Ross Clark

Ross Clark

Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. He writes on Substack, at Ross on Why?

Friday

Ross Clark

Ministers can’t blame Putin for the disaster that is HS2

From our UK edition

And I thought the SNP were destined to win the award for this year’s most pathetic excuse – after Scottish transport minister Jenny Gilruth blamed the party’s failure to dual the A9 on Putin’s war in Ukraine. Then UK transport secretary Mark Harper turns up and tries to use the very same excuse for HS2’s soaring costs. The Birmingham to Manchester section of the high-speed line will be delayed for two years, he said yesterday, because ‘Putin’s war in Ukraine has hiked up inflation, sending supply chain costs rocketing.’ HS2 has turned out to be an extremely expensive turkey because it was misconceived from the start Much as I despise Vladimir Putin, I’m sorry this just won’t wash.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Why is Whitehall intent on burying the Covid lab leak theory?

From our UK edition

Why does our government have so much trouble criticising China? It doesn’t seem to have had a problem calling out Vladimir Putin. But Downing Street – along with the rest of Whitehall – seems determined to do Xi Jinping’s regime’s dirty work. Over the past ten days we have become used to seeing Matt Hancock as a mad, authoritarian figure determined to lock Britain down during Covid, even when scientific advice did not call for it. Yet it does seem that he was able to consider the prospect that Covid originated in a laboratory in Wuhan. The evidence is not conclusive or overwhelming, not least because the Chinese have used every tactic to prevent scientists finding the truth.

Ross Clark

Independent thinking: private schools need reinvention, not abolition

From our UK edition

It is one of those ancient mysteries: why has no Labour government been able to abolish private schools? Harold Wilson didn’t spare grammar schools (and nor did Edward Heath’s government, which followed). New Labour, too, for all its reforming zeal, never dared disembowel the independent sector. When the party did promise to do so – in 1983 and 2019 – it lost heavily. But are private schools about to run out of luck? For once we have a Labour opposition which is threatening to end their charitable status – and which also looks as if it will cruise to victory at the next general election. Labour’s pre-manifesto has promised to end tax breaks in order to ‘fund our vision for the education system’. It has suggested that it hopes to raise £1.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Will Tony Blair ever give up on ID cards?

From our UK edition

Is Tony Blair ever going to give up hope of foisting ID cards on us? As prime minister, he was defeated over the issue – his plans were eventually dropped by the incoming coalition in 2010. He tried again during the pandemic, trying to sell us the idea of vaccination passports. And now he is at it again, this time with his old sparring partner William Hague. Together they have written a paper for Blair’s Institute for Global Change, called A New National Purpose: Innovation Can Power the Future of Britain, making the not-altogether-novel observation that computers can be jolly useful.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The £5.4 billion government surplus masks a larger economic issue

From our UK edition

There have been celebrations this morning about a government surplus of £5.4 billion last month, and people are even talking about a ‘windfall’ for Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in next month’s Budget. But all this shows is how conditioned we have become to appalling economic news – and that we will grab at anything which seems to indicate a shaft of light. Nevertheless, any talk of a government ‘surplus’ masks the very real problem the government still has While any surplus is to be welcomed – and last month’s borrowing figures are far better than the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted – we would be in serious trouble if the government had not succeeded in running a surplus last month.

Monday

Ross Clark

Sadiq Khan’s free school meals plan is fatally flawed

From our UK edition

Sadiq Khan said told Radio 4 listeners this morning that, while he was grateful for the free school meals he received as a child at his primary school in Tooting, he felt stigmatised by having to queue up and eat separately from children whose parents were paying for their meals. If that is what his school was really doing then it is a pretty horrible way to treat children – and create class divisions where they don’t need to exist. Sorting out payments for school lunches can, of course be handled away from children’s noses, so none of them know who is eating for free. But does Khan’s childhood embarrassment really justify what he wants to do now: offer free school meals to every primary school pupil in London?

Friday

Ross Clark

Does the NHS need any diversity officers at all?

