Ross Clark

Labour is right not to pay compensation to the Waspi women – those who feel aggrieved that the state pension age for women was raised from 60 to 66 without, so they claim, them being given adequate information about the change. We are being invited to believe that tens of thousands of women drew up detailed plans for their retirement – all now undermined – without actually bothering to find out at what age they would retire. You can’t claim poverty one moment while writing open-ended cheques for favoured groups the next To swan off into state-funded retirement at 60 when life expectancy for women is now well into the 80s would be absurd. We can’t have a working age population supporting a retired population that consists of around a third of all adults.

You can’t expect anything reasonable when Hollywood gets on its high horse, but really, are our pension contributions truly helping to strip the Amazon of its rainforests? That is the claim made in a short film featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, in which the actor appears in a sauna as 'Benedict Lumberjack', the CEO of a logging company. 'The business of deforestation is on fire right now and it is all thanks to you,' he says. 'The money from your pension has helped scorch, slash and burn entire rainforests… some bits of the world are literally burning but it’s just the bits that no one cares about.' Let’s sketch over the assertion that logging companies are setting fire to rainforests – emphasised in a shot of tall trees being consumed by fire.

Political office does odd things to parties which were in opposition. Angela Rayner and Steve Reed have written in the Sunday Times this morning complaining that environmental rules are threatening the government’s house-building targets. We’re in a situation, they say, ‘where bats and newts are getting in the way of people who desperately need housing.’ They are not wrong. One of the reasons why there are 1.2 million would-be homes which have been granted planning permission over the past decade but which have yet to be built is that pettifogging green rules are standing in their way. Three of those ghost homes are in my village.

Why does the government keep setting itself up for failure? It did it with the target for decarbonising electricity by 2030 – which virtually no one outside Ed Miliband’s department and its attached agency, the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO), thinks is possible and which has already been watered down to a 95 per cent reduction in emissions. And it has done it again with its target of building 1.5 million homes across the lifetime of this Parliament. Angela Rayner seems to think it is just a case of trampling over Nimbys and the houses will magically appear. But today the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) has scotched that notion, saying that Britain simply doesn’t have the skilled workforce necessary for such an acceleration.

The NHS is about to start doling out ‘the King Kong of weight loss drugs’ to obese patients – the scandal, needless to say, is that not enough people will qualify. The drug, Mounjaro, will be limited to people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 35 and who have at least one medical condition resulting from their excess weight. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has recommended that 220,000 people be given the drug in the next three years – a small fraction of the 25 per cent of the adult population which is obese.     How dare the NHS be so tight-fisted. It is, of course, a human right to be given drugs to save us from having to eat less.

Hold your hats, but Britain is doing rather well in something – or at least England is. Our children are achieving more at maths than in any country outside South or East Asia. According to the latest Trends in International Maths and Science Study, conducted by the Dutch-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), English 13 to 14-year-olds come out with an average score of 525, sixth behind Singapore (605), Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) (602), Korea (596), Japan (595) and Hong Kong (575).

Towards the end of his time in office, Tony Blair came over all nuclear. A new generation of atomic energy plants, he told a CBI conference in 2006, would provide Britain with clean, carbon-free energy as well as boost national energy security. He didn’t last long enough in Downing Street to see it through, but this week he is banging the drum for nuclear energy again. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has published a polemic, A New Nuclear Age, which dismisses fears over safety and cost to propose that Britain once more plunges headlong into new nuclear plants. ‘Public perception of the risk of nuclear power is not commensurate with the actual risk,’ it asserts.

Who would envy being an MP today when called upon to vote on a matter of conscience: the assisted dying bill? The issue cuts across party lines, and so whichever way they vote they will offend a good proportion of their own voters. But on the other hand, for once they are being trusted to use their own judgement rather than hiding behind party whips. That, surely, must be liberating. Might the comfort of knowing that assisted suicide were available at a later date dissuade able people from taking their lives? And which of us can say we haven’t found ourselves feeling that we must come down on one side or the other? I have a feeling that, were I in the House of Commons, I would still be wavering as I approached the lobbies.

It is hard to see where all of Ed Miliband’s ‘green jobs’ are coming from, but we are certainly losing existing manufacturing jobs. Net zero has just claimed a very significant scalp. Stellantis, the parent company of Vauxhall, has said that it plans to close its plant at Luton, where it makes the Vivaro van, at the cost of 1,100 jobs (although some work will be transferred to its other UK plant at Ellesmere Port). This has been coming for months; Stellantis chief executive Carlos Tavares warned earlier this year that the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate is making car-making unviable in Britain.

Where is the stick? For weeks the government has been trailing its white paper on benefits reform by floating the idea that there would be tough sanctions on claimants who refused to take up work offers. It culminated on Sunday in a double hit – Keir Starmer in the Mail on Sunday and Liz Kendall in the Telegraph – each promising that idlers would no longer have the option of a life on benefits. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ wrote Starmer, ‘we will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system, to tackle fraud so we can take cash straight from the banks of fraudsters.’ Kendall added ‘there should be no option of a life on benefits for young people’.

Turkeys don’t usually vote for Christmas, so just why have 43 new Labour MPs signed up to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Fair Elections and its campaign to replace the first-past-the-post system with proportional representation? These are, after all, the beneficiaries of the most distorted UK election in modern history, where Labour won one of the largest-ever majorities on just 34 per cent of the popular vote – a lower share than any post-war governing party. To underline just how lucky they were, it took 24,000 votes to elect each Labour MP in July, but 56,000 to elect each Conservative. The electoral system has started to treat the Tories even less favourably than the Lib Dems, who required 49,000 votes to elect each of their MPs.

I can’t fault Keir Starmer for his piece in the Mail on Sunday today promising that Labour will crack down on idlers and benefit cheats. But does anyone really believe that Labour is really going to get on top of the explosion in out of work benefits? Whenever the Conservatives announced plans to trim the benefits bill, Labour accused them of heartlessness ‘Don’t get me wrong’, the Prime Minister writes. ‘We will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system… There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals.’ Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall is due to announce on Tuesday measures which will supposedly achieve this and cut the £137 billion a year welfare bill.