It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, December 05, 2025
Our UK pensions should Invest in people, not wars – Neil Duncan-Jordan MP
Featured image: Neil Duncan-Jordan MP addresses a rally
“The overwhelming majority of people would be appalled to discover their savings are invested in illegal wars — including the genocide in Gaza.”
By Neil Duncan-Jordan MP
It’s important that our movement sees pensions as a force for social good. On Wednesday, MPs will consider the Pension Schemes Bill. I’ve tabled a series of amendments as part of my campaign for Progressive Pensions.
Directing pension funds toward social good is one way our Labour Government can start to rewire the economy so it works for ordinary people. These funds are the deferred wages of millions of workers. That money should be invested in areas such as green technology and social housing — stable, reliable sectors that also help build a better future for the very people who fund them.
Whether this is done through an expanded National Wealth Fund that could direct investment into socially useful projects or some other mechanism – it would clearly boost economic growth. This would be a tremendous step forward not only ensuring solid investments – but providing desperately needed decent homes at affordable rents.
Too often pension funds don’t reflect the sort of world workers actually want to see. The overwhelming majority of people would be appalled to discover their savings are invested in illegal wars — including the genocide in Gaza. Local Government Pension Scheme funds currently hold over £12 billion in companies complicit in Israel’s actions. My proposals would ensure pension funds are not entangled in war crimes or human rights abuses in Gaza or anywhere else.
The local Government Pension Scheme also invests over £16 billion in fossil fuels and 85% of all pension schemes have no credible climate action plan. Clearly the voluntary approach to fossil-fuel divestment has failed. Workers’ wages should not be used to accelerate a climate crisis that hits the global working class hardest. Fundamentally, there is no retirement without a liveable environment.
The call for progressive pensions sits comfortably in the traditions of collective action that underpin the labour movement. A single worker can’t win a better deal from their boss alone – solidarity is what builds power. Individuals – a binman, street sweeper or social worker can’t match the political influence that come with the deep pockets of the wealthiest corporations or billionaires. But when their savings are pooled into pension funds, the toil and sweat of workers can become one of the most powerful forces in the country. These funds should reflect the values and material needs of the workers who sustain them — and to make that possible, pension scheme members need far greater say and control over how their money is used.
That’s why we must guarantee a real voice for trade unions on all future pension boards. Right now, there is no requirement for worker representation on the boards of Local Government Pension Scheme pools. With the government planning to consolidate these into just six pools, this is the ideal moment to enshrine proper worker representation in law. Workers deserve a seat at the table – the government should back this change.
The Pension Schemes Bill provides an almost once in a lifetime opportunity to help the environment and society. The £3 trillion in UK pension funds could be used to address the historic transfer of wealth away from ordinary working people towards the wealthiest individuals and corporations in our society. Since pensions account for 40% of household wealth any serious attempt at reform must reflect how this vast sum – rooted in workers’ contributions over a lifetime, could be put to work improving their lives. The call to use our money and make pensions more progressive is therefore overwhelming.
“Instead of eroding fundamental rights, the government must commit to fully resourcing and staffing our courts.”
From the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS)
PCS strongly condemns the justice secretary David Lammy’s reported proposals to restrict the historic right to trial by jury.
PCS considers that the proposed plans for restricting the right to trial by jury are disgraceful, undemocratic, and represent a dangerous dismantling of a cornerstone of British justice that has stood for centuries.
The government claims this is a solution to court backlogs, but it is nothing more than a sticking plaster that will fail victims and defendants alike. The crown court backlog, understood to be around 80,000 cases, is not caused by juries. It is the result of systematic underfunding, staff pay restraint, chronic staff shortages, and years of neglect of our justice system.
PCS does not accept the Ministry of Justice’s argument that these proposals would save victims “years of torment and delay”. Restricting trial by jury is an undemocratic shortcut. Instead of eroding fundamental rights, the government must commit to fully resourcing and staffing our courts, investing in the people and infrastructure that keep justice moving. PCS members working across the justice sector know that the crisis is driven by cuts, not by juries.
PCS group president for the Ministry of Justice, Sharon McLean, says, “Trial by jury is not an optional extra – it is a vital safeguard in a healthy democracy. Removing it for thousands of serious cases is not in the interests of our members, the public, or the principles of fairness and democracy.
“PCS will oppose these jury proposals and calls on the government to reconsider immediately. Justice delayed is justice denied – but justice dismantled is no justice at all.”
Our members are as frustrated as the public about the backlogs. But we cannot see this significantly improving until there is a fully funded and resourced justice service.”
