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
There was little competition for the oddest and most obscure bill to be announced in the King’s Speech: the proposal to licence London’s pedicabs. On the list of the most pressing issues facing the nation, it doesn’t tend to feature very highly. There must be many people in Britain who have never seen a pedicab,
Should we bother taking any notice of what Andrew Bailey says about inflation, given that he and his colleagues on the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) failed miserably to foresee any of the inflationary forces of the past two years? As late as May 2021 they were still predicting that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) would
Oxfam used to be a worthy charity through which donors in wealthy countries could help fund famine relief in developing countries over-run by natural disasters. That was before it evolved into a left-wing pressure group sandwiched somewhere between Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter. It’s latest report, Climate Equality: a Planet for the 99 per
‘We know it is painful, especially with inflation at what it is. But there really is no option other than to ask you low-paid workers to contribute a little more in tax so that Rishi Sunak and his wife, when the time comes, can pass on a bit more of their £730 million wealth to
The UK economy has so far defied those, like the Bank of England, who confidently predicted a recession. But the threat is not over yet, as the retail sales figures for October show. Not only were sales volumes down by 0.3 per cent over the month, but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also revised its
A trade deal with the US has long been a holy grail for Brexiteers, not least because it is something that the EU has failed to achieve. Barack Obama told us we would have to go to the back of the queue, then Donald Trump told us we were at the front of the queue.
Liz Truss may be long gone, but one fragment of her premiership still remains: the Growth Commission she set up to advise on her policy for ‘growth, growth, growth’. The think tank, made up of British, US and Japanese economists and not to be confused with a body of the same name set up by
The green lobby has found another way of attacking the government for giving the go-ahead for new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. They are claiming that Britain doesn’t have enough refinery capacity to turn the crude oil into finished products. The climate pressure group Global Witness claims that most of the new
Is there anything left which hasn’t been overtaken by climate change drivel? In my spare time I serve as chairman of a village cricket club in East Anglia: a club which I and others, against the grain of the contracting world of village cricket, have succeeded in setting up from scratch over the past dozen
Rishi Sunak was attacked by the green lobby for delaying the outright ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035. But has he watered down the government’s ambitions enough? What few noticed at the time was that the government has left in place most of the targets on the way to what
At times, the Covid public inquiry has had the appearance of a show trial – one that starts with the premise that lockdown was essential to saving lives and should have been imposed earlier in the spring of 2020, and that is seeking to find the guilty parties who prevented this happening. As Carl Heneghan,
Should we really believe that house prices rose by 0.9 per cent in September, as claimed by the latest release from the Nationwide House Price Index? The unexpected rise moderates the annual fall in house prices from 5.3 per cent in August to 3.3 per cent in September. There is a health warning on the
So it seems that rail ticket offices will be reprieved. After a vociferous campaign – not least on behalf of elderly travellers who might find it difficult to use mobile phone technology, let alone the network of often-dysfunctional ticket machines – the government has undertaken a U-turn and told rail companies to withdraw their proposals
‘We’ve had 30 years of vested interests standing in the way of change,’ Rishi Sunak declared in his conference speech in Manchester. Now he has chance to prove that he intends to do something about it. Back in May, it was reported that Sunak himself had squashed Michael Gove’s proposals for banning new leasehold properties
The Autumn Statement could propose offering discounts in stamp duty for homebuyers who take improvement to raise the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of their home during their first two years of ownership. Could this be the beginning of a new divergence between the Conservatives and Labour, where the Tories provide incentives and Labour pursue punitive
It was the weather wot did it, wot stopped us spending in the shops. Yet again, the favourite old excuse has been trotted out by retailers trying to explain where their sales have vanished. Retail sales volumes in September, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports this morning, plunged by 0.9 per cent in September,
A year ago Liz Truss’ brief government collapsed when markets lost confidence in Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. A large part of the problem, it was explained at the time, was that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) – founded by George Osborne specifically to provide some independent backing for Budget measures – had not been invited to
Not for the first time, a widely-predicted – and for many frustrated buyers, hoped-for – house price crash has failed to materialise. The Office for National Statistics’ House Price Index (ONS HPI) shows average prices up 0.3 per cent in the month of August and up 0.2 per cent since August 2022. This is at odds with
Is the Covid inquiry running out of steam? Today, it saw one of Covid’s biggest stars take the ‘witness stand’: Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College, whose paper in March 2020 was instrumental in persuading Boris Johnson to call a lockdown. Ferguson, of course, went on to achieve notoriety by breaking the very lockdown rules
Matt Hancock, don’t retire just yet – we may need you back. There’s a new terror spreading across Britain – and even better for the tabloids, this one seems to have come from France. It is all a big and rather silly panic The great bedbug scare bubbled up a few weeks ago as an