Lynton Crosby: 'the so-called experts have lost touch with ordinary people'

Telegraph
Mr Crosby adds: “I mean the public polls are a bit like going to a doctor who’s reporting your temperature each day and tells you it’s 38, then it’s 40, then it’s 39, then it’s 41. They don’t tell you what’s actually going on, what's causing the temperature changes yet people, they just report the temperature what you want is diagnosis that tells you what’s going on and why and that’s what they don’t do.”

Lynton Crosby: Betrayal of British voters

Telegraph
Mr Crosby said: “The trouble now is that polls have become part of the political process so they’re not an independent measurement that says this is what’s going on, they actually influence what’s going on.
“And I think that’s quite dangerous. I would subscribe to the view there should be a stay on publishing polls publicly for two or three weeks before an election.”
He said he could not “understand” the ineptitude of Ed Miliband’s campaign.
“I couldn’t really understand it. They just wanted to divide Britain. And they focussed too much on process.
“Labour were always trying to talk up how clever they were. How they’d set up the Green attack unit, how they had set up the Ukip attack unit. How they were having 4 million conversations across the country.Well we had more than that - but you don’t talk about it.”

Secrets of the Tories' election 'war room'

Telegraph
In the war room, work began before dawn, and the office was manned until late at night. Mr Crosby chaired his first meeting every day during the campaign at 5.45am, with a handful of senior strategists.
Another meeting would follow at 6.30am to draw up firmer plans for the day, before the third meeting at 7.30 each morning, at which Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne would be present, often via conference calls from far flung parts of the country where they would be campaigning.
The PM and Chancellor would listen to the plans, make observations of their own and then approve the strategy as recommended by Mr Crosby, who chaired every meeting, even when Mr Cameron was present.
A few hundred yards away, at Labour headquarters in Brewer’s Green, Mr Miliband’s team had not yet turned up for work. The Labour campaign’s first meeting did not start until 7.45am, two hours after Mr Crosby had begun setting priorities for the day."

Kiwi-based doctor battled injury to save 23 lives after Everest avalanche

Stuff NZ
A Kiwi-based doctor is being credited with helping to save 23 lives after the deadly avalanche at Everest base camp, despite being injured herself.
British-born Rachel Tullet, an emergency doctor at Christchurch Hospital, was swept on to a rock and buried under a layer of ice crystals for several minutes in avalanche triggered by last month's 7.9-magnitude Nepalese earthquake.
She had been volunteering at Everest ER, the medical tent at the mountain's base camp run by the Himalayan Rescue Association."

Europe invaded

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
Astonishing numbers, and many who arrive will want others to join them:

Last year, 570,800 claims for asylum were registered in the European Union, more than a third of them in Germany, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

How many of these asylum seekers have the skills and background to fit in well? How many will feel “marginalised” in time?

Labour is facing at least a decade in the wilderness, party grandees warn

Telegraph

Labour has been plunged deeper into crisis as some of the party’s most senior figures warned that they would be out of power until at least 2025.

As the search began for a new leader, former Cabinet ministers joined members of Ed Miliband’s front-bench team to call on the party to “skip a generation” and pick a candidate who is untainted by the failures of the past."

Why attack ‘trickle-down economics?’ It doesn’t exist – and never has done

Spectator
More fundamentally, economic processes work in the directly opposite way from that depicted by those who imagine that profits first benefit business owners and that benefits only belatedly trickle down to workers."

Bonfire of Britain's Foreign Aid Billions: Swanky new aid offices in India costing £442,000 are just one example of the disturbing way British taxpayers' money is wasted

Daily Mail

The Mail on Sunday has spent months investigating how the foreign aid budget is spent, speaking to diplomats, aid agencies and civil servants, and has established that hundreds of millions of pounds of the £11.7 billion Britain sends overseas – perhaps as much as a quarter – are squandered on unworkable projects and 'consultants' who are little more than private contractors.

More than half of industrialised nations reduced their aid budget between 2013 and 2014, but it was revealed last week that under new European Union rules, Britain's total will swell by £1 billion over the next two years, making it the second-largest donor in the world after the US.

