Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero and The Road to Southend Pier.
Rishi Sunak is not wrong to write, as he does in the Telegraph today, that too many young people are being ‘ripped off’ by poor-quality university courses, and that many would be better signing up for apprenticeships. But should a Conservative government really be threatening to tell the universities what to do? David Cameron’s tuition
I have been playing a game with myself recently: asking just what would it take for me to vote Labour at the next election? The gossip out of No. 10 has answered it for me: if, as rumoured, the Prime Minister toys with the idea of abolishing inheritance tax – at a time when the
It is not pleasant to think of a poor bunch of creatures in distress, but the passengers who visited the Faeroes last Sunday aboard an Ambassador cruise liner have at least received an apology for their upset. Some 78 pilot whales were driven into a bay and slaughtered in front of them in a traditional
Sometimes there is a problem so glaring that you wonder why no one is addressing it. Sooner or later, the government is going to have to deal with the black hole that will appear in the public finances as a result of the switch to electric cars. True, Jeremy Hunt has announced that electric cars
According to Cathryn Ross, Thames Water’s co-interim chief executive, householders with large gardens should be paying a higher price for their water than people with small or no gardens. Actually, they already almost certainly do. If they have a metered supply, their bills will be proportional to how much water they use – and will
Anyone fancy having a flutter with 5 per cent of their pension fund on unlisted start-ups? It is not necessarily a bad idea – it is only 5 per cent, after all. As part of a portfolio which is balanced by more bread and butter investments it need not be reckless. At best, you might
According to Joe Biden on the steps of Downing Street, by travelling to the UK he ‘couldn’t be meeting with a closer friend and greater ally. Our relationship is rock solid’. Really? In that case, will Biden be using his time in London to start talks for a US-UK trade deal? Will he be changing
According to a YouGov poll this week 64 per cent have an unfavourable view of Just Stop Oil (only 17 per cent have a positive view and the rest aren’t sure). Unfortunately, however, none of these people appear to feature in the contacts books of BBC producers. The Today programme this morning attempted to have a
Are house prices falling? The Halifax house price index, published today, is finally showing a significant year on year fall: average prices are 2.6 per cent down in the 12 months to June. This is the biggest annual fall shown by the index in 12 years. But it is still hard to depict what is happening
Keir Starmer has come up with a good policy for once. He is promising to offer a Scottish-style right to roam across England, which would open up vastly more tracts of land for public recreation. The right to roam granted by the Blair government 20 years ago applies only to moorland, which is rare in the
What a handy distraction it makes for the banks to stand accused of closing down accounts held by Nigel Farage and others on the basis of their political views. It is a distraction because otherwise the big banking story this week would be a meeting between the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the large banks
Imagine a Tory prime minister who gave the liberal left almost everything that it wanted. Higher migration? Sure, let’s treble it. End austerity with more tax and spending? Sure, let’s pay the wages of 9 million people from the state’s purse, hand the NHS another £34 billion – and let’s jack up corporation tax to
One difference between the rivalry with China and the cold war is that the Soviet Union was completely economically segregated from the western world. That is not the case with China nowadays: cheap goods have flooded western markets for decades. But are we heading back to the multipolar world of the 20th century? China and
Planes grounded in New York, people told to stay indoors – and an actress forced to leave the stage on Broadway because of the smoke. Canada is ‘on fire’ and New York is choking from the drifting smoke – and it is all the result of man-made climate change. We know this because Justin Trudeau and other
So is Artificial intelligence (AI) to be a new engine of growth for the UK economy? That is Rishi Sunak’s hope. Ideally, he might have been using his trip to Washington to announce a trade deal between the UK and the US. Of course, that’s not going to happen: Joe Biden has made it clear that he
Would Labour’s plan to impose VAT on private school fees really raise £1.6 billion, as the party claims? Not according to a research paper by the education think tank EDSK. The £1.6 billion figure is often attributed to the Resolution Foundation, yet the original source, says EDSK, is a paper by the Fabian Society in 2011
If you think nothing works in Britain now, just wait. Wait, that is, until a future government (I’ll guess a Labour one, but can never tell with the Conservatives any more) introduces a universal basic income – that is a guaranteed, unconditional income for everyone, regardless of means, and regardless of whether they are working,
Another week, another extravagant claim for climatic doom goes unchallenged. Speaking on the Today programme on Wednesday morning, Dale Vince – the founder of Electrocity and donor to both Don’t Stop Oil and the Labour party – asserted: ‘40,000 people across Europe died from excess heat last summer. That’s part of the climate crisis. People
Liz Truss’ fallen star has been rising again of late (at least a few degrees above the horizon) as gilt yields return to the heights they reached during her brief premiership. Together with sluggish GDP figures this has led many to wonder whether she was not right, after all, to make growth the absolute priority
Not for the first time, a gulf has opened up between house price indices. This morning, Nationwide reports that average prices fell by 0.1 per cent in May (following a surprise rise of 0.4 per cent in April), taking annual house price inflation down to minus 3.4 per cent. That will surprise no-one, given the
