Ross Clark

Have you ever heard of Susan Hall? Until a month ago, I hadn't. Now that she has been selected as the Conservative candidate for next year’s London mayoral election, her name might well stick – although I am going to write it down somewhere just in case.  This isn't to disparage her abilities. Hall has, apparently, been leader of the Conservative party group in the London Assembly for the past four years – I don’t live in London, which may explain my ignorance. Before being elected a councillor in Harrow she was a mechanic in the family garage business and has also worked as a hairdresser – so she ought to have a connection with ordinary people which is lacking in so many of today’s MPs, many of whom have never had a job outside politics.

You could almost sense climate campaigners willing those thermometers in Sardinia to nudge into the unknown – a reading above 48.8°C would have marked a new European record and unleashed yet more forewarnings of climatic Armageddon.     But alas, they don’t appear to have got their way – at least not today. As of 6.30 p.m. the highest reported temperatures measured today were in the region of 45ºC, on Sardinia. There was a consolation prize in that the World Meteorological Organisation did finally verify the reading of 48.8ºC in Sicily made on 10 August 2021. Prior to that, the European record was established way back in 1977, which was beginning to look a little inconvenient for the narrative of an Earth which is ‘on fire’.

Rishi Sunak is not wrong to write, as he does in the Telegraph today, that too many young people are being ‘ripped off’ by poor-quality university courses, and that many would be better signing up for apprenticeships. But should a Conservative government really be threatening to tell the universities what to do? David Cameron’s tuition fee hike was meant to make discerning consumers out of university applicants. Rishi Sunak clearly thinks that’s failed. Cameron allowed universities to charge students tuition fees of up to £9,000 per year (since increased to £9,250). Universities would be able to charge full fees on good quality course, but find themselves having to reduce fees on lower quality courses, with poorer employment outcomes, if not cease offering them altogether.

Sometimes there is a problem so glaring that you wonder why no one is addressing it. Sooner or later, the government is going to have to deal with the black hole that will appear in the public finances as a result of the switch to electric cars. True, Jeremy Hunt has announced that electric cars registered from April 2025 onwards will have to pay road tax: £10 in their first year followed by £165 a year from then onwards. But that still leaves disappearing fuel duty. By 2030, according to Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) calculations out today, that will deprive the Treasury of £13 billion a year in lost revenue. Eventually, the lost revenue could grow to £25 billion. Will the government be happy to forgo this income?

According to Cathryn Ross, Thames Water’s co-interim chief executive, householders with large gardens should be paying a higher price for their water than people with small or no gardens. Actually, they already almost certainly do. If they have a metered supply, their bills will be proportional to how much water they use – and will be bearing the full cost of watering the lawn or the flowerbeds. If they are unmetered they will be charged a rate that reflects the size of their property. If, on the other hand, Ross means that people who own large gardens should be paying a higher rate for each unit of water they use, it might make sense for monopolistic suppliers to suggest this, as it would raise more cash for them in the politically easiest way. But it is otherwise illogical.

Keir Starmer has come up with a good policy for once. He is promising to offer a Scottish-style right to roam across England, which would open up vastly more tracts of land for public recreation. The right to roam granted by the Blair government 20 years ago applies only to moorland, which is rare in the South East, while Starmer's proposal would extend to woodland and other areas of uncultivated land. It is a clever policy not just because it is popular in itself – according to a YouGov poll today 62 per cent of voters are in favour and 19 per cent against; even among Conservative voters it is supported 56 per cent to 31 per cent.

Imagine a Tory prime minister who gave the liberal left almost everything that it wanted. Higher migration? Sure, let’s treble it. End austerity with more tax and spending? Sure, let’s pay the wages of 9 million people from the state’s purse, hand the NHS another £34 billion – and let’s jack up corporation tax to pay for it. Climate change? Let’s close down every gas-fired power station by 2035, ban fracking and lumber oil and gas companies with a windfall tax. Culture wars? Let’s make gay conversion therapy a crime.     You might think that the liberal left would at least bring itself to show some gratitude, but apparently not. We already have had a Tory PM who has brought about all of the above. His name is Boris Johnson.  But thanks?

So is Artificial intelligence (AI) to be a new engine of growth for the UK economy? That is Rishi Sunak’s hope. Ideally, he might have been using his trip to Washington to announce a trade deal between the UK and the US. Of course, that's not going to happen: Joe Biden has made it clear that he doesn’t regard trade deals – with anyone – as a priority, not least because the crowning achievement of his administration so far, the Inflation Reduction Act, is a huge protectionist device dressed up as a fiscal and environmental measure. The Prime Minister then seems to have decided that securing something on AI is the next best thing.

Would Labour’s plan to impose VAT on private school fees really raise £1.6 billion, as the party claims? Not according to a research paper by the education think tank EDSK. The £1.6 billion figure is often attributed to the Resolution Foundation, yet the original source, says EDSK, is a paper by the Fabian Society in 2011 – a paper which it says got its figures wrong in several different respects. It started with the assumption that there were, in that year, 628,000 pupils enrolled in independent schools. Yet this government figure did not just include pupils at fee-paying schools, but also children enrolled at academies and city technology schools. These were described as ‘independent’ because they were outside the control of local authorities.