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.
Rachel Reeves is beginning to look awfully like Gordon Brown. Study the actions of this government so far and you would hardly say that deregulation was its big idea. True, Keir Starmer did claim at his investment summit last month that he was going to slash red tape. Angela Rayner wants planning laws relaxed to
I’ve got a better idea for the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which is demanding civil servants be allowed to work just four days a week for no loss of pay, claiming that a shorter working week is ‘essential for a happy and healthy life’. Why not put civil servants on a zero-day week?
Keir Starmer said he was travelling to Cop 29 in Baku intending to “lead the world on climate change”. But it must surely be obvious that he is, instead, barking at a world that is heading in the opposite direction. Last year’s grand talk about “phasing down” fossil fuels at Cop 28 notwithstanding, today’s Global
‘It’s not about telling people how to live their lives. I’m not interested in that’ said Keir Starmer of his new target for Britain to reduce its carbon emissions by 81 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. Really? In that case perhaps he would like to tell us how he does intend to reach
With an urgency not always noted in plumbers, Charlie Mullins announced earlier this year that he was leaving the country, before even waiting for the Budget fallout. He put his £12 million penthouse on the market and is busy buying up properties in Spain and Dubai, between which he will now spend his time. Inheritance
If you think Donald Trump’s victory is hard enough on Kamala Harris’s campaign staff, spare a thought for the world’s climate activists and their assorted luvvie hangers-on. Just Stop Oil lost no time in spraying the US embassy in Battersea, claiming that democracy has been ‘hijacked by corporate interests and billionaires’. Billy Porter, an actor
On the face of it, Donald Trump’s threat to impose general import tariffs of 10 to 20 per cent on all goods – and much higher levies on those from China – is bad news for Britain, the US and the world. That protectionism makes us poorer is a lesson which seems to have to
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, watching the mood change in the BBC’s election studio has been delicious. It was like a New Orleans funeral in reverse – a carnival turning a corner and transforming into a wake. This was supposed to be a historic night. But then it wasn’t just the BBC. The liberal
Six days on from the Budget, and things don’t look any better for Rachel Reeves’s claim that her Budget won’t negatively affect working people. Today and tomorrow, it is the turn of the Commons Treasury Select Committee to pick through the wreckage. What have we learned so far? David Miles from the Office for Budget
If I were president of the National Farmers’ Union I know what my first task would be today: ring up Sir James Dyson and plead with him to keep his trap shut. It isn’t that Dyson, one of the few living Britons who has set up a manufacturing business of worldwide reputation, isn’t worth listening
It was the absence of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s judgment that was blamed for the bond market crisis after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had rushed to enact their vision for a fast-growing economy without waiting for the wisdom of the government’s official fiscal watchdog. For Truss, the OBR is
Is there any word more laughably misapplied than ‘tsar’? We have already had an ‘antisemitism tsar’ and now we are going to have a ‘value for money’ tsar. Had you suggested to a Russian peasant that their monarch was value for money I suspect you might have ended up floating on the Neva River alongside Rasputin.
It wasn’t an aggrieved business leader, facing a sharply increased wage bill thanks to the Budget, that led the 8 a.m. news bulletin on Radio 4 this morning, but the reassuring verdict of the IMF. ‘We support the envisaged reduction in the deficit over the medium term, including by sustainably raising revenue,’ the body declared.
It has been a good day for investors in the Alternative Investment Market (Aim), with the index of the top 100 Aim shares up 4.3 per cent. But that merely serves to undermine the damage that Rachel Reeves had done to the market by previously suggesting that she might remove the exemption whereby Aim shares
It is tempting to think of this Budget as a triumph in expectation management. Rachel Reeves’s minions have briefed us on so many potential tax rises that surely the actual speech, when finally delivered, can’t be as bad as feared. Having been conditioned to expect the worst, we will all end up feeling pathetically grateful
Could Rachel Reeves’s ‘black hole’ be filled not through tax rises or even spending cuts but rather through getting an extra two million people into work? That is the claim this morning made by the Jobs Foundation, a think tank set up by Matthew Elliott, now Lord Elliott, who formerly ran the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Raising
Remember Gordon Brown’s ‘golden rule’ – that over the course of the economic cycle the only net borrowing he would allow was to fund investment? As for current spending, he told us, he would pay down debt in the good times so that he could borrow in the bad. It sounded reassuring, until Brown started
It would be a shame if Britain were forced to leave the Commonwealth, given the great work it has done over the decades – especially under the guardianship of the late Queen. But our departure is swiftly going to emerge as an option if grasping Caribbean governments continue with their threat to ambush Keir Starmer
Could Rachel Reeves really be so brazen as to lumber private sector employers with having to pay national insurance contributions (NICs) on their employees’ pension contributions – but to spare public sector employers the same burden? That is what is being reported this morning. It has been suggested that, in next week’s Budget, the Chancellor
There is a big danger in today’s government borrowing figures for September being a little less bad than was expected by many observers. It will lead to claims that the Chancellor has enjoyed a ‘windfall’ prior to next week’s Budget, therefore lessening the need for spending cuts. No, there is no windfall. Until recent years,
