Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero and The Road to Southend Pier.
A man who has the honour of being his country’s first leader from an ethnic background but who comes to office with the baggage of a questionable performance running the health service during the pandemic. It could be Humza Yousaf, but equally it could now be Vaughan Gething, who was elected as Labour leader in
How lovely that engineers working for National Air Traffic Services (Nats) can work from home rather than having to slog it in to the company’s headquarters at Swanwick, Hampshire. Lovely, that is, for the engineers rather than for air passengers. A report by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has revealed the reason behind the meltdown
The problem with intermittency of wind and solar energy is so obvious that you wonder why is has taken the Prime Minister this long to work out that we are going to carry on needing gas-fired power stations to fill in the gaps. In the case of solar energy this is, of course, every evening.
Just what has the government done to try to retain the Red Wall vote? It seemed when they won a majority of 80 in 2019, thanks largely to a big switch of working class votes in peripheral areas of the Midlands and North, away from the main cities – that Boris Johnson and his ministers got
What is wrong with UK shares? While the US, European and Japanese stock markets reach new highs, UK markets are stuck in a deep rut. The FTSE 1000 is just 10 per cent higher than it was on the last day of last century. As for the FTSE 250, small cap and AIM markets –
Are large numbers of children in Britain being killed by black mould in their homes? That seems to be the assertion made by Amnesty International in a short film featuring Olivia Colman. Colman plays a lapsed lawyer whose career is reignited by the injustice suffered by a neighbour whose baby dies. The local council housing
When is the government going to stop pretending that chopping down trees in North American forests and shipping them across the Atlantic to burn them in UK power stations is a zero-carbon form of energy? The environmental-friendliness of Drax power station in North Yorkshire has been called into question yet again this week after BBC
Time was when a chancellor had to resign for leaking the Budget – Hugh Dalton famously lost his job after telling a reporter a few details of what he was about to deliver. Dalton assumed it was past the newspaper’s deadline, but he was wrong. Nowadays, it seems to have become customary for chancellors to
Here’s a good wheeze: prod every last inch of your own country, open the taps and become the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. Then, when other countries start to try to develop their own resources, tell them they mustn’t, for the good of the planet. In other words, make them all dependent on you.
Ursula von der Leyen came to the post of President of the European Commission five years ago with a less than glittering reputation. Martin Schulz, her compatriot and former President of the European Parliament, described her as the ‘weakest minister’ in Angela Merkel’s government. There was a strong sense that she had been booted upstairs
It is of course good news that the Ofgem price cap for a dual fuel household bill will fall from £1,928 to £1,690 from April (that is the bill paid by the average householder). It means that there should be strong downwards pressure on inflation (the Consumer Prices Index) in April. Barring a jolt in
Why is housing still so expensive in Britain? Conservative MP and former levelling-up minister Neil O’Brien has produced a set of statistics which draws attention to the role of migration in the high cost of housing. Across England as a whole he says, 7.4 per cent of the population is made up of people who have arrived
With Keir Starmer having rid the Labour party of its Corbynite doctrines, Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent would not be expected to feature much in the coming general election campaign. But will that change after the failed test firing of a Trident missile, for the second time in a row? The missile, which was launched from HMS
We’re not cutting interest rates because we think the recession may already be over and we’re not even sure we are in recession anyway. That was the gist of Governor of the Bank of England’s evidence to the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee this morning. Bailey fell back on the traditional excuse of CEOs
Just why did Michael Gove campaign for Brexit? I thought he was selling us a future with a more entrepreneurial attitude and less meddlesome regulations. This week we are going to find out just how committed he is to lighter regulations when he announces legislation to force owners of holiday lets to obtain planning permission
The question of whether lockdowns caused more problems than they solved will be picked over for years to come, even if the official Covid-19 inquiry shows little interest in peering into the matter. The latest contribution, a paper from Lund University in Sweden, provides further evidence that this really is something that a UK inquiry needs
Maybe the Office for National Statistics should stop seasonally adjusting its data. That is the lesson from today’s retail sales figures, which show a strong rebound in sales volumes of 3.4 per cent in January. All areas of spending were up except clothing, which was down by 1.4 per cent. The overall figures might sound promising,
Keir Starmer isn’t even in Downing Street yet already his government-in-waiting is in danger of being defined by its £28 billion green spending pledge, just as Tony Blair’s administration was defined by ‘45 minutes’ – the claimed deployment time of Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction. First, Starmer promised to spend that sum on
Britain’s unemployment statistics are unreliable, and the Office of National Statistics is experimenting with a new method of counting the number of people out of work. Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, said as much this afternoon while giving evidence to the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs. Until the 1990s the
‘Appalling and unhinged’ was Joe Biden’s (or at least the White House’s) verdict on Donald Trump’s remarks that he might actually encourage Vladimir Putin to invade Nato member states who fail to meet the organisation’s requirement that they spend at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence. It is hard to disagree with that
