Ross Clark

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.

Cop29 has drawn to a close with arguments over a $250 billion (£200 billion) a year ‘loss and damage’ fund, which developing countries complain is not nearly enough to match their demands. But away from the grand gestures at the summit it is worth looking at what countries are actually doing rather than what they say they are going to do. The answer to that seems to be drilling for more oil. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global supply of oil in October rose by 290,000 barrels a day to reach 102 million barrels per day. That is just as well given that the IEA predicts that global oil demand will rise by a further 1 per cent to reach a record 103.8 million barrels per day in 2025.

Is 'workshy Britain' a mirage caused by dodgy statistics? That is what the left-leaning think tank the Resolution Foundation is claiming in a report published this morning. The Office for National Statistics (ONS), it says, has missed 930,000 people who are actually in work. The missing numbers, it asserts, are enough to raise Britain’s employment rate from 75 percent to 76 percent, with a corresponding fall in the combined total of people classified as unemployed or economically inactive. Until the 1990s, the concept on unemployment in Britain was pretty straightforward: it was the total number of people who were claiming unemployment benefit.

It is a fate which has been creeping up on Britain for years, but that doesn’t make it any the harder to bear when it becomes official. According to the OECD, we now have the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe. At 80.9, the average Brit now keels over more than three years earlier than the average Swiss (84.2), Spaniard (84.0) or Italian (83.8) – which are the top three countries in Europe. We have lower life expectancy than many significantly poorer countries such as Greece and Slovenia. We also live shorter lives than countries where assisted suicide is commonplace, like Belgium and the Netherlands. We also come out pretty badly on the use of illicit drugs, with the highest cocaine use in Europe Why? On some health measures Britain comes out ahead in Europe.

So that’s it then: the Guardian has declared that we are all being scorched, drowned and blown over by climate change. The website Carbon Brief, it says, has found ‘stark evidence of how global heating is already supercharging deadly weather beyond anything ever experienced by humanity’. Never mind that humans were around to witness multiple ice ages – let’s have a look at Carbon Brief’s claim. The report looks at 744 extreme weather events and trends measured by 617 different studies and makes the claim that in 74 per cent of cases, the event had been made more likely or more severe by anthropogenic climate change, while 9 per cent of events had been made less likely or less severe.

I’ve got a better idea for the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which is demanding civil servants be allowed to work just four days a week for no loss of pay, claiming that a shorter working week is ‘essential for a happy and healthy life’. Why not put civil servants on a zero-day week? That would surely be even happier and healthier for them. It would certainly be happier and healthier for taxpayers. Virtually no private business would have allowed employee numbers to get so out of control It would be little wonder if the civil service can do in four days the work it used to do in five: its numbers have exploded in the past decade. In 2016 we had 2.9 million civil servants employed by central government; now we have 3.79 million.

‘It’s not about telling people how to live their lives. I’m not interested in that’ said Keir Starmer of his new target for Britain to reduce its carbon emissions by 81 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. Really? In that case perhaps he would like to tell us how he does intend to reach his target. If he thinks he can do it without mandating changes to our lifestyle he must have a cunning plan indeed. His target is very much going to have to involve telling people what cars they are allowed to drive and how they are allowed to heat their homes Let’s have a look at this 81 per cent target a bit more closely. According to government figures the UK has already reduced its territorial greenhouse gas emissions by 53 per cent compared with 1990 levels.

If you think Donald Trump’s victory is hard enough on Kamala Harris’s campaign staff, spare a thought for the world’s climate activists and their assorted luvvie hangers-on. Just Stop Oil lost no time in spraying the US embassy in Battersea, claiming that democracy has been ‘hijacked by corporate interests and billionaires’. Billy Porter, an actor presenting the Prince of Wales’s Earthshot Prize, said he had been ‘crying all day’ over the result. The activists and lobbyists heading for the Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku over the next few days shouldn’t worry too much – contrary to popular imagination, US carbon emissions per capita continued to fall over the course of Trump’s first presidency, from 16.1 tonnes per person in 2016 to 14.