“With neither a credible plan to fix the jobs’ crisis for resident doctors nor address their pay erosion coming from Government, we have no choice but to announce more strike dates”
Tim Tonkin on why British Medical Association (BMA) members will return to the picket lines in the run-up to Christmas in search of an improved pay offer.
Resident doctors in England will strike again this month, with the BMA urging the Government to call off the action by resuming talks on jobs and pay.
The BMA resident doctors committee has today confirmed doctors will return to the picket lines in the run-up to Christmas, while urging the Government to ‘get a grip on the situation’ by returning to negotiations.
Should it go ahead, the latest round of action will see resident doctors stage full walk-outs from 7am on 17 December until 7am 22 December.
Confirming the new strike dates, BMA resident doctors committee co-chair Jack Fletcher said that, while doctors would rather be treating patients than be on picket lines, continuing inaction with addressing the profession’s concerns meant there was no alternative.
He said: ‘With neither a credible plan to fix the jobs’ crisis for resident doctors nor address their pay erosion coming from Government, we have no choice but to announce more strike dates.
‘However, these do not need to go ahead. Gradually raising pay over a few years and some common-sense fixes to the job security of our doctors are well within the reach of this Government.
‘It would ensure both the long-term strength of our healthcare workforce and spare the country the indignity of seeing unemployed doctors at a time patients are queuing up to even see a GP.’
The announcement of upcoming action, which follows on from a five-day walkout in November, comes just days after RDC wrote to NHS England chief executive Jim Mackey, highlighting how desperate and absurd the plight of many doctors applying for jobs had become.
In the 25 November letter, committee members warned that thousands of foundation year 2 candidates seeking training posts in internal medicine had been unable to secure interviews owing to having to compete with more experienced doctors who themselves had been caught up in training place bottlenecks.
Dr Fletcher said: ‘This month we’ve seen the full farcical extent of the jobs’ crisis, with new doctors applying for basic training posts being asked to provide evidence of experience well beyond what would have previously been asked of advanced specialists.
‘It is precisely this sort of situation which is driving doctors to the picket line. But it is not too late for Government to get a grip on the situation.’
With the mandate for industrial action set to expire in January, RDC announced plans last week to once again ballot resident doctors in England on extending the right to strike.
A ‘yes’ vote in the ballot, which opens on 8 December and will run until 2 February next year, would see RDC receive a fresh mandate lasting until August 2026.
“This is wealth extracted from the network into private shareholders’ pockets, instead of being reinvested to strengthen and modernise the railways.”
By the RMT
Private rail companies have quietly extracted £1.8 billion from the railway in dividends since 2016, new RMT analysis reveals.
The findings, published to mark the first anniversary of the Passenger Railways (Public Ownership) Act receiving Royal Assent, expose the sheer scale of cash leaving the system under privatisation.
The report shows more than £510 million was paid out during and after the pandemic, and £190.6 million in 2023/24 alone.
This is wealth extracted from the network into private shareholders’ pockets, instead of being reinvested to strengthen and modernise the railways.
RMT General Secretary Eddie Dempsey said: “Nearly £2bn has been taken out of the railway to line the pockets of shareholders and private company bosses.
“Even during the pandemic, when operators were entirely reliant on public funding, dividends kept flowing out of the industry and often leaving the country altogether.
“The Public Ownership Act is a major step forward, and we need Great British Rail as soon as possible to bring track and train together to ensure every penny is reinvested in a railway run for the interests of rail workers and passengers.”
Key findings from the report include:
FirstGroup extracted £203.7 million post-pandemic, including £60 million from Avanti West Coast, and spent £92 million on share buybacks in 2025 with another £50 million planned for 2026.
Govia paid out £154 million, mainly from its Thameslink operations, even after its Southeastern franchise was removed for financial misconduct.
Transport UK, the rebranded Abellio, took £114 million from three franchises now back in public hands.
Arriva, owned by a Luxembourg-based private equity firm, paid out £35 million, almost all from CrossCountry.
Publicly owned LNER returned more than £90 million to the Treasury.
After the Chancellor froze train fares in her long-awaited Budget speech for the rest of the country, there is a very good case for the same happening in London as well.
Now the simplest interpretation of this would be that Transport for London keeps fares at current levels rather than implementing the planned 3.6% rise.
A transparent back-of-the-envelope calculation on what a TfL fare freeze would roughly cost begins with the fact that TfL passenger (fare) revenue was £5 billion in fiscal year 2024/25.