In all, according to UK Aid Network – a coalition of aid groups – the Government is set to spend £12.2 billion on aid this year, accounting for 1.6 per cent of its total spending."

Foreign aid budget to increase by £1 billion

Telegraph

The overseas aid budget will increase by an extra £1 billion over the next two years under new European Union rules, it has emerged.

The Department for International Development (Dfid) is preparing to change accounting methods in order to bring Britain in line with other EU countries, making it harder to meet the controversial aid target in the next parliament, according to The Times.

The UK already spends more than any other country on international agencies and is the second largest aid donor in the world.

Government figures released on Thursday reportedly show that Britain met last year's aid spending target of 0.7 per cent of GDP, totalling £11.7 billion.

They showed that most of the extra cash had gone to international aid agencies rather than projects run by the British government on the ground.

Plans to increase the aid budget were branded "absurd" by several former Tory MPs, who said the money would be much better spent on protecting the armed forces.
Sir Gerald Howarth, former Tory defence minister, told The Times: "What is the point of this arbitrary figure of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP?
"The idea that if we spend this amount all the world's problems will end is so absurd, or that by providing that magic figure we suddenly become paragons of virtue.
"If a change in the formula means the British taxpayer has to contribute yet more in overseas aid despite five years of austerity a lot of people will start questioning the largesse of this country," he added.
"There are many military figures who just don't see the logic of putting money into aid instead of defence."

Nigel Farage Was Right About Health Tourism

Guido Fawkes
Nigel Farage has been round condemned by the commentariat for suggesting that treating foreigners for free on the NHS was not right and that we should, like 46 other countries, not admit foreigners who are HIV positive.

The cost for treatment for HIV positive patients is some £20,000 or more for anti-retroviral drugs every year. Once HIV treatment is started, patients will probably need to take the medication for the rest of their lives. In total, the cost to the NHS could be up to £1 million per patient if they survive into old age from their early twenties."

England's migrant population 'soars by 565,000' since 2011

Telegraph

The migrant population in England is estimated to have increased by more than half a million in three years, research from the University of Oxford has revealed.

Around two-thirds of the 565,000 migrants thought to have come to the country between 2011 and 2014 were born in other EU countries, the study by the university's Migration Observatory said......

The greatest increase in the number of foreign-born residents has been in the capital.

Almost 200,000 more migrants were estimated to live in London last year compared to 2011."

Liberal elite are helping spread of extremism, by Professor Anthony Glees

Daily Mail

Universities are meant to advance human understanding, expand our knowledge and serve as a platform for debate. But tragically, through their failure to confront and root out Islamist radicalism, some British institutions are achieving the very opposite. Instead of deepening the liberal roots of our civilisation, they are helping to allow intolerance to flourish through their unwillingness to confront extremism in their midst. That insidious process has been graphically demonstrated by the case of Mohammed Emwazi, the Islamic State butcher nicknamed ‘Jihadi John’.  ....So, we need new legislation to uncover and deal with potential recruits, and stronger intelligence services. But the recent criticism of MI5 echoes, unwisely, the mindless and offensive drivel put out by ‘human rights’ campaign group Cage: that Emazi became a jihadist because of harassment by the security services. We should support our security community — only our enemies want to undermine it. And, just as importantly, we must address the urgent question of Muslim radicalisation on British university campuses, especially through the influence of Islamic societies, which are often in thrall to a hardline agenda. The roll call of student terrorists is long, indeed. James Brokenshire, the Security minister, has said that from 1999 to 2009, at least 45 per cent of those convicted of Al Qaeda-related terrorism in the UK had attended university or higher education colleges. Yet neither the university system, dominated by the liberal Left, nor even important elements of the Coalition Government are willing to face up to this reality.   ......The claim from Nicola Dandridge that there is ‘no evidence’ to link ‘student radicals with violent extremism’ is just absurd. The opposite is true. Emwazi’s name is to be added to the chilling list of students from Britain who have turned to terror. .....The time has come to monitor every Islamic society in English universities, with a view to banning them if they have supported extremism. Vince Cable could not be more wrong when he says that only those who directly incite violence should be silenced. Sooner or later, extremism leads to violence. It must be stamped out."