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.
Can a banking crisis really be going this well? After a week of panic withdrawals and a crashing share price, the First Republic Bank in the US will be taken over nearly in its entirety by J P Morgan Chase, in a shotgun marriage facilitated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). No depositors will
Boris Johnson wanted to make Britain ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’. But Grant Shapps is keen to send Britain’s green agenda in a new direction. Speaking at The Spectator’s Energy Summit on 26 April, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net-Zero announced the government’s ambitions for Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage – CCUS – where
The UK car industry is, of course, doomed. First we lost our native manufacturers and then, post Brexit, overseas manufacturers like Honda started to close down their UK factories, too. Finally came the farce of BritishVolt: the Tyneside factory which was going to transform the UK car industry by pumping out batteries, but collapsed before
There is nothing more boring than potholes. I remember that from my own days as a parish councillor. It saps the spirit every time the subject comes up, makes you wish you could be anywhere other than this damned meeting. How much more exciting it must have felt to have been the councillors in Cambridge
Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill isn’t going to win a popularity contest. Speaking on a podcast for Columbia Law School – a medium in which he perhaps felt a little less exposed than had he said it on a British TV programme – he said: ‘Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept
Lockdown ended, the economy reopened – and public sector borrowing went up. Provisional figures for 2022/23 released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the government borrowed £139.2 billion. This is an increase of £18.1 billion on the previous year, when the economy was still being disrupted by Covid. The figure
We have spent a year talking about energy security, but with inflation in food prices running at 19 per cent, how much longer before the debate turns to food security? Ideally, we would have policies which prioritise energy security as well as food security, but sadly the latter seems to have been forgotten. National self-sufficiency in
At 3 p.m. this afternoon, our phones will awaken with a screech announcing impending doom. It won’t be for real (unless a terror group decides it is an opportune moment to launch an attack) but an exercise in testing a new civil defence warning system – an updated version of the network of sirens used
Has the BBC been invaded by a cabal of Extinction Rebellion protesters who have tied up the Director General in his swivel chair? I ask because of a remarkable interview on Newsnight which marks a new low in the objectivity of the BBC’s climate coverage. The flagship BBC Two news programme last night covered the threatened
Did retail sales really fall in March because of the wet weather? This is the excuse being trotted out by the ONS and many others this morning. Or is it really more a case of February’s surprise rise in sales being too good to be true, and the economy not being as perky as we
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary never has exactly been the master of tact, but will his latest outburst make his customers finally ask themselves: do they really want to travel in his planes? Speaking at a Bloomberg event he asserted that Britain will one day rejoin the single market because ‘in the next five to ten
Just what would it take to induce a housing price crash in Britain? Evidently, more than a Bank of England base rate of 4.25 per cent combined with a cost of living crisis. The Office for National Statistics’ House Price Index – the most comprehensive of the house pries indices – shows that prices fell
You have to feel a little sorry for Rishi Sunak. When you have a wife as rich as Akshata Murty, just how do you keep tabs on all her investments, making sure that each one of them is properly declared as an interest in the House of Commons Register? The Prime Minister has suffered the
Are we going to have to give up flying to save the planet? Many climate campaigners have been saying so for years, but now Sustainable Aviation – a trade body which represents the UK aviation industry – seems to agree, at least in the case of less well-off passengers. It is rather significant that the
How big a deal is long Covid and can it be treated? Opinions range from it being a serious impediment to the health of millions of those who suffered from Covid-19 to a figment in the imagination of the workshy. A study by the University of Oxford of a drug developed by US Pharmaceutical company Axcella
The term ‘hostile environment’ was dreamt up by the Home Office to describe a policy of making migrants lives’ so difficult that they would be minded to pack up and leave the country. But it could equally well have been coined to apply to the government’s policies towards buy-to-let investors. For years, governments of all
Good news – at least for those who hold faith in economic forecasts. The IMF has just eradicated half the recession it forecast, in January, for Britain. At that point, it expected the UK economy to shrink by 0.6 per cent over 2023 – which would have meant Britain uniquely suffering a recession among advanced
The path from the editor’s chair at The Spectator to 11 Downing Street was not untrodden when Mrs Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to replace Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor of the Exchequer after the 1983 general election. Iain Macleod had made the same journey in 1970. But whereas Macleod died 13 days into the job, Lawson
Just when we thought inflationary forces were softening, the price of crude oil has shot up sharply today in response to an announcement by Opec that it will try to reduce production. A barrel of Brent crude, which touched $120 last summer before falling back to $75 last month, reached $85 at one point today.
If anyone thought that the public sector strikes were fading out, this week marks a resurgence, with Passport Office staff striking for five weeks – apparently on behalf of other civil servants whose absence might be less noticed – along with the National Education Union (NEU). The education union voted by a margin of 98