Using the passenger revenue and the planned increase, the cost of not taking that increase is approximately £180 million per year of foregone revenue. A useful comparator here is when the Mayor previously identified £123m of GLA funding to freeze fares for a year in an earlier package.
Alternatively, if TfL instead matched a higher national rail-style freeze (say 4.6% which applies to some regulated fares), then approximately £230 million per year in lost revenue would result.
Some caveats will of course need to be made, as the real number could vary. Firstly not all fares move by the same percentage (some are nationally regulated; some TfL sets itself), thus the total loss depends on which fare types are frozen.
Secondly we have the ridership effects — fare freezes can slightly increase journeys (or limit passengers lost to higher fares), changing the yield, but l wouldn’t be surprised if TfL’s passenger income is also sensitive to journey counts and ticket mix.
Thirdly, TfL’s published “gross service income” is split by mode (Underground, buses, Elizabeth line, etc.). A more accurate model would apply different percentage changes to those mode-specific revenues. The 3.6 / 4.6% figures are applied here as a single average for simplicity.
And finally, the figures above are annual ones — a one-year freeze costs roughly the amount calculated for that year, as of course multi-year freezes multiply the impact unless offset by other measures (savings, grants).
So in summary, a TfL fare freeze that simply cancels a 3.6% planned rise would cost roughly £180m a year, using a £5 billion passenger income baseline. If larger regulated increases (4–5%) were avoided across the board the cost could be in the £230m a year range, or higher if you use a larger passenger income base.
This has of course been done before by the Mayor and during a cost of living crisis. You would think it is doable again. It is just a question of what level one should implement against the national trend now set by the Chancellor.
Murad Qureshi was a member of the London Assembly from 2004 to 2016 and from 2020 to 2021.http://www.muradqureshi.com/@MuradQureshiLDN
Image: 1967 Stock train at Finsbury Park in 2010. Creator: Tom Page Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
We continue to resist the UK Government’s detention of migrants
Former detainee:“While I was at Campsfield I saw many people struggle to cope with depression and a system designed to break people down. You are treated as if you are a risk to society when all you are trying to do is reach safety and build a life.”
The UK detains more migrants – including people who will be recognised as refugees – for longer than any other country in Europe, without time limit, and without proper judicial oversight.
An increase in immigration detention was already under way before the latest attacks on the vulnerable announced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
But it ain’t necessarily so. Ten years ago, following the build-up of the anti-detention movement inside and outside of detention, and two critical reports by ex-judge Stephen Shaw, the UK government pursued a “detention reform programme” to detain fewer people, for shorter periods, and investigate alternatives to detention. Four detention centres closed in 2015-2018, and numbers detained fell sharply.
This welcome pause was reversed with the opening of Hassockfield (Derwentside) women-only detention centre in County Durham in 2019 and the announcement in April 2022 of the reopening of detention centres at Campsfield (near Oxford) and Haslar (Gosport, Portsmouth) as part of the Rwanda deportation flights plan. Last year, the incoming Labour Government, instead of cancelling the reopenings along with the Rwanda flights, doubled down on the anti-migrant programme, saying more detention was necessary to increase deportations (‘removals’).
Now Campsfield is about to reopen following a £70 million ‘refurbishment’ by builders Galliford Try: the Detained Duty Advice Scheme (DDAS) has posted a December rota for the centre. Campsfield will be run by MITIE, whose record at Harmomdsworth elicited a scorching report from the Chief Inspector of Prisons only last year – “the worst conditions [ever] seen in immigration detention.”
So, the continuity of Labour and Conservative Government policy has been reinforced. I say Labour Government, as Labour Party members voted at Conference two or three times in the Corbyn years to end immigration detention altogether. The Labour Campaign for Free Movement has a particular focus on detention.
The 25-year campaign to close Campsfield ended in 2018 with its closure, so there was a basis for the establishment of a broad Coalition to Keep Campsfield Closed. Last year Cherwell District Council joined Kidlington Parish, Oxford City and Oxfordshire County Council and the newly elected local MP Calum Miller in opposing on humanitarian grounds the plans to reopen and expand Campsfield. As at Haslar, the two-phase plan involves refurbishment and new-build: at the two sites this would bring a total of 1,000 more detention beds.
To get round the solid local opposition, the Government will pursue a ‘Crown Development’ route for the new-build that cuts out the local planning authority’s decision-making power. Effectively, one Government minister invites another to agree with its plans despite the clear wishes of local people.
