Ross Clark

Ross Clark

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

The deluge: Rishi Sunak’s election gamble

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It’s a bumper edition of The Edition this week. After Rishi Sunak called a surprise – and perhaps misguided – snap election just a couple of hours after our press deadline, we had to frantically come up with a new digital cover. To take us through a breathless day in Westminster and the fallout of

Ross Clark

Don’t blame climate change for the crummy weather

It was climate change wot gave us such a wet and stormy winter – or so you may have gathered from various reports this week. ‘Never ending UK rain made ten times more likely by climate change,’ declared a Guardian headline. ‘Climate change is a major reason why the UK suffered such a waterlogged winter, scientists have

Ross Clark

What happened to the electric car revolution?

China is often characterised as a copycat when it comes to industry and technology but in one way it has proved to be a pioneer. It was China which saw the first boom in electric cars – and it was China that was the first to suffer when demand for them collapsed. The vast graveyards

Could Rightmove make the wrong move?

Banks have been cutting fixed mortgage rates, leading to hopes among some people that the housing market – which has been pretty flat so far this year – will soon respond positively. While prices and sale volumes haven’t been going anywhere, last month the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors reported that enquiries from buyers have

Labour and Unite go to war over oil

There is nothing new about battles between the unions and a Labour government. But could a Starmer government be upset by a growing union rebellion from an unexpected quarter? In a move which has been remarkably underreported in England, the union Unite has launched a campaign against Labour’s policy of refusing licences for new oil

Ross Clark

Hunt’s tax attack on Labour is sure to backfire

It should come as no surprise that Jeremy Hunt has signalled in a speech this morning that  he will try to make taxation a central theme of the coming election campaign. The tactic has certainly worked in the past. In 1992, fears that Neil Kinnock and his shadow chancellor John Smith would jack up taxes

It would be ridiculous to clamp down on foreign students

Oh, the embarrassment. The government commissioned its own Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to investigate whether graduate visas (which grant overseas students the right to stay in Britain for two years after graduation) are being exploited and should be abolished. This was seemingly in the hope of gaining some ammunition to do away with a measure

Ross Clark

The EU has ruined plastic water bottles

Hurrah, the problem of plastic waste has been sorted – as of this summer all plastic water bottles sold in the EU have to come with a cap that is tethered to the rest of the bottle. If the cap comes attached to the bottle, goes the thinking, then consumers are less likely to discard

Britain is right to stand up to the WHO’s vaccine power grab

The World Health Organisation (WHO) hardly distinguished itself during the Covid 19 pandemic. It was slow to declare an emergency, then tried to make up for the delay by trying to persuade governments to lock down and introduce all kinds of illiberal measures. Worst of all it heaped praise on China’s handling of the epidemic,

Khan may have won, but he should still reverse on Ulez

So what was that all about? Rumours that Susan Hall was close to toppling Sadiq Khan have proved to be wide of the mark. In the event, Hall is failing to match Shaun Bailey’s performance in 2021. There is a swing against the Conservatives in London, and Hall is failing to win in places which

Wes Streeting should be ashamed of his white supremacist Tory jibe

Over the past few years Wes Streeting has established himself as one of the more open-minded and reasonable members of the shadow cabinet. Rather than nodding along with his party’s traditional worship of the NHS, and utilising the usual, false campaigning tool of trying to claim that the Tories have some secret plan to privatise

Ross Clark

Hate people? Visit Iceland

No-one seems to like tourists any more. This week Venice introduced its €5 entry charge – which merely buys you the right to go into the city and be ripped off by cafes and restaurants. On Tenerife, residents have been marching and daubing slogans on the walls ‘tourist – go home’. So much for free

Brexit has not made food unaffordable

Imagine that for the past 30 years all food entering Britain from EU countries had been subject to stringent sanitary checks and that today, for the first time, the government had decided to abolish those checks. It isn’t hard to guess how the Labour party would react. The government, it would be claiming, was throwing

Why didn’t the Tories nationalise the railways?

The Conservatives can crow all they like about the benefits of privatisation – and make whatever claims they like about tickets being more expensive, and services worse, were the railways to be brought back under public ownership. But there is little getting away from the fact that Labour’s policy of progressive renationalisation of train services by

Who will pay the price for the boost in defence spending?

Rishi Sunak’s announcement that the government will increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP has been warmly welcomed, but how much is it really going to transform the UK’s military? Former armed services minister James Heappey was quick to scotch expectations this morning when he said it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to reverse falls