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?
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The vote for strike action by 10,000 ambulance drivers who are members of the GMB union is more about public safety than about pay, insists the union. How it will benefit patients to have ambulance drivers go on strike is a little hard to fathom. Particularly so as the GMB has chosen to call a
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The US entered recession earlier than the UK and Europe, and suffered its inflation surge earlier too, so it was always likely that its economy would recover earlier. But is the US emerging from recession while Europe and the UK are still plunging into theirs? That’s what today’s data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis
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Rail travel has never been cheap, but should we really each be paying £500 a year even if we never set foot on a train? That, according to figures released by the Office of Rail and Road today, is astonishing sum that each household had to contribute to government subsidies for running the railways in the
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Jeremy Hunt has supposedly just closed a black hole in the government’s finances. But is another black hole opening up before his eyes? One of the more popular announcements in the autumn statement on 17 November was a rise in the windfall tax applied to oil and gas companies from 25 per cent to
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Staging rebellions against their own government has become a way of life for many Tory MPs – but why choose onshore wind farms as the hill on which to die? If Rishi Sunak concedes to the demands of a group of (reportedly) around 50 MPs and lifts the moratorium on onshore wind which has been in
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Just why is Britain still spending over £50 million a year in development aid to China? Despite it being the world’s second largest economy and investing in UK infrastructure projects, the latest statistical release by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office shows that in 2021 more than £50 million of bilateral aid money was spend
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Imagine if Jeremy Hunt announced a new 60p income tax band that was payable only by people who earn less than £20,000 a year. Or if he reversed council tax so that Band A homes paid three times as much tax as Band G homes, rather than the other way round. There would be more
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The rail unions have announced further strikes for December and January. Nurses have already voted to strike for the first time in over a century. Now university lecturers, postal workers and Scottish teachers have joined in. So are we headed for a second Winter of Discontent – emulating the last months of the Callaghan government
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The OECD has marked Britain down as the only G7 country (and the only major country bar Russia) expected to suffer a shrinking economy next year. But how accurate are its predictions? A year ago, it predicted that inflation in the UK would peak at 4.9 per cent in the first half of this year before
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A year ago Boris Johnson lost his place in his speech to the CBI annual conference. He started blathering on about Peppa Pig World, after having treated young Wilfred to a day out there the day before. It was excruciating, but at least it was fun. It is hard to say the same about Rishi
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It almost certainly wasn’t Vinice Mabansag, the baby born in the Philippines last Tuesday and picked out by the UN to personalise the occasion, but somewhere in around about now someone will be born who really does take the world’s population to eight billion. It is a landmark which has attracted the usual Malthusian handwringing
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There were some very chunky tax rises in the Autumn Statement, most of them using the device of ‘fiscal drag’, whereby tax thresholds are not raised with inflation. But there is one tax where Jeremy Hunt could have gone further. Fans of electric cars may be displeased to learn that they will have to pay
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Britain appears to be enjoying a surge of entrepreneurialism, with more than 200,000 start-ups registered at Companies House between April and June this year alone. However, while many of these are genuine cases of people taking the plunge and embarking on their dream of opening a tea shop, launching a webinar app or whatever, an
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We have now been primed for so many tax rises that Thursday’s autumn statement will inevitably come as some form of relief. Whatever Jeremy Hunt announces is sure to be milder than the possibilities fed to us over the past few weeks. But there is one suggested tax rise which is far too mild, and
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Like Liz Truss, Sam Bankman-Fried will be the stuff of pub quizzes: who lost his entire $16 billion fortune in days? A quick trawl of the internet suggest his only real challenger in losing so much money so quickly was Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who was estimated to have made a paper loss
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Is the inflationary spike past its peak? That is the obvious reaction to the news that US inflation fell to 7.7 per cent in October, down from 8.2 per cent in September and significantly lower than the 8.0 per cent that markets had been expecting. Clearly, inflation remains high, but US inflation is now lower
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Having delivered his platitudes on climate change at Cop27, Rishi Sunak returns to a more pressing problem: how to keep Britain’s lights on this winter. Last week it was revealed that the government has been wargaming a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ in which blackouts last up to a week. Whether those fears prove unfounded or not,
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Is it right that Britain should pay £1.5 billion for developing countries to adapt to floods, cyclones and rising sea levels as Rishi Sunak has announced at Cop27? Absolutely. That is what aid money is for: to help countries cope with natural disasters. If you can spend some of this money in advance of those disasters
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Whatever happened to David Cameron’s promise to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid? Amid much criticism, it survived Cameron and Osborne’s (failed) efforts to bring the public finances back into balance. Then, following Covid, the then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak cut the target to 0.5 per cent, saying that it would be restored to
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We can be grateful for small mercies. 4 November 2022 will go down as the day when a presenter on the Today programme finally challenged a dodgy statistic trying to blame economic collapse on Brexit. The statistic in question was put forward by former Bank of England governor Mark Carney in an interview with the