From our UK edition

The HSJ, as the Health Service Journal likes to be known these days, has managed to produce one of the most intriguing headlines of the week: ‘NHS is “pandering to ministers” by cutting its equality, diversity and inclusion teams to 35 whole-time posts.’ A mere 35? That, by the way, is merely the central administration of the NHS in England. It doesn’t include NHS trusts. Overall, according to a set of Freedom of Information requests submitted by the Taxpayers’ Alliance last October, NHS England employs 800 diversity and inclusion officers, at a cost of £40 million a year. What do they all do? Accuse each other of discrimination, for one thing. NHS England is currently embroiled in a tribunal claim from its own joint director of equality, diversity and inclusion.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Another windfall tax isn’t the answer to Centrica’s profits

From our UK edition

British Gas has behaved disgracefully towards energy customers who have fallen into arrears, sending agents to break into their homes and install prepayment meters – activities for which the company deserves to be ordered to pay millions of pounds in compensation. Meanwhile, Centrica, the owner of British Gas, has just reported full-year profits of £3.3 billion, more than three times that it made in the previous year.   Both are true, yet that doesn’t mean they are connected. When you drill down into Centrica’s profits you find that the vast majority are being made in the upstream part of the business – producing oil and gas – and in trading in the wholesale market.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why no one wants a Ford Fiesta anymore

From our UK edition

The world of business has long been creative with feeble excuses. Even so, the explanation given by Tim Slatter, chairman of Ford in Britain, for slashing 1,300 jobs in the UK, 1,000 of them in product development, does take the biscuit. The company is moving towards a wholly electric fleet of cars by the end of the decade, he says, and as they are simpler cars they will need less product development. Really? Electric cars may have fewer moving parts than their petrol equivalents and in that sense are less complicated. But they are also relatively novel, especially from a mass-market perspective. There are a great number of technological problems which have to be overcome before they can fulfil the same function as petrol and diesel cars.

Monday

Ross Clark

Is Brexit really costing households £1,000 each?

From our UK edition

They never give up, those Remainers. Like the Japanese soldier found on a Pacific island still fighting the second world war – in 1974, every other day there is another loose shot from the undergrowth. After last week’s Ditchley Park gathering involving Lord Mandelson, David Lammy and others, comes an interview in the Overshoot with Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) member Jonathan Haskel. In it, Haskel makes the claim that Brexit is costing each British household £1,000 a year through lost trade and investment. The beauty of modelling is that you can get it to tell you pretty much anything you want it to Let’s start with the assertion that this is a loss per household.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Can the CBI make its mind up on tax hikes?

From our UK edition

Does the CBI want higher taxes or lower taxes? This morning its director general, Tony Danker, complained that the rise in corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25 per cent is in danger of killing off economic growth. He also demanded at the very minimum that a ‘super-deduction’ – where businesses can cut their tax bill by 25 pence for every pound invested – be maintained. 'We know the economy can – and must – break out of its low growth trap, but we need action of business investment to achieve it,' he said. 'Firms are seeing the end to super-deduction with nothing to replace it but a big rise in corporation tax. This will have a huge impact on investment and leave the UK falling behind its global competitors.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why central bank digital currencies are terrible

From our UK edition

The government and Bank of England seem to have finally woken up to one of the many glaring problems with trying to achieve a cashless society: that there are 1.3 million people in Britain who do not have a bank account. Whether that is because of long-established habit, because they don’t trust banks or because banks don’t trust them, it is an awful lot of people to contemplate shutting out of the economy. Presumably, they would have to resort to some form of barter, or to establish unofficial currencies such as cigarettes, used in jails. Having access to cash is no good if you cannot use it But the solution suggested by Jeremy Hunt and Andrew Bailey seems itself wrapped in problems.

Friday

Ross Clark

Mick Whelan gives the game away over striking railway workers

From our UK edition

We’re all familiar with the usual trade union cliches: it’s not about us, it’s about passenger safety; staff morale is low; and strikers are being ‘victimised’. Or, in the words of Aslef general secretary Mick Whelan on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, train drivers are being ‘demonised’. More so than government ministers, who are forever portrayed by union leaders as callous evil-doers?     But it is what Whelan said next that really catches the ear. Asked whether he thought the public should be sympathetic towards train drivers on £60,000 a year turning down an offer which would take their pay to £65,000 a year, he said: 'It isn’t about what we earn, it is about what other people don’t earn.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Why should under-productive civil servants get a pay rise?

