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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There are so many house indices that they can create confusion. Last week, the Halifax house price index showed a small monthly fall. This week the government’s own index, the HPI, shows that prices rose by 7.8 per cent in the year to June, down from 12.8 per cent in the year to May. That
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We are all supposed to remember where we were when we heard that Mrs Thatcher had resigned (my mother rang me while I was having a late breakfast). But I will always have a much more vivid memory of where I was when I heard Boris Johnson had called it a day. I was at
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Have we yet seen the end of Covid restrictions? It is tempting to think so. For many people, Covid and the lockdowns have receded into history, replaced by Ukraine and the energy crisis. It would be easy, but foolish, to dismiss Tony Blair’s proposals as the ramblings of a bored ex-PM But perhaps we have
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That today’s inflation figures would come as an immense shock to anyone who has returned from a year in the wilderness goes without saying. A little over a year ago, in May 2021, the Bank of England was predicting that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) would peak at no higher than its two percent target.
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For anyone tempted to believe warnings from Mark Carney and other City figures about ‘stranded assets’ in the fossil fuel industry, while simultaneously buying the idea that renewable energy is the investment which can’t go wrong, here is a cautionary tale. Just over a year ago the mining giant Anglo American demerged its thermal coal
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Who doesn’t want lower electricity bills, and sympathise with households who will be unable to keep themselves warm this winter? But there is something rather missing from the Dutch auction between Keir Starmer and the two Tory leadership candidates over promises to help with household energy bills. What about businesses, whose gas and electricity bills
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Gordon Brown is demanding Parliament be recalled for an emergency budget. By October, he says, quoting a study he commissioned from the University of Loughborough, half the population could be living in fuel poverty. ‘Not enough thinking is being done about the major social crisis,’ he told Radio Four’s The World at One on Monday.
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The Bank of England recently raised hackles by predicting that the economy would shrink in the final quarter of 2022, with Britain spending the whole of next year in recession. Liz Truss was especially critical, saying that a recession was not inevitable. In last night’s Cheltenham debate she again referred to the subject, saying that
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For residents of the London borough of Islington whose homes were flooded this week by a burst water main, Thames Water’s decision to announce a hosepipe ban the following day must have come across as a sick joke. Just a few days before the flood, the company sent out an email asking its customers to
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This summer marks a truce. But if, as expected, Liz Truss becomes prime minister, it is almost inevitable that tensions over the Northern Ireland protocol will resurface. Britain has been threatened with trade barriers if it tears up the protocol, with implications for import and export industries. But one possible consequence has been largely overlooked, in spite
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Whatever happened to the great surge towards a cashless society which the pandemic was supposed to bring about? As I wrote here in February 2021, the cashless lobby was ruthlessly exploiting the pandemic in order to push for its nirvana in which we would be forced to pay for everything electronically, either via cards or
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On Monday, I wrote here about how the Great Barrier Reef is defying predictions of its own demise, bouncing back from a mass bleaching event last year to show the greatest vegetation cover in 37 years of observations. Now comes news that a prominent scientist involved in some of the doom-mongering work over coral reefs
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We are, of course, in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth. It is just that one of the iconic victims doesn’t seem to be playing ball just at the moment. As recently as May, environmentalists were warning that the Great Barrier Reef, the 1,500-mile coral structure
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For years, security services have worried about terrorists unleashing a ‘dirty bomb’ – where a conventional explosive is used to spread radioactive material over a large area. Russian forces now stand accused of threatening a similar form of warfare in Ukraine: attacking a nuclear power station with conventional weapons. Shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power
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Until this morning this had been Rishi Sunak’s week. While Liz Truss found herself trying to talk her way out of her rapidly-abandoned policy for regional pay boards – which she accused others of misrepresenting but couldn’t seem to explain herself – Rishi Sunak emerged the surprise winner from a show of hands among Sky’s
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It has been a long time coming, given that shares and bonds have been falling for most of the year, but this morning there are the first signs of a slide in house prices. Don’t get too excited: the Halifax House Price Index fell by just 0.1 per cent month on month, and prices are
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The Bank of England has warned that Britain will fall into a recession this year. Its Monetary Policy Report, released today, predicts that the economy will shrink from October, with the downturn lasting until the end of 2023. The Bank of England also hiked interest rates from 1.25 per cent to 1.75 per cent, the
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When our freedoms are being taken away we are like the proverbial frog boiled alive in water where the temperature is slowly brought to boiling point. Who batted an eyelid in June when it was reported that rail companies are drawing up plans to abolish paper rail tickets and have us all travel with e-tickets
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Is the eurozone heading for another 2010-style sovereign debt crisis? Today comes the news that inflation in the eurozone hit 8.9 per cent in the year to July. Although it is a record high, it is not as quite as towering as inflation in Britain – at 9.4 per cent. However, what it does do
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There’s an almighty debate ongoing in the US about what exactly a ‘recession’ is. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said the US economy is not shrinking, saying it is in a state of ‘transition’, not recession. But in a clip from 2000 being circulated on Twitter that is comically apt, Bill Clinton said ‘a recession is two quarters
