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
Consumers seem finally to have thrown in the towel: they are no longer propping up the economy. After a year in which the predicted recession kept failing to arrive, the high street finally ran out of steam in December with a hefty 3.2 per cent fall in sales volumes compared with November. Non-food was down
Should it really be any surprise that not all teenagers are on the same page as Greta Thunberg? According to a poll by Survation, 31 per cent of Britons between the ages of 13 and 17 agree with the statement ‘climate change and its effects are being purposefully overexaggerated.’ It does rather restore faith in
There must be a slight flaw in the IMF’s crystal ball, causing the future prospects for the German economy to be refracted onto Britain. Remember a year ago when the IMF confidently predicted that the UK economy would suffer the worst performance of any major industrial nation and contract by 0.6 per cent in 2023,
Can I have a Legend of Aviation award please? I deserve it for the time I flew Aeroflot and lived to tell the tale. Then there was the time I flew from Denmark to Amsterdam, taking off from a snowbound runway in a twin-propped plane which looked like something out of Biggles; that was pretty hairy,
London mayor Sadiq Khan has just given us a foretaste of a Labour government by capitulating to the RMT and averting a tube strike at the last moment by, to borrow Nye Bevan’s phrase, stuffing the rail workers’ mouths with gold. That, at least, is Boris Johnson’s assessment of the 11th-hour agreement to avert the
There will be people outraged by the latest initiative of HMRC: to demand that the likes of Airbnb, eBay, and Vinted furnish it with details of everything bought and sold on their online platforms. The taxman should keep his nose out of the sharing economy, many will say. People who sell their secondhand clothes, books,
Economic forecasts rarely survive far into the New Year. Just look at last year’s prophecy by the IMF that the UK economy would shrink by 0.6 per cent in 2023, which was already being revised by March. But we are only three days into 2024 and already the forecasts of falling house prices are beginning to
When is a backlog in asylum applications not a backlog? When it is made up of ‘complex cases’ and of new applications which hadn’t been made at the time ministers promised to clear the backlog. Today, the Home Office has been chirping about its success in tackling illegal migration by announcing ‘the legacy asylum backlog
This should have been the year when we could finally put Covid behind us and return to normal. But as far as public transport is concerned it has instead turned out to herald the realisation that paralysis has become the normal condition, not a product of the pandemic. Any Eurostar passengers who thought they had escaped
I am guessing that Tory MP James Daly has given up trying to defend his majority of 105 in Bury North, has accepted that he will need to find a new job in the next 12 months and has decided to go out in style. I can’t think why else he would say, in an interview
Finally it seems to be dawning on many Conservative MPs that abolishing – or seriously cutting – inheritance tax at the same time as jacking up income tax for millions of low earners is not a great way to tackle a strong Labour lead in the polls. Several backbenchers have written to the Prime Minister
My first instinct is to rush to the attack against any think tank which calls for stuff to be banned. But in the case of a proposal by Bright Blue that wood-burners should come with a health warning, and that their use should be prohibited on certain days when pollution is high, I will make
Are we going to end 2023 with a recession after all? The great non-arriving recession of 2023 has so far confounded the forecasts of the Bank of England (which forecast a shrinking economy throughout 2023), the IMF (which forecast growth of -0.6 per cent over the course of the year) and others, too. But could
Anyone for more tax cuts in the spring budget? You might as well hand out free beer. For many Conservatives, tax cuts provide the last tiny chink of light before the door closes on their electoral prospects for good. This month’s government borrowing figures might just provide some encouragement, too. Net borrowing in November was
You can say one thing about Jim Callaghan’s Labour government of the 1970s. It certainly kept migration under control. Over the course of his government, Britain saw net migration of around minus 65,000. That had quite a lot to do with a top tax rate of 83 per cent. Whether Scotland’s new tax rates will
Covid provided a revelation of the vulnerabilities of the global supply chain, but now war in Yemen has provided another. Attacks on shipping by Iranian-backed Houthis has reminded the world of how much trade is reliant on free passage through the Bab-al-Mandeb Strait, an 18-mile wide waterway at the southern entrance to the Red Sea.
This morning’s inflation figures are good news. The fall in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) to 3.9 per cent, from 4.7 per cent, not only exceeded market expectations by a healthy margin, but in November prices actually fell by 0.2 per cent. Given that averages earnings are rising by 7.3 per cent it is hard
Remember ‘localism’ – when David Cameron was going to return powers to local people when it came to things like planning? If that is how the Conservatives’ 14 years in power began, they seem to be ending with the opposite: with Michael Gove threatening to seize the planning reins from Sadiq Khan and get more
Donald Trump may be offensive in many ways. He may have defiled his office during his previous stint as president by claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him. But at some point over the next ten and a half months before polling day in 2024 even his detractors are going to have to start
‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scotland.’ So read the words carved into a stone outside Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh unveiled by Alex Salmond while he was first minister. But as the SNP’s education policy begins to unravel and the budgetary pressures build at Holyrood,
