Ross Clark

Did anyone really think that the incoming Starmer government was going to appease the public sector unions for long by stuffing their mouths with gold – awarding them fat pay rises without any requirement to improve productivity? When he awarded junior doctors a pay rise of 22 per cent last July, Wes Streeting told us that he had made more progress in days than the Conservatives had made in months. The strikes were over, thanks to grown-up government. Not so fast, Wes. Predictably enough, the government’s largesse towards towards the unions has merely served to embolden them. Now they are back for more – and the government finds itself unable to satisfy them.

The answer, according to Ed Miliband in an infamously toe-curling rendition of the Bob Dylan song, is blowing in the wind. But no longer, it seems, if you are on the board of SSE. The energy company, which was one of the first UK electricity companies to commit in a big way to renewable energy, has just pulled £3 billion worth of investment in renewables, citing the 'changing macroeconomic environment' and delays in the planning system. For that read that the projects it had intended to build have become economically unviable now that we no longer have near-zero interest rates, and that the national grid is struggling to absorb so much intermittent green energy.    To put that figure into context, SSE is still planning to invest £17.

One of Keir Starmer’s first mistakes in office was to remove the winter fuel allowance from all pensioners other than those in receipt of pension credit. His latest big error is performing a U-turn and telling us that the government is, after all, looking at loosening the eligibility criteria, so that many more pensioners will qualify for the money next winter. Starmer’s explanation for his U-turn during Prime Minister’s Questions was bizarre How can both these things be true? Because the former was a political error, the latter an economic one. The optics of removing the winter fuel allowance at a time when millions of public sector workers were receiving large pay rises was terrible.

The Environmental and Rural Affairs select committee is surely right that the government imposed the inheritance tax changes on farmland without proper consultation – and ignored the likelihood that they will cause serious hardship for family farms. Never mind the threshold which Rachel Reeves claims will mean most farms can still be passed on IHT-free – something questioned by the NFU and other critics – the new rules will inevitably drive many larger farms out of business when the current generation passes on. But is there really any point in what the committee is proposing: that the changes are simply delayed for a year?

If the consequences of Labour’s heavy losses in the local elections were not already clear, they became so in this morning’s press conference to relaunch the government’s migration policy. Reversing years of generally friendly attitudes towards migration, dating back to Tony Blair’s day – when the UK opened its doors to migrant workers from Eastern Europe seven years ahead of most EU countries – Keir Starmer has unashamedly tried to reposition Labour as an anti-immigration party. He lambasted the Conservatives for saying they would reduce migration before trebling it, and repeatedly used the Leave campaign’s slogan ‘take back control’.

We had the shock of ‘Liberation day’ when punitive tariffs were levied on imports from virtually every country in the world. That was the destructive part of Donald Trump’s trade war. Now we enter phase two: trying to put things back together again. The announcement of trade deal with a ‘big and highly-respected country’ (believed to be the UK) on Thursday morning is significant not just in itself but because Trump added the suggestion that this will be ‘the first of many’. His strategy has become clear: last month’s tariffs were shock therapy intended to precipitate a round of trade deals which would rebalance trade in America’s favour. They were not intended as a permanent fixture – at least not at the levels announced on 2 April. We don’t know the details yet.

Wasn’t a trade deal with India supposed to be one of the big gains from Brexit – an example of how Britain, once free from the protectionist grip of the EU, could go ‘out into the world’ and free up trade with fast-growing economies, rather than be stuck trading with Europe’s stagnant ones? Markets certainly like the Anglo-India trade deal announced by the government on Tuesday. Sterling is up sharply against the euro and the dollar, signalling that investors are feeling positive about the prospects for a freer-trade Britain. Car manufacturers and the Scotch Whisky Association are pretty pleased, too, given that it means the end of punitive – indeed, positively Trumpian – tariffs on UK exports to India. So why, then, have the Conservatives received the news so sourly?