It looks grim. But the new Coalition to Close Campsfield will persist, mindful of the fact that perseverance is key and that over the last 20 years local people have seen off Government plans to open an 800-bed asylum seekers accommodation centre on MoD land at Bicester, an 800-bed closed detention centre on the same site, and an expansion of Campsfield in 2015.
Immigration Bail: Still a Struggle for Justice
For over 20,000 people detained each year in the UK, to apply for release on bail is a fundamental right which they need to be able to exercise. But it hard to do so. A spin-off of the Campsfield campaign is the Bail Observation Project. For locals visiting people in detention and supporting them at bail hearings, what they observed made them so concerned that they decided to demand improvements. The problem was a lack of hard data to back up their contentions. So, a team of 20 lay people developed a questionnaire, received training from the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, then observed 330 bail hearings and published two reports in 2011 and 2013. Some improvements were made.
A third report, ‘Immigration Bail: Still a Struggle for Justice – hearings observed 2013-23’, has just been published. It shows how the right to seek bail is still severely curtailed and makes recommendations for improvement. The report has been launched in Parliament and in Oxford University. The report urges others to scrutinise bail hearings of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and gives advice about how to do so. The inside cover of the report provides a summary of the work of the Campaign to Close Campsfield and its successors.
Last four verses of Campsfield House Hotel by Jean-Louis N’tadi (Republic of Congo)
Written at St Francis House, Oxford, 2005, Translated by Cristina Viti:
Scandalised citizens march and campaign
For the deadly hotel to pack up and go
No one in the world, and this should be plain
Is an ‘illegal’ human soul.
Noxious hotel, Campsfield House, house of grief
You’re like a fiend locking heroes in coffins
Shutting them out of the biblical feast
With hunger and despair in the offing.
May your evil kingdom vanish tonight
May you close your deadly gates
May your subjects, the families you blight
No longer sleep on hewn slate.
May no man bird or beast ever know quiet or ease
As long as this plague of the land continues to rage
As long as the rotten hotels of no truth and no grace
Shame England, the kingdom of unity and peace.
Bill MacKeith is a vice president of Oxford Trades Council and has campaigned against Campsfield since before it opened in 1993.
Main image: Outside Campsfield, 22nd November 2025, c/o Coalition to Keep Campsfield Closed
The UK housing crisis – what might work and why Labour’s plans won’t
In 1981, over a third of Londoners lived in social housing, more than double the number who rented privately. The social housing sector embraced 872,926 households – compared to 178,000 in New York, for example. Nor had they been exiled to the capital’s outskirts, as in Paris.
But as elsewhere in the UK, Thatcher’s Right to Buy programme and grant cutbacks reduced the housing stock and changed the social make-up of council tenants, increasingly drawn from the socially marginalised. Over the next decade, private landlords, once almost an endangered species, were revived with the help of easier evictions and other anti-tenant measures.
By the mid-1990s, home prices began rising rapidly, fuelled by the search by global investment funds for ‘safe assets’. Houses were increasingly bought on a buy-to-let basis by wealthier landlords. Over the next decade, the house-price-to-income ratio would soar, just as the New Labour government created a new rent formula which increased social rents above the rate of inflation.
Under Blair, councils were also required to work with the private sector to access the investment they needed for social housing. Many transferred their housing stock to housing associations, whose lack of democratic accountability would become a major problem when the service level they offered declined.
Councils unwilling to take this route were left with no money for major repairs. Redevelopment of crumbling estates necessitated private developers, who had little interest in providing affordable homes. The result was gentrification and the displacement of long-standing local communities.
When the Tories returned to power in 2010, a harsh programme of austerity combined with a massive speculative boom in London’s property market created a perfect storm. The boom could have been harnessed by those in power to demand truly affordable housing in the new developments, but in fact they made the developers’ work easier. In the 700-home development at London’s Mount Pleasant, for example, personally signed off by Mayor Boris Johnson, the developers refused to include anything higher than 10% of affordable housing, despite local planning targets seeking 50%. “A revolving door began to spin between council planning departments, developers and the consultancies which worked to broker relations between the two,” notes Apps.
The unregulated private sector market allowed quality to nosedive. Council environmental officers discovered shocking ‘accommodation’ in their localities – in one case, six ‘tenants’ paying rent to sleep in old commercial meat freezers, with no natural light or ventilation. As rents spiralled, the government cut benefits and introduced other punitive measures.
Today, London’s social housing provision is in a parlous state. Despite some well-managed estates, much is high-priced, in disrepair, and overcrowded in 15% of cases. Waiting times on average are 55 years in the Borough of Greenwich, 38 in Newham.
