Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. He writes on Substack, at Ross on Why?
From our UK edition
The worst thing about the government’s plans to force pension providers to invest their money in particular assets is that ministers and MPs themselves don’t have to worry about it. They, of course, are members of a gold-plated pension scheme that is underwritten by the taxpayer. They will receive their index-linked pensions whatever the economic
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Sooner or later, Airbnb is going to change its name to Airb, partly because it takes less time to type, and partly because it is becoming a misnomer. Increasingly rarely is there a breakfast to go with your bed. I am walking from John o’ Groats to Land’s End at the moment, so I have been staying in a different town
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Never let a good crisis go to waste, as they say. And Rachel Reeves has made it quite clear that she is going to milk the Iran war for all it is worth. It was Iran wot pushed inflation up to 3.3 per cent, she has hinted (ignoring that the Consumer Prices Index was already
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Liz Truss’s greatest fiscal sin was her Energy Price Guarantee. True, markets didn’t like her tax cuts unmatched by spending cuts, and a Budget which froze out the Office for Budget Responsibility. But they hated an open-ended commitment to subsidise energy prices, which the government estimated would cost £25 billion in the first six months
Donald Trump’s second presidency began with a blaze of executive orders which horrified and impressed in equal measure. It also begged the question: if it really were so easy for a president to circumvent the legal obstacles and assert his will, how come none had behaved in this way before? A year on, we are learning
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What have North Sea oil and gas production and grammar school education got in common? Both are subject to a fiddle by which they can be expanded while the government pretends they are not expanding. After David Cameron changed his mind on grammar schools and said he wouldn’t allow new ones to be created, a
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First the good news. Some commercial users may be enjoying free electricity at some point this summer – or better still, they may even be paid to consume it. Now the not so good news: at other times it will mean us all having to pay even more for our electricity than we already do.
From our UK edition
It was bound to happen sooner or later, but coming at the beginning of a local election campaign in which his party is expected to make a huge breakthrough, it is pretty much the worst time for Zack Polanski. The nice, middle-class Greens who joined the party because they care deeply about the climate, bunnies
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Our invertebrate government has struck again. Given the chance to show a bit of backbone in the face of demands by the PCS union that staff at the Office of National Statistics (ONS) shouldn’t have to go into the office, ever, if they don’t feel like it, the government has slumped into an amorphous mass
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Like US wartime presidents before him, Donald Trump made a priority of, and has succeeded, in attaining air superiority over Iran. Unfortunately, he has failed to acquire even the slightest control over his own mouth. He has now sprayed just about all of his natural allies with friendly fire. His latest jibe yesterday was to
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How miraculous. Britain is full of people with devastating afflictions, with millions apparently unable to walk a few yards from the nearest car park. And yet these mysterious disabling conditions rarely seem to affect people’s ability to drive a car. Put them behind the wheel and they are transformed as if the Messiah had just
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At first sight it might seem like the triumph of reason over ideology. The Times is reporting that Ed Miliband has given way and is poised to announce that he will, after all, grant a licence for extraction from the Jackdaw gas field 250 miles east of Aberdeen. It has been a long time coming. For
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Reform UK has just made what could turn out to be an enormous error. Its Treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, has committed the party to retaining the ‘triple lock’ on pensions, whereby the state pension rises each year by either inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is greater. This follows a period in which Nigel
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According to Ed Miliband and Bridget Phillipson, motorists are paying more than they need to at the pumps because of ‘price gouging’ by petrol retailers. No mention there about tax gouging. How much more revenue could the government raise if Miliband rescinded his ban on new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea?
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Sooner or later it is going to dawn on Ed Miliband and the rest of the government that anger over Britain’s sky-high energy prices is not going to go away. They are no longer going to be able to conceal the obvious evidence that UK consumers and businesses are paying significantly more for their energy
Have markets and governments horribly underestimated the fallout from the Iran war, or is it the doomsters who have got it horribly wrong? President Trump’s announcement has rather caught the world off guard. This morning, he posted on Truth social saying that he is seeking a negotiated settlement with Iran and has postponed his planned
Have markets and governments around the world horribly under-estimated the fallout from the war in Iran? That is the claim made by the president of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, who says the effect of the closure of the Straits of Hormuz is the equivalent of the 1973 oil crisis and the 2022 gas
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This is the way that Brexit ends: not with a bang but with a whimpering submission to EU standards on everything, billions in contributions to the EU purse – but with the pretence that we are not really rejoining the single market or customs union, honest. That was the position laid out by the Chancellor
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Like Harold Wilson and his ‘white heat of technology’, Rachel Reeves is presumably hoping that blathering on about AI and quantum computing in her Mais lecture today is going to make her sound modern and positive. Yes, of course artificial intelligence is the ‘defining technology of our era’ – we don’t need the Chancellor of
I am sorry to hear of the death of Stanford University Professor of Biology Paul R. Ehrlich at the age of 93, but to read his writings you wonder whether it is an event he might actually want us to celebrate. It does, after all, mean one less mouth to feed. Just another 6.5 billion
