Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better
The UK vaccination programme has been such a success to date that until yesterday evening it seemed a formality that the government would achieve its target of offering all adults at least a first dose of a Covid vaccine by July. Indeed, on Monday it looked as if this date might be brought forwards when
Should the Bank of England be jacking up interest rates whenever the housing market starts to run away with itself? That is what the Reserve Bank of New Zealand has in effect just been asked to do by Jacinda Ardern’s government: to take into account a ‘sustainable housing market’ when fixing its monetary policy. If
Far from subsiding, as it seemed to be doing last week, the European war over the AstraZeneca vaccine has intensified. Over the past few weeks, EU leaders have swung from accusing the company – and Britain – of hoarding the vaccine and failing to supply it to EU countries, to claiming that it is ineffective,
As the chief medical officer professor Chris Whitty suggested this week, the situation with Covid figures can change very sharply, very quickly. One moment infection numbers can be falling, like they were in late November, but the next moment, they can take off again — as they subsequently did in mid-December. That is why all eyes are now on the
Punters have been warning about the over-valuation of tech stocks for so long that great fortunes have been made in the interim. Then again, anyone old enough to remember back 20 years will know that tech stocks are not invincible – they can indeed crash. So is the wobble in tech stocks since the middle
At the beginning of the year, Boris Johnson and his advisers were at pains to tell us that by spring we would be in a vastly better situation with Covid. Well, spring is here, the number of new infections and deaths is falling by around 30 per cent week on week, deaths are back to
Will the return of schools reverse, or dramatically slow, the sharp downwards trend in new Covid-19 infections, which is currently falling at more than 30 per cent a week? No one knows for sure, but it seems unlikely that the mass return of schools today will not have some effect on infections in England, especially
According to government figures the toll of Covid 19 so far has been 124,419 deaths (if you define a Covid death as any death which occurs within 28 days of someone being confirmed as infected with the virus) or 140,062 (if you define a Covid death as one where the word ‘Covid’ is mentioned anywhere
How strong is the link between obesity and the danger of dying from Covid? Yesterday, the World Obesity Federation published a report containing a widely-quoted statistic that 2.2 million out of 2.5 million Covid deaths globally have occurred in countries where more than half the population is overweight. The figure is stark, although also highly
Imperial College’s REACT study is given a prominence over other Covid data, but it is a struggle to understand why. This morning, as so often, BBC news bulletins included the latest tranche of results from the study, suggesting that the fall in new Covid infections is ‘slowing’. The data appears to confirm a deceleration in
Buy when there is gunfire on the streets, goes the old adage. But could this be a case of the right time to buy being when there is, well, hardly anything happening on the streets? Few investments have been as hard hit by Covid-19 as commercial property in central London. As shops and restaurants have
The trouble with emergency financial measures is that the crises used to justify them never seem to end. Just as the Bank of England couldn’t bring itself to think the time was ever right to reel back the ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing it introduced at the nadir of the 2008/09 financial crisis, so
There is one certainty for every Budget day: that the chancellor will dream up some novel scheme to prop up the housing market. Rishi Sunak’s idea of providing state guarantees for 95 per cent mortgages taken out by first time buyers isn’t, however, that new. It is really just a reheated version of one branch of
We mustn’t abandon the railways to market forces, many on the left asserted when British Rail was broken up and privatised in the 1990s. They needn’t have worried. A quarter of a century on and we have yet to see a market force take to the tracks. Wasn’t the whole purpose of privatisation supposed to
How worried should we be about the news that P1, one of the two Brazilian variants of Sars-CoV-2, has been found in six people who travelled from Brazil to Britain before the hotel quarantine rules came into force, and that one of these people has yet to be traced? Variant P1 is of concern not
Is the decline in new Covid infections slowing down? That is the picture painted by the government’s figures for confirmed infections, arrived at via the NHS Test and Trace system. The most recent figures show that the 71,320 cases recorded in the seven days to Wednesday are 15 per cent down on the previous seven
The UK policy of delaying second doses of the Pfizer vaccine has been criticised by some as risky, with Pfizer warning that there is no data on the effectiveness of its vaccine other than for the dosing regime used in phase 3 trials: two doses, 21 days apart. But evidence is steadily trickling through. Earlier in
When the Prime Minister mentioned ‘Covid status certification’ as part of his route back to normal life, one man must have enjoyed the moment. For Tony Blair it was yet one more little victory in his UK comeback tour, made all the sweeter because Boris Johnson was once a principal opponent of the idea of
Secondary-school children returning to school from 8 March will be required to wear masks in classrooms, at least for several weeks. That is in contrast to the initial return of children to school last summer. It wasn’t until November that they were required to wear masks at school, and then only in corridors and other
What an enriching business it is, having a global pandemic. That is the conclusion, at any rate, one might reach from reading, in isolation, the government’s figures on employment and earnings. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) the average earnings for employees have risen by 4.7 per cent over the past 12 months –