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
Few will, or should, feel sympathy for Thames Water being fined 9 per cent of its annual turnover for fouling rivers through sewage discharges. Water regulator Ofwat found numerous failings with maintenance and a lack of investment, which resulted in sewage discharges becoming a routine event rather than an emergency response to heavy rainfall. The
For a while it looked as if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were going to be lucky: they had walked into an economic recovery. The anaemic growth and market turmoil of the past few years – which Labour liked to blame entirely on ‘Tory chaos’ and absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic or energy
Today’s stock market plunge is interesting for two main reasons. First, for those of us who have never traded on the Japanese stock exchange, comes the revelation that the colours used to denote changes in stock prices are the inverse of those used on western markets: red means a share has gone up, green means
It goes without saying that the riots in Southport, Hartlepool and London are a mindless reaction to the killing of three girls, based on false information which, according to former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, may have been propagated from Russia in a deliberate attempt to stir up social unrest in Britain. But is Sir
As Kate Andrews argues here, the Bank of England were never going to cut interest rates during an election campaign for fear of being accused of favouring one side or the other. That ruled out a rate cut in June, while in July there was no meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee. But are those five
It will surprise no-one to learn that there is a trail of money which leads from climate protesters and their pranks in Britain back to the self-satisfied celebs of Hollywood. It will come as a greater – and possibly happier – revelation that this particular source of money appears to be drying up fast. If
Angela Rayner has announced that the government will aim to build 370,000 new homes, up from the 300,000 a year implied in the party’s manifesto. But if the deputy prime minister really thinks that all she needs to do to achieve that target is to take on Nimbys – as Rayner and chancellor Rachel Reeves
There is one over-arching question hanging over Rachel Reeves’s speech today, in which she claimed that a £21.9 billion hole has opened up in the current political spending for this financial year: why, if there is such a large ‘black hole’ in the public finances, is there suddenly money available for £9.4 billion worth of
Oh, the suspense. It seems that we will have to wait until next week to discover the details of the £20 billion ‘black hole’ which chancellor Rachel Reeves has supposedly discovered in the public finances. Don’t get too excited, though. The revelation will be no greater a surprise than the ending of James Cameron’s blockbuster film
The UK climate is getting ever more extreme. We know this because the BBC keeps telling us so, most recently in today’s reporting of the annual Met Office/Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) State of the Climate Report for 2023. ‘Climate change is dramatically increasing the frequency of extreme high temperatures in the UK,’ writes climate editor
Three weeks into the new Labour government and it is already becoming clear where some of its weaknesses lie – none more so than Ed Miliband’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid, save consumers money and boost the economy with many thousands of ‘well-paid green jobs’. Today the Royal Academy of Engineering weighs in with
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