The private rented sector is even worse. The individual stories that the author scatters throughout the text underline its inhumanity. In Catford, a pensioner who was forced to leave her accommodation after a steep rent hike, appealed to Lewisham Council for help. They offered her a private tenancy in County Durham, warning that if she refused it they would help no further. In Harrow, doctors had to provide inhalers for a number of children living in a privately rented block due to respiratory problems caused by damp and mould.
Homelessness has skyrocketed. By 2024, there were over 65,000 households in temporary accommodation, an 80% increase since 2011. Some get housed late in the day for a single night and return to wait in council offices the next day for their next ‘home’, a routine that can go for days. Children in temporary accommodation are three times more likely to die in childhood, compared to the general population.
The result is an exodus from the capital – especially of the young. London’s population grew by 625,000 in the ten years from 2011, but the 2021 census showed 62, 412 fewer children, a figure that also reflects a 25% drop in London’s birth rate, a far faster fall than the national rate. The future looks bleak, as ageing renters will see their pension eaten up by rent and face poverty in their last years.
Apps offers some radical solutions, including the nationalisation of private lets, which comfortably passed in a city-wide referendum in Berlin in2021; local authorities having the power to requisition land at sub-market rates and public land for free; and incentives for reuse and repair rather than grandiose redevelopments.
Little of this will happen without community organising. The London Renters Union and similar groups will need to grow and step up their campaigning if things are to change.
Let’s hope so. Apps’ book comes with a warning: the level of precarity and displacement wrought by the housing crisis undermines people’s fundamental sense of identity and belonging and fuels far right narratives. Others pose the problem even more starkly: “The housing crisis is not merely about roofs and rent – it’s about the future of democracy itself,” writes Bartosz Rydlinski, referring to a Europe-wide plight where one in five Europeans aged 30 to 34 still lives with their parents. “A generation locked out of stable housing is a generation with diminished stake in the democratic order.”
Meanwhile in Leeds…
Jessica Field’s book also focuses on the plight of renters, but it comes from a very personal place. For five years between 2017 and 2022, the author’s mother Hazell was a leading figure in her community’s campaign to prevent their mass eviction, after her family and 69 other tenant households learned that their landlord, corporate investment company Pemberstone, was seeking to demolish their entire tenanted estate in south Leeds and build up to 72 new executive-style houses for sale.
The background was the usual story: scant investment in the estate, growing disrepair and decline and then the offer of a shiny new private sector development, with minimal social housing. To win its case, Permberstone resorted to moralising – they were apparently not prepared to allow their tenants to continue renting properties that were becoming unsafe.
There is a long record of moralising landlords, evicting tenants for their own good. Field takes us through the history of slum landlordism, but also of renters’ resistance, as in the massive rent strike in Glasgow in 1915, as well as smaller battles in her own area of Leeds.
Her own estate was owned by the National Coard Board, which nationally once held 140,000 properties. As the mining industry waned, so did the NCB’s commitment to home maintenance. Managed decline became the norm. Then, in 1976, even before Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation bonanza, the Board decided it would ‘get out of housing’ and rushed to sell its remaining stock. Houses too dilapidated to sell were simply boarded up. As neglect intensified, the NCB sold off entire estates for a pittance. Under private landlords, repairs and maintenance stopped entirely, yet rents rose. Eventually, evictions paved the way for developers, attracted by the vast profits that could be extracted and facilitated by the national context of rising rents and less secure tenancies.
The prospect of eviction and being pitched into the expensive, competitive private renting market – Leeds City Council has lost 35,000 council houses in the past thirty years due to Right to Buy – galvanised a fightback on Hazell’s estate. The campaign generated widespread local support and national media attention and succeeded in getting the landlord’s plans unanimously rejected by the council planning panel. But Pemberstone appealed and the campaign found it difficult to mobilise as effectively as before, with the onset of the Covid pandemic.
The Government planning inspector agreed with the landlord’s seeming concern for the fate of their tenants. “In short: Pemberstone’s neglect of the houses gave Pemberstone the right to evict,” the author notes drily. An entire neighbourhood community was destroyed along with its vital social networks.
It’s unsurprising that the tenants’ campaign did not win: in recent years, just a handful of such campaigns have caused enough of a stir to prevent the worst excesses of mass eviction. Yet the protests – often women-led – are growing in size and number and have helped make housing the central political issue it needs to be.
