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
So much for ‘dry’ and ‘no buy’ January. The UK public seems to have thoroughly rebelled against efforts to persuade them to work off the excesses of the festive season. In particular, we seem to have stuffed our faces somewhat. The retail sales figures put out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning
It is one of the world’s great mysteries: if wind and solar energy are supposed to be so cheap then why does the UK – which generates a higher proportion of its electricity from wind or solar than virtually any other developed country – have higher electricity prices than any other member of the International
Hereditary peers are for the chop, but life peers still have their uses. Last October the process of ennoblement allowed Keir Starmer to appoint a minister of state for investment in rapid preparation for his investment summit of that month. Finding no-one on the green benches who took his fancy, he turned to Poppy Gustafsson,
The decision by Donald Trump to hold peace talks with Russia on ending the Ukraine war – without Ukraine actually being present – is starting to look even more disgraceful. It transpires that the war was not the only item on the agenda in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. A significant part of the day’s business
Is it any wonder that the economy is struggling in spite of an apparently booming jobs market, with employers finding it difficult to hire recruits and average earnings rising by 5.9 per cent in the past year? Here is a shocking statistic which goes a long way to explaining the apparent paradox: there are now
Several weeks ago, just in advance of Donald Trump’s second presidency, there was a mass withdrawal of US financial institutions from Mark Carney’s Net Zero Banking Alliance – which committed members to adopt policies of reducing lending to fossil fuel companies and to take other measures aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Are UK banks now
The government says it wants to stop the ‘blockers’ which are holding back Britain’s economy. It also says it wants to boost the nation’s energy security. How convenient, then, that along comes a project which could achieve both at the same time. The only trouble is that it is something which will drive Ed Miliband
I am sure that Nigel Farage would love the opportunity to embarrass Labour and the Tories as much as he can in May’s local elections. But sorry, Angela Rayner is right – for once – to delay local elections for a year in some areas so that local government can be reorganised and many councils
Wes Streeting is offended by NHS staff promoting ‘anti-whiteness’ – as should any taxpayer who has not succumbed to the racist ideology of critical race theory. A social media post from a counselling psychologist with the East London NHS Foundation Trust sought an assistant on a year-long placement, describing herself as someone ‘who integrates anti
At last, some news of an industry in Britain that is flourishing. Unfortunately, it is one that is helping to suppress growth in every other sector of the economy. I am sure that the lawyers who have brought a case involving 60,000 female workers at Asda think they have won a famous victory after an
No doubt Keir Starmer wants us to think he is being ‘grown up’ in accepting an invitation to dinner at an EU summit. But it is actually the reverse: he is behaving like a toddler in danger of being enticed into a stranger’s car by a bag of sweets dangled out of the window. As
Could Liz Kendall turn out to be the most significant figure of Keir Starmer’s government, and a Chancellor in the making? When I wrote on the Work and Pensions Secretary’s proposed reforms here in November, I was sceptical that Labour really had much intention of pushing through benefits cuts, not least because the party had
Yesterday it was a court ruling to invalidate licences for oil and gas extraction in the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields. This morning comes another perverse consequence of Britain’s legally-binding net zero target. Environment Secretary Steve Reed is to announce that he intends 9 per cent of farmland in England to be taken out of production
Ed Miliband seems to have gone missing since Rachel Reeves announced her ambition for a third runway at Heathrow yesterday. Just before he disappeared, he mumbled that ‘of course’ he wouldn’t be resigning over the issue – in spite of threatening to do just that when he was climate secretary in Gordon Brown’s government. But
So much for the theory that Covid would change working practices for good: that we would divide our time between the office and our sofas – or work remotely all the time. The writing was on the wall when Zoom – the very business which profited most from remote working during the pandemic – ordered
Why is it that some lies get endlessly repeated without ever being challenged, even though they are quite obviously wrong? In her pro-growth speech today, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves asserted: ‘There is no trade-off between economic growth and net zero’. Government ministers, advisers and many others have been saying such things for years – and
The BBC licence fee is dying as millions of Britons realise that they do not need a television; they can get all the entertainment and news they want on the internet. But don’t assume that it will go quietly. On the contrary, we could end up with something even worse. Bloomberg is reporting today that
It is easy enough to trace the point at which local authorities embarked on the sad, downwards journey which has led to several going bankrupt. It was when they renamed their town clerks ‘chief executives’. In doing so they started posing as private businesses, with salaries and bonuses to match. But their pretensions were not
Is Rachel Reeves really correct that her new-found enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow would be consistent with the government’s net zero targets and other environmental policies? Over the weekend she argued that a third runway would be good for air quality over London because it would mean fewer planes circling over the capital.
The CIA report concluding that Covid most likely originated from a laboratory leak of a man-made, or man-enhanced, virus raises an awkward and glaring question: why on Earth isn’t Britain’s own Covid inquiry even considering the possibility of a laboratory leak? The inquiry, which still grinds on even if most people have lost interest in
