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?
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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 How much more revenue could the government raise if Miliband rescinded his ban on new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea?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
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Could there be any greater vindication for the government’s policy of pushing us to buy electric vehicles than the crisis in Iran, which has sent prices of petrol and diesel soaring? That is what the government itself would like us to think, but it is not how the UK car industry sees it. Never mind
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Well, who would have guessed? Emboldened by Mauritius’s success in persuading Keir Starmer to surrender the Chagos Islands – which were never even part of Mauritius in the first place – the African Union is reported to be planning to take Britain to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to demand reparations for slavery and
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How many times has Ed Miliband told us that his renewable energy policies were helping to free us from ‘fossil fuel dictators’? Wind and solar energy, he assures us, are saving us money and making us more energy-secure. Then we wake up to find that actually, Britain has only two days’ worth of gas left in storage.
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Who cares about vacuous influencers whose ghastly apartments in Dubai are being struck by Iranian missiles, wiping the smile off their botoxed lips? Not many of us, to judge by social media, and a few newspaper columns too, over the past few days. Retaliatory strikes by Iran have unleashed a tide of gloating. To give
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In the end it wasn’t even close. The Greens won the Manchester Gorton and Denton by-election with some to spare, winning 40.7 per cent of the vote. Reform UK, who looked the main challengers at the beginning of the campaign came second on 28.7 per cent, and Labour, as had looked likely, were pushed into third
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Living longer but spending more of our lives in ill health. That is the rather shocking picture presented by the figures for ‘healthy life expectancy’ published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday. They show that while life expectancy continues to rise modestly, the proportion of our lives lived in ‘good’ health is falling
There is no member of the Trump administration with greater clarity of thought than Energy Secretary Chris Wright. While opponents rage at Trump’s climate policy, Wright gave a speech to the International Energy Agency this week in which he explained the rationale behind America’s sharp deviation from Europe. In the minds of many people, the
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It is finally dawning on the government and the banking industry that it is not such a good idea to put the entire economy at the mercy of a couple of large overseas corporations. Today, a consortium of banks are meeting to hammer out a plan to create a homegrown alternative to Visa and Mastercard,
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Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is
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Imagine if spectators at the London Olympics had to gingerly make their way past loose pit bull terriers and XL bullies, some of them rabid. No civilised country would tolerate several million stray dogs on the streets, and indeed we don’t. If a stray dog is found on the streets of London it will be
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What a pair Ed Miliband and California governor Gavin Newsom make. Both seem to suffer from the delusion that they are national leaders, meeting up in London on Monday to sign a deal in which they aim to share green technology and finance. Both are committed to what they like to call a ‘global race
