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
Finally, in a horrible week for Rachel Reeves which has seen inflation surge, the public finances take a dive and her authority undermined by Angela Rayner’s memo and the Prime Minister’s U-turn on the winter fuel payment, a glimmer of good news. Retail sales rose by 1.2 per cent in April. The Office for National
The answer, according to Ed Miliband in an infamously toe-curling rendition of the Bob Dylan song, is blowing in the wind. But no longer, it seems, if you are on the board of SSE. The energy company, which was one of the first UK electricity companies to commit in a big way to renewable energy,
We can thank Rachel Reeves for one thing: setting up a real-world experiment to show the Laffer curve in action. April’s figures for the public finances, like yesterday’s figures for inflation, are truly dreadful. April should have been a bumper month for tax receipts, being the month that the rise in Employers’ National Insurance Contributions
One of Keir Starmer’s first mistakes in office was to remove the winter fuel allowance from all pensioners other than those in receipt of pension credit. His latest big error is performing a U-turn and telling us that the government is, after all, looking at loosening the eligibility criteria, so that many more pensioners will
Rachel Reeves may have killed off growth with her raid on employers’ National Insurance contributions, but today comes a reminder that she is nevertheless the relatively mild face of the Starmer government. We can at least be thankful that Angela Rayner is not Chancellor. Labour’s deputy leader has written a memo to Reeves suggesting a
There is no positive spin to be put on this morning’s inflation figures, which show the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rising from 2.6 per cent to 3.5 per cent in a single month. If you want to do the trick of stripping out energy and food prices to arrive at so-called ‘core’ inflation (how you
Rachel Reeves is perhaps not a great fan of Donald Trump, but she should be grateful to him nonetheless, and Ed Miliband even more so. The trade war sparked by Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs is about to lower energy prices for UK consumers. According to a forecast by consultants Cornwall Insight, Ofgem’s price cap will
The bleak future of the UK’s public finances can be summed up in a few statistics. For the financial year just ended, the Office for National Statistics’ provisional estimate for the government’s deficit – the gap between income and expenditure – is £151.9 billion. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s estimate is that spending on welfare
The Environmental and Rural Affairs select committee is surely right that the government imposed the inheritance tax changes on farmland without proper consultation – and ignored the likelihood that they will cause serious hardship for family farms. Never mind the threshold which Rachel Reeves claims will mean most farms can still be passed on IHT-free
If the government was deliberately trying to encourage union militancy, it could not be making a better job of it. It is reported that junior doctors – or ‘resident doctors’ as we are now supposed to call them for fear of implying that they might be less qualified than consultants who have been doing their
If the consequences of Labour’s heavy losses in the local elections were not already clear, they became so in this morning’s press conference to relaunch the government’s migration policy. Reversing years of generally friendly attitudes towards migration, dating back to Tony Blair’s day – when the UK opened its doors to migrant workers from Eastern
Here’s a question: do you think that Bill Gates would have started and built up his Microsoft empire had the top rate of US income tax been 99 per cent? I don’t know Gates but I think the answer is obvious. Why would he have put in all those hours and taken all those risks
We had the shock of ‘Liberation day’ when punitive tariffs were levied on imports from virtually every country in the world. That was the destructive part of Donald Trump’s trade war. Now we enter phase two: trying to put things back together again. The announcement of trade deal with a ‘big and highly-respected country’ (believed
Wasn’t a trade deal with India supposed to be one of the big gains from Brexit – an example of how Britain, once free from the protectionist grip of the EU, could go ‘out into the world’ and free up trade with fast-growing economies, rather than be stuck trading with Europe’s stagnant ones? Markets certainly
You can say it for Wes Streeting: he doesn’t hang about. Reacting to the heavy loss of council seats in last week’s elections, he is proffering £102 million of money for extra GPs’ appointments – hopefully to end what has been termed the “8am scramble”: a kind of Hunger Games which NHS patients have to
A man from John Lewis came yesterday to measure up for some window blinds. When he started struggling with the mobile broadband on his phone – which he required to be able to give a quote – I made what I thought was a straightforward offer for him to sign onto my home broadband. He
There is little disguising what is surely going to be the prevailing story as council election results pour in from lunchtime onwards: Reform UK has had a very good night, Labour a poor one and the Conservatives a disastrous one. To win a by-election – even by just six votes – in Runcorn, will enliven
Here’s a pub quiz question: which European country has no net zero target? I don’t mean which country is not bothering too much about conforming with its net zero target, because that is most of them, but which one doesn’t even have such a target in the first place? The surprising answer is Norway, which
The facade of Garden Court Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is reassuringly traditional. The barristers who work there occupy buildings which were once home to the Earl of Sandwich and the Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval. If there were any building in London in which wigs and gowns would seem a natural form of dress,
Ouch! Tony Blair had only recently left office when Ed Miliband, a protégé of Gordon Brown, drove the Climate Change Act through the Commons, committing the UK government to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent, compared with 1990 levels, by 2050. That target was upgraded to a net zero target – with minimal debate
