a girlie man

 

It's embarrassing to have a whiny little baby for president demonstrating everyday that he's not up to the job of being the leader of the free world

 Trump lashes out at UK and France, telling allies ‘the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore’

... “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!,” he concluded. ... For its part, Tehran continues to demonstrate its ability to dominate and derail maritime traffic in the strait, hitting a fully laden Kuwaiti oil tanker in the anchorage area of Dubai’s port earlier Tuesday. 

How come this isn't the end of Starmer's government when it was the end of Truss'?

 

It never occurs to homo Andrew Sullivan that Christianity in Great Britain has already been replaced by, well, himself

 

... The fart in a coffin [his high school classmate, PM Keir Starmer] did his best this week — and survived. Critically, he acknowledged the centrality of mass immigration to the national discourse, the way it has undermined a sense of common culture, undercut wages, begun to replace Christianity with Islam, required ever higher levels of censorship, killed Jews, and turned the cities my grandparents knew into something they wouldn’t even recognize as British. ...

More.

The new archbishop of Canterbury, first among equals of the Church of England, is a woman. And not just any woman, but a self-described liberal, feminist, dyslexic [one of us! one of us!], supporter of fetus-murdering and LGBT. It's not like she's Margaret Thatcher for God's sake.

That's not Christianity. 

How utterly lost is the left, he asks.

How utterly lost is he. 

Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth wants you to know he was just following orders

German General Anton Dostler was executed by firing squad in December 1945 after admitting he ordered the executions of fifteen captured American soldiers in March 1944 because he was ordered to do so by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring.

The latter was convicted in the Ardeatine massacre of hundreds of Italian citizens and sentenced to death in May 1947, but, incredibly, pressure exerted by the sympathetic English, including by Winston Churchill and Harold Alexander, resulted in a commutation of his sentence to life in prison by General John Harding in July 1947.

Kesselring would have died in prison, but even more incredibly was released from there in October 1952 for health reasons, and didn't die until 1960 of a heart attack.

The Kesselring affair is emblematic of the decadent trajectory of the English character still plumbing new depths even today, a trajectory America is also on. At least the Americans of the time dispatched Dostler expeditiously within months of his arrest.

The Italians hated Kesselring about as much as they hated Mussolini.

It's probably too early to guess how Pete will be remembered here. After all, he has crimes to go before he sleeps, and promises to keep.

 

Trump is shoring up UK defenses with B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bombs deployed to U.S. fighter squadrons based there

 The British tabloids have been full of stories about Russian threats to use nuclear weapons against the UK.

 

 

British Conservatives aren't

 

Nigel Farage's UK Reform Party won new majorities in ten regional councils across England in the May 1 elections, stunning Labour and the Conservatives

 ... The races were local. But Reform UK’s unprecedented surge has recast political trends nationwide, sparking panic in Britain’s two major parties while drawing comparisons to the rise of populist movements that have come to power in Europe and the United States.

Reform’s breakthrough included wins in two of four mayoral races the party contested, and the poaching of an open parliamentary seat previously held by the Labour Party. The Conservative Party fared far worse, losing control of 15 county councils and, with them, almost 700 councillors. In all, the two long-dominant parties lost about two-thirds of the 1,600 offices on the ballot, most of them to Reform UK. 

“Both parties were wiped out in places where it would have been unimaginable before,” said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics. “This could mark a major shift in the electoral dynamic.” ...

More.

They're calling the 10Y at 4.5% the moron premium because everyone hates Trump and his tariffs, but I don't remember it being called the 5% dotard premium under Joe Biden

People need to get a grip.

Blaming hapless Liz Truss' two-months as PM in September and October 2022 for the UK's high interest rates pretends that the Bank of England didn't raise interest rates in response to inflation same as the US Federal Reserve Bank.

This trashy headline belongs in The Daily Star, not the UK Telegraph. No wonder they're trying to sell you a 1-year subscription for only 29 pounds.

 

 

Canada stopped exports of hydroelectric power to New England on March 6th

On March 6, at the start of the still-simmering trade war between the U.S. and Canada, hydropower generator Hydro‑Québec quietly stopped exporting electricity to New England. ...

