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?
From our UK edition
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
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Is oil extraction a form of environmental vandalism which threatens life on the planet, or a source of revenue which could propel Scotland and its people to new levels of wealth? It is little use asking Nicola Sturgeon: she appears to believe it is both. Three years ago, when striking schoolchildren and Extinction Rebellion were
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Whoever Rishi Sunak is taking his advice from, evidently it isn’t me. Last Friday I wrote here supporting his decision to skip COP27 in Egypt, arguing that it is futile trying to persuade the big carbon emitters like China and the US to follow our example and make a legal commitment to eliminating net carbon
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So much for those ‘stranded assets’ which former Bank of England governor Mark Carney and many others tried to warn us about. It wasn’t long ago that climate activists were urging the world to dump shares in oil companies, not just because we should want to punish them for climate change but because, they said,
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Britain’s economic problems can, of course, be laid at the door of Brexit. We know this because it was asserted on a BBC podcast which went viral over the weekend – and no one would question the BBC’s objectivity. But maybe there ought just to be a scintilla of doubt in the heads of the
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Rishi Sunak deserves one of those ‘climate champion’ badges they hand out at primary schools. Why? Because he is not going to fly to the COP27 summit in Egypt – thereby saving 1.65 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to the World Land Trust’s carbon calculator. So what if Ed Miliband thinks it is a failure
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Given the swift defenestration of his predecessor after her mini-Budget panicked the markets, it is not surprising that Rishi Sunak has delayed the Treasury’s autumn statement until 17 November. No set of fiscal plans will satisfy everyone, but markets and public opinion do seem to be especially sensitive to changes in fiscal policy at present.
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Inflation, asserted Rishi Sunak in his first PMQs, makes us all poorer. That is not entirely true – people relying entirely on the state pension, for example, will be fully compensated for this year’s high inflation, and no doubt some of Sunak’s former colleagues in the hedge fund industry have found a way to profit,
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Is Europe’s chilly winter destined to become another Millennium bug – a much-feared disaster that never transpires? Only a few weeks ago wholesale gas prices were surging, leading to predictions of blackouts, rationing and people unable to heat their homes. Throughout August, analysts produced forecasts (extrapolated from wholesale gas prices) which showed eye-watering energy prices
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Well, good luck, Rishi. You’ll need it – and not just because, as backbench Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope put it this morning, the Conservative party has become ‘ungovernable’. The whole job of prime minister has become impossible. There are too many demands on the person who holds that position, and too much blame placed
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Given how inflation has taken off and sent real incomes into steep decline it is remarkable that Britain is not already in recession. It seemed that we were heading that way – until the Office for National Statistics revised upwards economic growth in the second quarter of this year from minus 0.1 per cent to
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Here’s a little mystery: whatever happened to that nice, sensible foursome whom all week we were led to believe were ready to seize the reins of power from Liz Truss: Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt and Ben Wallace? If Truss resigned, we were told, the Tory party would behave in the same grown-up fashion
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If anyone was expecting markets to be in jubilant mood after Liz Truss’s resignation, they will be feeling a little disappointed. True, the pound has risen and gilt yields have fallen this afternoon – but not by much. They moved far further on Monday when most of Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget was ditched, which
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The more you study what is going on with the Just Stop Oil protests and the Public Order Bill, the more weird and inconsistent our national attitude to protesters seems. Britain, according to those opposed to the Bill, is a police state. If you look at their response to the Just Stop Oil protests, however,
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Is low unemployment causing us more problems than we realise? The suggestion might seem absurd, offensive even. It’s reminiscent of the days of Mrs Thatcher’s supposedly ‘cruel’ monetarism, when we had three million unemployed. Some on the fringes liked to argue that unemployment was good for the economy because it made people work harder, being
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So, no Black Friday. The pound is steady, the FTSE100 up 1.5 per cent, the FTSE250 up more than 3 per cent. Just as fears grew that the end of the Bank of England’s gilt-buying programme could send pension funds to the brink and precipitate a fresh market crisis, the opposite happens: markets embark on
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All financial crises have their peak days, the moment of drama when everything comes to a head. Think of Black Monday – 19 October 1987 – when the bottom fell out of global stock markets, or Black Wednesday – 16 September 1992 – when the pound crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. With the
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Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget was botched and the government has lost control of public spending. But this morning Jacob Rees-Mogg was not wrong to deflect at least some of the blame for current market turmoil on the Bank of England. The bank has been hopelessly behind the curve on inflation – in May last year it was
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If I were boss of Shell I would be tempted to take the company overseas and live a quiet life. Do a Thungela Resources, in other words – the South African-based coal miner spun out of Anglo American in June 2021, dumped by British funds on its first day of trading. But, as coal power stations