Labour rightly made renters’ rights a priority on gaining office, yet its housing reforms will do little to alleviate the dire position facing renters, the author argues. While ending Section 21 no-fault evictions is positive, increasing landlord notice periods from two to four months is still well below the requirement of other European countries. Nor do these piecemeal reforms tackle the huge issue of affordability.
“The whole system needs an overhaul,” concludes Field. “The structure of the housing market, where skyrocketing profits are made through land-banking and sales, means that private builders can’t be neutral constructors of affordable rented houses.”
And, Labour take note: “The solution to this 150-year-plus eviction crisis isn’t for the state to enable the building of more houses… The future landlords in this simplistic build-more terrain will continue to be investors.”
Field’s father was 65 and her mother 57 when they were evicted. Small wonder that for her the essence of any new approach must be housing security – people feeling secure in family and neighbourhood communities. Government policy is a long way from that.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
“There are lots of grounds to be concerned about this on reasons of plurality, for competition, but more than anything else this Labour government should consider whether it is good for Britain, and good for its democracy."
Just when it seemed Britain’s media landscape couldn’t tilt much further to the right, news broke that the Daily Mail’s owner is set to buy the Telegraph. The move marks the apparent end of a turbulent two-and-a-half-year battle for the paper, which was put up for sale after the Barclay family defaulted on debts.
On 22 November, the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) confirmed it had agreed a £500 million deal with the Telegraph’s owners, RedBird IMI. The announcement came just days after RedBird Capital, the US group led by Gerry Cardinale, withdrew its own bid amid pressure from inside the Telegraph newsroom to scrutinise its alleged links to China. An earlier RedBird offer, backed by Abu Dhabi, had also prompted calls for government intervention over concerns about foreign state influence in the British press.
If approved, the deal would bring the Telegraph into the same stable as the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, iPaper, and Metro, tightening DMGT’s grip on yet another major national title. The company insists the Telegraph will retain editorial independence, but critics see the acquisition as yet another step toward an ever more concentrated, and ever more right-right media landscape.
Tom Baldwin, former political editor of the Sunday Telegraph and ex-communications director to Ed Miliband as Labour leader, said:
“Britain’s media is already tilted dangerously to a homogenous, right-wing, angry point of view. A merger between the Mail and the Telegraph will only exacerbate that.
“There are lots of grounds to be concerned about this on reasons of plurality, for competition, but more than anything else this Labour government should consider whether it is good for Britain, and good for its democracy, for the Daily Mail to strengthen its pernicious grip on Britain’s media.”
Former Labour leader Lord Kinnock shared the same concerns: “Everyone should be able to recognise that the creation of a right-wing press giant will plainly not improve balance of opinion and presentation.
“Indeed, it is likely to diminish competition and diversity in providing information and opinion – the most precious of all commodities.
“That would harm discernment and, therefore, democracy. I hope that the competition authority will attach prime significance to that reality.”
Online, many noted how ideologically allied the two papers are already. One Reddit user said that the Telegraph is “just the Daily Mail wearing a cravat.”
Telegraph admits Brexit is an ‘unmitigated economic disaster’
A new report also found that UK business investment is 12 to 18 per cent lower than it would have been if Britain had stayed in the EU.
The penny has finally dropped at the Telegraph, after the newspaper was forced to admit that Brexit has been an ‘unmitigated economic disaster’.
Amid mounting evidence of the economic harm done by Brexit, with one recent study highlighting how it had reduced GDP by as much as 8%, a comment piece in the right-wing paper which campaigned to leave the EU, lamented the ‘disastrous economic consequences’ of Brexit and its failure to deliver a much promised ‘national economic renewal’.
Writing in the comment section, Jeremy Warner – who serves as the Assistant Editor at The Telegraph, wrote: “From an economic perspective at least, Brexit has so far proved close to disastrous. If leaving the EU was supposed to be a moment of national economic renewal, it has comprehensively failed to deliver as it was supposed to.”
It comes after the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), produced a report based on nearly a decade of data since the referendum, showing how the UK’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) had fallen by as much as 8% from where it should be since 2016.
The NBER says that increased uncertainty and reduced demand following the decision to leave had an adverse effect on the UK economy. It stated: “We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process.”
Last month, a new report also found that UK business investment is 12 to 18 per cent lower than it would have been if Britain had stayed in the EU.
As the disastrous economic impacts of leaving the EU become ever clearer, new data released by the economists at Stanford University, the Bank of England, and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has found that business investment loss by this year could be £275 billion or £400 billion.
