Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better
Well, that didn’t last long. Having preached to us about fiscal responsibility and ‘securonomics’, Chancellor Rachel Reeves appears to be about to cave in at the first opportunity – by hinting that she will grant 5.5 per cent pay rises to teachers, NHS workers, and other public sector workers. At the heart of Reeves’s problem
Is the retail sector ever going to recover from Covid-19? The rest of the economy seems to be purring quite nicely at the moment, with GDP up 0.7 per cent in the first quarter (not adjusting for population growth). But the good times have yet to reach the retail sector, where sales volumes fell by
‘We cannot let the challenges of the recent past define our relationships of the future,’ declared the Prime Minister ahead of today’s meeting of the European Political Union at Blenheim Palace. The meeting, he added, ‘will fire the starting gun on this government’s new approach to Europe’. The subtext to this is: the grown-ups are back
Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has promised the ‘most ambitious programme of devolution this country has ever seen’, with new powers for local councils and more directly-elected mayors. But this will not apply, it seems, when it comes to planning. On the contrary, the centrepiece of the King’s speech today will be planning reforms aimed
Few will notice, yet this year England and Wales are almost certainly going to cross a remarkable threshold: the number of deaths will exceed the number of births. In the year to mid 2023 – figures for which have been published today by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) – there were 598,400 births and
Don’t bother going after the Reform UK vote – the next Conservative leader should target voters lost to the Lib Dems instead. So says George Osborne, who told ITV ‘the Conservative party over a number of years vacated the central ground of British politics and allowed the Labour party to move from the Corbynista position
Just Stop Oil continued its campaign by spreading orange paint over road junctions in Westminster this week, but why bother when the organisation seems now to be in power? Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband is said to be weighing up blocking new licenses for oil drilling in the North Sea. Labour has previously said
Less than a week in to his government and Keir Starmer is already facing an ideological battle within the Labour party – over the nationalisation, or non-nationalisation, of the water industry. News that Thames Water has been put in special measures at the same time that Ofwat has given permission for other water companies to
What country ever went wrong with a sovereign wealth fund? It is easy to envy Singapore and Norway – the latter of which now has £1.3 trillion squirrelled away, equivalent to £240,000 for every citizen. Britain would be in a much better situation now had it, like Norway, invested its windfall from the North Sea, rather than
What a surprise. South Cambridgeshire District Council has declared its controversial experiment with a four day week – which put council staff on a 32 hour rather than 40-hour week with no loss of pay – a tremendous success. The council, whose chief executive Liz Watts was revealed last year to be doing a doctorate
On the eve of the election the then shadow minister without portfolio Nick Thomas-Symonds appeared to be getting Labour’s excuses in early. If an incoming Labour government started to look at the books and realised that things were even worse than they had thought, he said, then the new government’s fiscal policy might have to
I know it has only just begun, but it is not too early to start wondering: what will it be that causes the Starmer government its first serious problem? A likely surge in arrivals of illegal migrants seems one possibility, given that some of those encamped in northern France appear to be well aware of
It’s a disaster, a cataclysm, a wipeout. Half the cabinet will lose their seats, and Labour will be in power for a decade. All those things will be true if the BBC exit poll is anything close to reflecting reality – but hang on a minute. At the risk of sounding like one of those
I recant. On a number of occasions I have asserted that the European Union is run by lobbyists acting on behalf of French farmers and the German car industry. It seems I was wrong – or perhaps that I have become wrong as the politics of global trade has shifted. A more accurate way of putting it
I have a theory about intra-Johnson family politics. Some time in 2017 or 2018 Stanley agreed to shut up about his opposition to Brexit if Boris dropped his climate scepticism and threw himself wholesale into green issues. A truce between father and son certainly seemed to emerge around that time, and Boris, the man who
What is the primary purpose of a tax: to raise revenue to fund public services or as a tool to help engineer society in a way which the government favours? It should disturb us that Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury who is likely to be holding the real job by Friday,
Labour appears to be planning to make housing a big priority for its first weeks in power, which is perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it will have gained power thanks in part to the growing number of frustrated young would-be homeowners. We are being led to expect a housebuilding bill within three weeks of Keir Starmer
Britain’s creaking infrastructure and frequent paralysis of public services deserved to be a bigger factor in the election campaign than it has been. But could it now actually affect the result by disenfranchising some voters? A growing number of voters have complained about failing to receive their ballot papers in the post. Given that many
Members and supporters of the Conservative party do not generally speak in favour of proportional representation (PR) – which is hardly surprising given that the current system has given them 49 out of the past 79 years in power. There are exceptions: Ferdinand Mount, head of the No. 10 Policy Unit under Mrs Thatcher, briefly
Never mind net zero – let’s spend the money on the NHS instead. That, in an echo of the infamous promise on the side of the Vote Leave battle bus, is what Reform chairman Richard Tice announced this morning at the party’s latest press conference. Achieving net zero, he said, would cost £30 billion a
