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?

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.

Monday

Ross Clark

Is the National Grid’s energy payment offer too good to be true?

From our UK edition

Still resisting installing a smart meter in your home? If so, the National Grid might make you think again – by offering you free electricity. With low temperatures boosting demand for power, and output from wind and solar farms looking a little flaky, the grid needs to cut demand to avoid blackouts. This has prompted it to exercise, for the first time, something called the ‘demand flexibility service’, which offers incentives worth up to £10 or so to customers who are prepared to switch off their appliances for a couple of hours this evening. To take advantage of this offer, you need to have a smart meter and buy your electricity from one of the companies who are signed up to the scheme.

Thursday

Ross Clark

The unhinged environmentalism of Al Gore

From our UK edition

Lucky old Americans. They only had to put up with one fruitcake as president, in Donald Trump. It could have been worse. But for a few hanging chads in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, they could have ended up with Al Gore.  It isn’t just the hanging chads, though, that have become unhinged, but Gore himself. In an extraordinary speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, an increasingly crimson Gore angrily berated the rest of the world – Greta Thunberg and other youthful activists excepted – for failing to realise just how close we are to climate apocalypse. 'People are familiar with the thin blue line which astronauts bring back in their pictures from space,' he began. 'That’s the part of the atmosphere which has the oxygen and it’s only 5 to 7 km thick.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The strikes have lost their power

From our UK edition

The dead went unburied and the rubbish piled high in Leicester Square. Then a suntanned Jim Callaghan arrived back at Heathrow from a summit in Guadeloupe to tell reporters, in words fairly paraphrased in the Sun headline: ‘Crisis. What crisis?’ The Prime Minister said that he didn’t think the rest of the world, looking at Britain, would see a country going down the tube. The folklore of the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 is ingrained in the nation’s collective memory. It was the final act of a miserable decade of three-day working weeks and power cuts. Some are suggesting that we are facing a second Winter of Discontent. Certainly, look at the strike calendar for January and there is something going on – or not going on – every day.

Ross Clark

Food price inflation hits 16.8 per cent

From our UK edition

Oil prices are down, wholesale gas prices are down, so why isn’t inflation falling a lot faster than it is? The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) for December, announced this morning, stood at 10.5 per cent, down from 10.7 per cent in November and 11.1 per cent in October – a welcome boost but still way, way above the Bank of England’s target of 2 per cent. Petrol and also clothing were down in price, but they were nearly cancelled out by rising food prices. Food prices in the year to December rose by 16.8 per cent, which was up on December’s 16.4 per cent. The good news is that fuel, like other raw materials, is a leading indicator and should point to further falls in the inflation index in the months ahead. The pound is stronger which should temper inflation in imports.

Monday

Ross Clark

Do we truly know the cost of net zero?

From our UK edition

Just why is Chris Skidmore’s review into the government’s target to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 called an ‘independent’ review? It somewhat stretches the definition of the word ‘independent’. Skidmore was the very minister – the Energy and Clean Growth Minister – who pushed the net zero commitment through the House of Commons in the first place in 2019. He remains a Conservative MP. Putting him in charge of an ‘independent’ review on net zero is analogous to Rishi Sunak putting Boris Johnson in charge of a ‘independent’ review into Brexit. That, of course, would be laughed out of the House of Commons. But things seem to work very differently in the world of net zero.

Friday

Ross Clark

Could Britain avoid recession altogether?

From our UK edition

The idea that we face a certain recession has been drummed into our heads for months. The Bank of England recently produced a graph showing recession lasting into 2024. Just yesterday, the International Monetary Fund repeated its assertion that Britain faces an especially gloomy 2023, with recession inevitable – while simultaneously upsetting the House of Commons Treasury select committee by refusing to testify before it.  But could the unthinkable happen? Could Britain now avoid recession altogether? The Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) first estimate for economic growth for November shows that GDP grew by 0.1 per cent – unexciting, but still remarkable given that many economists were expecting negative growth by now.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Is Starmer foolish to attack the Tories’ strike laws?

From our UK edition

Labour feels strongly on the NHS – you can tell that by the number of times Keir Starmer brings up the NHS during Prime Minister’s questions, which he did again today. Historically, the NHS has always been a weak point for the Conservatives. In spite of granting the health service ever more resources, come election time Labour automatically trots out the charge that the Tories are out to privatise or otherwise dismantle the NHS. But has Starmer made a miscalculation in attacking the government’s proposed strike laws, which would oblige the unions to ensure that minimum service levels are maintained in the ambulance service, as well as several other public services, on strike days?