Hydro‑Québec’s main transmission line into New England, known as the Phase II line, stopped exporting any meaningful amount of power two days after President Donald Trump’s tariff on Canadian imports went into effect. Last March, by comparison, anywhere from a few hundred megawatts to more than 1,200 MW flowed along the line at any given time, making up between 5% and 10% of the region’s electricity use on average, Turner estimated. ... 

Last year, 5,560 gigawatt-hours of power traveled into the region over the Phase II line, less than half the amount exported in 2022. ...

More.

It's catching on

 

Imagine FDR telling Churchill in August 1941 to make peace with Hitler and fork over Britain's coal to America

 

A Day of American Infamy

Bret Stephens, The New York Times

... If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy. ...

Cowardly Republican stooges, but I repeat myself, dummy up on UN vote and Trump appeasement, but Cocaine Mitch comes through

 

 Republicans mostly mum on Trump’s upending of Russia policy: Some spoke out against Putin, sidestepped Trump 

... The two votes on Monday were the latest sign of a dramatic reversal of America’s bipartisan policy since World War II of standing diplomatically and militarily with Europe to defend against the threat of Soviet and later Russian aggression.

It is a shift that congressional Republicans have, with very few exceptions, silently watched unfold.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, issued the most fulsome GOP dissent to date against President Donald Trump’s position on Ukraine.

McConnell, in a statement, called Trump’s unfolding policy reversal “disgraceful” and “unseemly” and suggested it was a reprise of the appeasement that led to World War II.

“‘Peace for our time’ is a noble end, but hope that appeasement will check the ambitions of this aggressor is as naïve today as it was in 1939,” McConnell said, referring to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s famous remark after signing the Munich Agreement and Germany’s subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia. “America is right to seek an end to this war, but an end that fails to constrain Russian ambition, ensure Ukrainian sovereignty, or strengthen American credibility with both allies and adversaries is no end at all.”

Such a “hollow peace,” he said, would “invite further aggression,” a reference primarily to the lesson China might take away from a demonstration of wilted U.S. resolve.

... virtually no GOP lawmakers besides McConnell have directly criticized Trump’s emerging plan . . ..

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: To watch our ally of 80 years, the USA, turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days

 

Trump’s embrace of Putin is a Molotov-Ribbentrop crisis for Europe:

The new regime in Washington is testing pro-American sympathies to breaking point

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard20 February 2025 6:50pm GMT

We are at that moment in Animal Farm when the gentle carthorse Clover looks through the window to see the pigs playing cards and drinking a toast with men.

The pigs are all perfectly at ease and sitting back in chairs around a table, no doubt a rougher surface than the luxurious polished table used to host America’s Marco Rubio and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week. The Russian press reports that the meeting was a love-fest of jokes and bonhomie, with a “very tasty lunch”.

George Orwell’s scene was an allegory of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Europe’s great power alignment suddenly and violently shifted. The liberal democracies woke up on Aug 23 1939 to discover that the Soviet Union had reached a non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany. Days later, Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Nazis could then turn their concentrated fury on France and Britain without having to worry about a second front.

Britain had started to re-arm as early as 1935. Neville Chamberlain hurled money at the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, with Spitfire squadrons arriving just in time. Defence spending had risen to 9pc of GDP by 1939.

This time, Europe’s democracies have indulged the same pacifist illusions as they did in the run up to 1939 but have milked the peace dividend even longer. Military spending by EU states was 1.9pc of GDP in 2024, a full 17 years after Vladimir Putin declared political war on liberal civilisation and all its works at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 – “a good speech” said one Angela Merkel, audibly, in the front row.

He then set about restoring the tsarist empire to the borders of Catherine the Great with an unswerving consistency. Austria is not even part of Nato and behaves accordingly.

Some are rising to the challenge. Denmark has given its stock of munitions to Ukraine and even the trade unions back a war tax to raise defence spending to 4pc of GDP. “We are in a very, very critical period in world history,” said Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister.

Poland’s military budget is already up to 4.7pc. “We’re that afraid,” said his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski at last week’s Munich forum.

