Ross Clark

I doubt whether many people will feel a pang of sympathy for Bernard Looney, former chief executive of BP who has just resigned over his failure to fully disclosure historic relationships with fellow employees. Perhaps he should have resigned last year when he declared proudly that high oil prices had turned BP into a ‘cash machine’ – a remark which hastened the imposition of a windfall tax which the industry may come bitterly to regret the next time oil prices crash. Yet the remark didn’t do Looney much personal harm – his pay was doubled last year to over £4 million. He will have a pretty decent pension, too, to go off and spend more time on his love life.

It is hard to remember that this time last year soon-to-be prime minister Liz Truss was on the verge of compromising her free market principles by dreaming up a scheme for the state to make an open-ended commitment to subsidise the energy bills of every household in Britain. At the time, there were dire predictions that households would be swamped by energy costs, forecasts for which were rising by the day. This morning, Ofgem has announced that the Energy Price Cap is to fall again, to a level at which the average household will see energy bills of £1,923 a year, down from £2,074 a year at present. The move won’t take prices below the level they were before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but it will take them just below the level they were later that spring.

At what point are we going to drop the fiction that acquisitive crime is on the wane and admit that we are in an epidemic of fraud? Today, Barclays Bank has appealed to social media firms – rather than banks like itself – to refund victims of online scams. I am sure that social media companies could do more to close down scams, but isn’t the real problem that the law is tolerating online crime in a way that it doesn’t tolerate other crime?  If your house is burgled, you know to contact the police. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will investigate, or even pay you a visit to take fingerprints, but at least it will be recognised as a crime and you will be treated as a victim – even if you left your doors unlocked.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is meant to implore us to ignore hearsay and folklore, and to follow the scientific evidence. So why is it now suddenly promoting the likes of herbal medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture? In a series of tweets this week, the WHO has launched a campaign to extol the virtues of what it calls ‘traditional medicine’. ‘Traditional medicine has been at the frontiers of medicine and science, laying the foundation of conventional medical texts’, it asserts. It goes on to claim that ‘around 40 per cent of approved pharmaceutical products in use today derive from natural substances’.

Imagine that, just as Britain was closing down for the first Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020, you were 18 years old and had received an offer from the university of your choice, subject to good exam results. The grades proved to be no problem – with all exams cancelled, you were graded in accordance with your teacher’s estimate of how you would perform, and sailed through. But then the time came to go to university and you couldn’t – not properly, anyway. ‘Lots of students end up in jobs deemed to be low-skilled that would not need a degree in the first place’ You kept finding yourself imprisoned in a hall of residence as one student after another tested positive for Covid; you struggled even to get food.

Have high house prices succeeded where decades of government efforts at regional development have failed? That is, have they managed to redistribute economic development around the country?  According to the estate agent Hamptons, nearly one in three buyers looking to move out of London in the first six months of this year was a first time buyer. It means that the traditional migration – move to London upon graduation, buy a first home in the capital and then possibly move out to the countryside when rearing a family – has been disturbed.

Not so long ago, some were arguing that cheap food was a problem in Britain. We're unlikely to hear such complaints now that food inflation remained at 17.3 per cent in June, not far off its peak of 19.2 percent in March. Is this a blip? An economist from PwC thinks not and has declared that the 'era of cheap food has probably come to an end in the UK'. If so, this will have several serious implications.  Just four years ago, a commission set up in 2019 by the left-leaning think tank the RSA claimed that cheap and unhealthy food was causing a public health crisis and contributing to environmental destruction. 'Our own health and the health of the land are inextricably intertwined,' it added, high-mindedly, but 'in the last 70 years this relationship has been broken'.