From our UK edition

We all know about the teachers and train drivers, but apparently there are 100,000 civil servants in 124 government departments and quangos also on strike today – if anyone has noticed. It includes members of the PCS union employed at the DWP, National Highways, the Food Standards Agency and, er, the Risk Management Authority, Trade Remedies Authority, Council for the RFSAs and, of course, Bord na Gaidhlig. It is only thanks to their striking that many people will ever have heard of them.

Ross Clark

The dangerous myth of degrowth

From our UK edition

Britain is beset by low productivity and stagnant growth, and things are not getting better. In the public sector, productivity stands at 7.4 per cent lower than it did before the pandemic. Until we can generate more growth in the economy, we cannot grow richer and real wages cannot grow. An uncontroversial statement, you might think – even if opinions vary on what to do about it. But no. There are people who genuinely don’t want economic growth, who think it an evil that must be ended. Take a comment piece published late last year in the normally sober pages of the scientific journal Nature.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Three years on, is Brexit worth celebrating?

From our UK edition

Today, if you feel so inclined to celebrate it, is Brexit Day: the date on which, three years ago, Britain formally left the EU – although the transitional arrangements kept us effectively within the bloc for a further 11 months. But does anyone feel like celebrating? Only really in the Lincolnshire Wash, going by an opinion poll commissioned by the website unHerd. That is the only part of the country, it seems, where most residents still think that Britain was right to bid adieu to its European neighbours. Nationally, 45 per cent of people think Brexit is going worse than expected, according to polling by Ipsos Mori. This figure is a rise from 28 per cent in June 2021. As expected, 66 per cent of Remain voters think it’s been a flop.

Ross Clark

What does the IMF want from the UK economy?

From our UK edition

Just what is a UK government supposed to do to keep the IMF happy? This morning it has issued a bulletin predicting that the UK will be the only major economy to shrink in 2023 – by 0.6 per cent – and blaming it on ‘tighter fiscal and monetary policies’. This represents an even-bleaker outlook than the IMF foresaw in October, when it pencilled in growth of just 0.3 per cent. Yet this is the same IMF which last September condemned Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget for slashing taxes, saying 'given elevated inflation pressure in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture, as it is important that fiscal policy does not work at cross purposes to monetary policy'.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Could Britain cope without Taiwanese microchips?

From our UK edition

So now we know what Britain’s great green economy looks like. First, the good news: construction of electric cars in Britain increased by 4.5 per cent in 2022 to 234,066 vehicles. Now the bad news: overall car production slumped to its lowest level since 1956, with just 775,014 units rolling off the production line. Britain may be leading the world when it comes to setting targets for decarbonisation, but it isn’t helping us to even maintain our manufacturing industry, let alone to turn us into a hotbed of ‘green growth’. The next government target to hit the industry is the Zero Emission Mandate, which will oblige UK producers to make a certain percentage of their vehicles as pure electric models (we don’t yet know what percentage).

Wednesday

Ross Clark

It’s no surprise Britain’s manufacturers are struggling

From our UK edition

Every month, we are bombarded with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), the main inflation measure. It is currently running at 10.5 per cent, and although this is slightly down over the past two months, it is still far, far above the Bank of England’s target of two per cent. But what about inflation for people who are running businesses? The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also publishes a Producer Price Index (PPI) covering inflation for commercial organisations. If you think living costs for consumers are high, count yourself lucky you are not running a factory: the PPI of input prices (i.e. prices of raw materials and other goods) for December has come in at 16.5 per cent. That is down from November (18.0 per cent) and October (20.

Ross Clark

The retirement age should be 70

From our UK edition

Remember the Waspi women, who used to leap up and down outside Tory conferences for the right to continue to retire at 60? They claimed that their carefully laid retirement plans had been thrown into disarray by the government’s decision to equalise women’s retirement age with that of men – even though they had been given two decades’ notice and their careful plans for retirement hadn’t, it seemed, quite extended to bothering to find out at what age they would retire. The ideal should be to water down the concept of retirement altogether The government eventually saw them off, but it is once again risking the wrath of 50 and 60 somethings – of both sexes – by threatening to bring forward the date at which the retirement age will be raised to 68.