Ross Clark

Ross Clark

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

Starmer’s savvy Brexit position

Keir Starmer has made the anodyne demand that Britain seek a ‘closer trading agreement’ with the EU. But why doesn’t he go the whole hog and make it Labour policy to rejoin the single market?  The Labour leader could hardly be accused of seeking to reverse Brexit. Some Leavers, prior to the 2016 referendum, wanted Britain

Ross Clark

Europe is turning against net zero

The contrast couldn’t be greater. In Britain a wealthy cabinet minister goes on television to boast of how he is installing a heat pump in his home – something his government is proposing to force on millions of British homeowners over the next few years in spite of them costing many thousands of pounds more

Britain is becoming Brussels on Thames

Whatever happened to Singapore on Thames? Weren’t we, after leaving the EU, supposed to be forging a future as a deregulated, low-tax, business-friendly enclave situated 20 miles off Calais? It isn’t quite looking that way at the moment. We are reinventing ourselves as Brussels on Thames – only more so. Do our bureaucrats really need

Train companies are finally getting their comeuppance

As they call yet more strikes today and tomorrow, rail unions are the leading candidates for the most miserable and destructive institutions in contemporary Britain. Train operating companies, though, are not far behind. Having ripped us off for years by ruthlessly exploiting the local monopolies gifted to them through the franchise system they can’t even run

Why are the Tories so afraid to tackle housing reform?

If there ever were a couple of policies the government desperately needs to give it a chance of being re-elected next year it is rental reform and leasehold. Both in their own way would make life a good deal less miserable for the younger voters who have drifted away from the party in recent years. 

Justin Welby’s climate confusion

It is widely expected that Justin Welby, having now screwed the crown on Charles III’s head, will shortly retire as Archbishop of Canterbury and put himself out to grass. If so, he is not going quietly. This afternoon, in the House of Lords, he launched a wholesale attack on the government’s Illegal Migration Bill, which

The troubling return of 100 per cent mortgages

Is there a greater weapon of financial mass destruction than the 100 per cent mortgage? Take out a loan equivalent to the full value of your home and it only takes one bad month for the Halifax house price index to land you in negative equity.  If you have bought a new home, you will almost

What happened to the voter ID backlash?

You might have thought that a heavy defeat for the Conservatives in the local elections would silence those claiming that the government was out to disenfranchise left-wing voters by introducing compulsory photo ID for voters at polling stations. But not a bit of it.   Paul Mason was up bright and early bleating about ‘serious vote

Can reforms save the London stock market?

The decline of the UK stock market has finally reached the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It has proposed to deregulate it in order to attract more companies to list in London rather than do as, for example, UK-based chip-maker ARM is doing and choosing to list in New York (it was once a UK-listed company

Ed Miliband is wrong about BP’s profits

Are BP’s profits of $5 billion in the first quarter of this year really the ‘unearned, unexpected windfalls of war’, as Ed Miliband asserted this morning? The idea that any oil company’s profits are unearned must come as news to the geologists and engineers who are employed in the tricky business of exploring and drilling for oil.

When does a banking wobble become a crisis?

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

Can Britain become the Saudi Arabia of carbon capture?

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

There is hope yet for Britain’s car industry

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

The era of big state spending is here to stay

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

Why are we allowing solar panels to swallow up our farmland?

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

This afternoon’s alarm test is slightly sinister

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

Newsnight stoops to a new low in its climate protest coverage

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