Lithuania aims for 5pc to 6pc of GDP by next year, alarmed by intelligence warnings that Putin may seize the Suwalki Gap, which runs through its territory from Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

They all know that Putin has a narrow window of time to attack if the Ukraine war is quickly settled on Russian terms. His advantage is temporary: a greatly enlarged army heading for 1.5m by 2026 and an industrial war economy firing on all cylinders but untenable for much longer.

Fears are growing that Donald Trump will order the US military to pull its Nato tripwire forces out of the Baltics in order to seal the “deal of the century” with the Kremlin. Will he swallow the bait as the smooth McKinsey-trained head of Russia’s investment fund, Kirill Dmitriev, dangles the offer of hydrocarbon riches – real or imagined – in Russian Arctic waters?

The issue runs deeper in any case. Maga America has a greater natural affinity for Putin’s Right-wing cultural Weltanschauung than it does for the liberal democracies. After the battering of the last two weeks, some of us are forced to conclude that Britain and Europe are now the real enemies for this new Washington and, furthermore, that the US is anything but isolationist under Donald Trump.

He will not let us carry on being different. He will force-feed us his Maga ideology. His oil-fracking energy secretary was in London this week describing our renewables as “sinister”. Will we face sanctions for trying to do something about CO2 emissions? Perhaps, yes. Particularly for that.

I do not wish to dissect every post by Trump on Truth Social, or dwell on the speech by JD Vance. I think Britain should repeal all its hate legislation and stop misusing police resources on thought crimes. It should stop dividing us into categories and return to colour-blind liberalism. But one can agree with elements of Vance’s anti-woke critique while entirely rejecting the larger message behind it.

We are told repeatedly by Trump’s circle that he does not really mean what he says, or that we should not overreact to what he is very clearly doing. Let us hope they are right, but it is becoming harder by the day to have confidence in such assurances, or to believe that either Republicans or plutocrats will lift a finger to stop him – and I say this as a defender of Pax Americana for half a century.

Sir Keir Starmer is right to stay calm and try to defuse this terrifying inter-allied crisis on his visit to the White House. But we of The Telegraph parish, readers and writers alike, will all have to look into our souls if, as now seems painfully plausible, Britain is singled out for tariff warfare along with Europe on the pretext of our VAT taxes.

Worse yet if Trump does this while reaching a cosy commodity deal with Putin along with a grand bargain with Xi Jinping to protect Elon Musk’s interests in China. That would test one’s pro-American sympathies to breaking point.

Europe shares much of the blame for the disintegration of the Western alliance system. It failed to re-arm after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Germany rewarded Putin months later by launching the Nord Stream 2 project, which had no purpose other than depriving Kyiv of strategic leverage by re-routing Siberian gas through Baltic pipelines. In return, Germany enjoyed a sweetheart gas deal at sub-market prices.

Britain could have rebuilt its military hardware at ultra-low borrowing costs during the secular stagnation of the 2010s, when it had ample spare capacity. It could have rebuilt its decaying infrastructure and revived its economy at the same time. The multiplier effect would have let us do these things without pushing the debt ratio any faster. Britain pursued austerity instead. Now it faces a greater task, in a hostile bond market.

Europe was even more destructive. Germany cut public investment and military spending to the bone for 15 years. It relied on mercantilist export surpluses of 8pc of GDP to drive growth, a policy that has left Germany in the cross-hairs of Trump’s trade warriors.

The eurozone debt crisis – self-inflicted because the European Central Bank did not then have political approval to back-stop debts – turned into a wider depression because Brussels over-egged austerity and used bailouts to impose drastic spending cuts. There was no exemption for military spending.

Defence as a share of GDP in 2015 was Hungary 0.5pc, Belgium 0.8pc, Germany 1.0pc, Spain 1.0pc, Italy 1.2pc, France 1.8pc –and that was after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Military budgets crept up slowly thereafter but not enough to prevent further disarmament.

Europe thought it could keep free-riding on Uncle Sucker forever, despite warnings that this would end badly. There was much talk along the way of a European army and endless euro-speak meetings about procedures, modalities and the architecture of EU defence, but never anything real. That is why Europe today finds itself utterly naked.

But nobody expected it to end this badly and this suddenly. To watch an ally of 80 years turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days.