From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

The liberal parliament in the United Kingdom is on the brink of a collapse after a scandal involving mass rape perpetrated by migrant gangs rocked national politics across the pond.

Jess Phillips, the Home Office Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls and a Labour Party member, blocked an inquiry by the town of Oldham into Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s conduct while overseeing the prosecution of a migrant grooming gang’s sexual abuse of children in the town from 2011 to 2014, according to a Jan. 2 report from the Telegraph. The move prompted mass outcry and renewed attention to the UK’s ongoing crisis involving organized migrant grooming gangs, largely consisting of Pakistani nationals, stemming from waves of unchecked immigration.

Chiefly, critics accuse Starmer of failing to tackle migrant rape gangs when he headed the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 and 2013, complicating his political situation amid calls for his resignation and a tanking approval rating. Starmer, in his capacity as prime minister, allowed illegal immigrants to apply for asylum even after arriving in the UK, according to the BBC.

In 2009, the CPS under Starmer dropped charges against a Pakistani grooming and rape gang in Rochdale — despite the prosecution having DNA and hours of video evidence of the crimes — claiming the teenage victim wouldn’t have been viewed as a “credible” witness, the BBC reported in 2012. The case was reopened in 2012 when Nazir Afzal took over as a prosecutor for the CPS, where he secured convictions for eight men involved in the gang.

Ex-detective Maggie Oliver, who helped uncover the abuse in Rochdale, said that Starmer is complicit in the mishandling of the investigations into the rape gangs, according to The Telegraph.

“The time is long overdue for a full national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal,” Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, said on X Jan. 2. “Trials have taken place all over the country in recent years, but no one in authority has joined the dots – 2025 must be the year that the victims start to get justice.”

The Labour Party, led by Starmer, has had a historic polling collapse according to Sky News polling released Dec. 22., and for the first time, the party’s polling dipped below 27% despite winning one of the largest majorities in parliament history just five months prior. It is currently projected to lose its majority in the upcoming May election, and the Reform UK party, started by conservative politician and architect of Brexit, Nigel Farage, could supplant the Labour Party as the most popular in the UK and win a majority of seats, according to an analysis by the Telegraph.

The UK’s immigration policies remain one of voters’ top concerns, according to YouGov polling from Jan. 6. As of 2022, 14% of the UK’s population was foreign-born. Asylum seekers made up 4% of the foreign-born population in the UK the same year, and a majority were from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India and Bangladesh, according to Migration Observatory.

Foreign nationals living in the UK are three times more likely to be arrested for sex offenses than British nationals, and twice as likely to be arrested for crimes in general, The Telegraph found.

Billionaire tech mogul and President-elect Donald Trump’s confidant Elon Musk, who has become increasingly outspoken about UK politics, accused Phillips on X of trying to protect Starmer amid his political struggles by squashing the national inquiry request. Musk’s interest in the scandal and recent involvement brought the issue international attention.

Starmer, in response to the public outcry, accused people of “jumping on the bandwagon of the far-right” for calling attention to the issue.

“It is so disrespectful it is beyond belief,” Sammy Woodhouse, activist and independent reporter covering the grooming scandal in the UK, said on X. “[Starmer is] branding people again as ‘far-right.’ This is not being ‘far-right,’ this is people having genuine concerns and outrage [sic] … we are talking about children being groomed, abused, raped, tortured, trafficked, murdered, blamed, ignored, impregnated, criminalized.”

Multiple local reports over the years have detailed the astonishing extent of sexual abuse by foreign migrants.

In 2014, a report from the town of Rotherham found that at least 1,400 girls were sexually exploited, mostly by Pakistani migrants, between 1997 and 2013. Local authorities were also apprehensive about identifying the ethnic background of the perpetrators for fear of reprisals. 

Ten members of the Labour council wrote to the Home Secretary, Conservative Amber Rudd, in 2016 claiming that allegations of abuse in the town of Telford were “sensationalized,” according to the Free Press. It was later revealed by The Mirror in 2018 that “up to” 1,000 underage girls were raped and abused there in what was deemed an “ongoing” crisis at the time, that started in the 1980s. The report claimed that authorities feared accusations of “racism” for sharing details about majority-Asian assailants.

Starmer’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in an interview on CSPAN, Sept. 30, 2000

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Stephen Moore

Shortly before his death in 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing Milton Friedman over dinner in San Francisco. The last question I asked him was: What are the three things we had to do to make America more prosperous?

His answer I have never forgotten: “First, allow universal school choice; second, expand free trade; third and most importantly, cut government spending.” That was long before Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden came along.

There are not too many problems in America that cannot be traced back to the growth of big and incompetent government.

It is notable that the two big bursts of inflation during modern times both occurred when government spending exploded. The first was the gigantic expansion of the LBJ “war on poverty” welfare state in the 1970s with prices nearly doubling, and then the post-COVID era spending blitz in the last year of Trump and then the Biden $6 trillion spending spree with the CPI sprinting from 1.5% to 9.1%.

Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.

The connection between government flab and the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar is obvious. In both cases the Washington spending blitz was funded by Federal Reserve money printing. The helicopter money caused prices to surge. (I still find it laughable that 11 Nobel prize-winning economists wrote in the New York Times in 2021: Don’t worry, the Biden multi-trillion-dollar spending spree won’t cause inflation.)

The avalanche of federal spending hasn’t stopped even though COVID ended more than three years ago. We are three months into the 2025 fiscal year and on pace to spend an all-time high $7 trillion and borrow $2 trillion. If we stay on this course, the federal budget could reach $10 trillion over the next decade.

This road to financial perdition cannot stand. It risks blowing up the Trump presidency.

Upon entering office, Trump should on day one call for a package of up to $500 billion of rescissions — money that the last Congress appropriated but has not been spent yet. Cancelling the green energy subsidies alone could save nearly $100 billion. Why are we still spending money on COVID?

We could save tens of billions by ending corporate welfare programs — such as the wheel barrels full of tax dollars thrown at companies like Intel in the CHIPS Act. The Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency is already identifying low hanging fruit that needs to be cut from the tree.

Along with extending the Trump tax cut of 2017, this erasure of bloated federal spending is critical for economic revival and for reversing the income losses to the middle class under Biden.

This is especially urgent because the curse of inflation is NOT over. Since the Fed started cutting interest rates in October, commodity prices are up nearly 5% and the mortgage rates have again hit 7% — in part because the combination of cheap money and government expansion is a toxic economic brew — as history teaches us.

Nothing could suck the oxygen and excitement out of the new Trump presidency more than a resumption of inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. Trump’s record-high approval rating will sink overnight if the cost of everything starts rising again.

Cutting spending won’t be easy. The resistance won’t just come from Bernie Sanders Democrats. Trump will have to convince lawmakers in his own party — many of whom are already defending green-new-deal pork projects in their districts.

This is why Trump should make the case in his inaugural address that downsizing government is the moral equivalent of war. Borrow a line from Nancy Reagan: just say no — to runaway government spending. Say yes to what Friedman titled his famous book: “Capitalism and Freedom.”

Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”