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?

Monday

Ross Clark

This vote marks the beginning of the end for Boris Johnson

From our UK edition

There is a school of thought, expressed by Fraser Nelson here this morning, that the Prime Minister’s Tory opponents have shot their bolt too soon, that they should have waited for a couple of by-election defeats and for the emergence of a clear front-runner to replace Boris Johnson, before sending in their letters of no confidence. This analysis is right in that Johnson will very likely gain more votes that MPs vote against him this evening. Whether that really amounts to ‘winning’ is another matter. Historic precedence suggests that Keir Starmer is correct when he asserts that today’s confidence vote marks the beginning of the end for the Prime Minister.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Are republicans becoming an endangered species?

From our UK edition

How disappointing. Come Jubilee time and the Guardian can usually be relied upon to lead the way in publishing sour pieces moaning about ‘jingoism’, attacking the extravagance of a royal procession and trying to claim that the people who turn up to watch and join in with the celebrations are somehow outnumbered by people who would rather get rid of the royal family and live under a republic. At the time of the Queen’s Golden jubilee in 2002, Mary Riddell wrote of a ‘family that knows how to command a deference out of kilter with its popularity’, adding that ‘a third of the population wants a republic, a third couldn’t care what befalls the monarchy, but damp-palmed curtseyers abound.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The EU’s oil ban is a damp squib

From our UK edition

When Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine on 24 February there was a conceit that this might be the first war which the West could fight – and win – by sanctions alone. The EU’s latest efforts to stop importing Russian oil show just what a folly this was. Donations of military equipment to Ukraine are certainly helping to keep Russian forces at bay, but economic sanctions? That is another story. Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas is the product of years of ill-conceived energy policy Sanctions may be helping to lower living standards among Russian citizens, but they are still a long, long way from cutting off the lifeblood of the Russian economy – its oil and gas exports.

Saturday

Ross Clark

The World Health Organisation has lost all credibility

From our UK edition

Let’s be honest: is there anyone out there who has faith in the ability of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to tackle a future pandemic? Any lingering hope that the WHO might be an organisation fit to be trusted with global heath concerns has pretty well evaporated with the election, by acclamation, of China as one of the 12 members of its executive board on Friday.  It is true, of course, that an international body must have representation from all over the world if it is going to win the near-universal cooperation it needs in order to operate. It can’t be led entirely by western democracies and wealthy South Asian countries even if they might have the best skills available; you need members able to tap into every culture and religion on Earth.

Sunday

Ross Clark

It’s time for Boris to take on the rail unions

From our UK edition

Imagine if we gave the rail unions what they really wanted, and renationalised the railways. Would they then leave us alone and get on quietly with the job of driving trains, clipping tickets and so on? Like hell they would. Thankfully, Nicola Sturgeon has just tried this very human experiment, so that the Westminster government does not have to. On 1 April, railway services north of the border were taken back into public ownership so that, as the unions would put it, passengers could once again be put first and profits no longer drained away by nasty private companies rewarding their evil shareholders. And the result? Er, a national rail strike – just the same as the unions are threatening in England.

Monday

Ross Clark

Russia and the death of the Golden Arches theory

From our UK edition

Ah, well, it was a lovely idea, born of the age of liberal-democratic triumphalism that was the 1990s: the ‘Golden Arches theory’, which held that no two countries that had McDonald’s franchises had ever been – or would ever go – to war. Remarkably, it wasn’t the product of McDonald’s PR department but the work of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He argued that the arrival of McDonald’s signified a society that had become so consumerist that enough people had enough invested in economic stability to ever risk a war. Armed conflict ain’t good for the hamburger trade The final nail in the coffin of the Golden Arches theory has come with the news that McDonald’s is to abandon Russia permanently.

Ross Clark

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s attack on fixed penalty notices is too little, too late

From our UK edition

What an heroic stand for freedom and justice Jacob Rees-Mogg has just made by criticising the system of Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs). According to the Brexit Opportunities minister, the reason this form of summary justice “goes against British tradition” is that an FPN “assumes you are guilty until proven innocent because you have to go to court to get it set aside”. It is not that I disagree with him – it’s just that I would have been rather more impressed had he made this point before police began to shower the Prime Minister and Downing Street staff with FPNs. The problems with FPNs and their civil cousins Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) have been very clear for many years.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Is the bond bubble about to burst?

From our UK edition

First, the good news: US inflation is down. Now the bad news: US inflation isn’t down by as much as a lot of people were expecting. Cue quite a lot of confusion on the markets. First, the S&P 500 plunged by 0.5 per cent, then it rose by 1 per cent, then it was more or less back to where it started the day. The FTSE100 has performed a similar gyration: first erasing its daily gain and then regaining it, to finish nearly 1.5 per cent up on the day. So, is it positive or negative news that US consumer inflation has fallen from 8.5 per cent in March to 8.3 per cent in April? Today’s news can be used to support fears that the spike in global inflation is not merely transitory.

Ross Clark

BlackRock is right to abandon eco-activism

From our UK edition

Is this the end of climate activism from pension providers and other institutional investors? BlackRock, which manages $10 trillion in assets, has toned down its enthusiasm for blocking company boards that are not sufficiently committed to a carbon-free future. In January 2020, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink shook up the world of investment by writing an annual letter to the CEOs of companies in which he invests, warning them that in future BlackRock would take a more critical view of their climate change policies.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why I’m not falling for Prince Harry’s latest eco-venture

From our UK edition

Just when you thought Prince Harry’s post-royal career couldn’t get any more absurd, he manages to make it so. His latest venture is a service which supposedly tells you how many carbon emissions will be emitted as a result of an airline passenger’s journey by various airlines and routes – helping travellers choose the most ‘sustainable’ option. He launched it this week on a Maori television channel in which he appears with a couple of ‘ratings agents’ which pretend to assess his environmental impact as a tourist in New Zealand.  Why use Maoris to push it? Harry is presumably hoping that the viewer will draw some kind of association between a traditional Maori lifestyle, with low environmental impact, and his airline ratings service.

Monday

Ross Clark

Crypto is dead

From our UK edition

When Britain voted for Brexit, Macron boasted that Paris would eat the City of London’s lunch. It didn’t quite work out that way, with most league tables continuing to put London as the number one or two financial centre, with not a single EU city in the top ten. Emmanuel Macron's government has now announced that it has invited Binance, a crypto exchange site, to set up a European HQ in Paris. You have to ask: has Macron leapt on a bandwagon which has already started to lose its wheels?  The warning sign for cryptocurrencies is not so much that they have crashed – Bitcoin is down 50 per cent from its peak last November – but that they have become boring.

Saturday

Ross Clark

‘Please don’t do a hit job’: An interview with Devi Sridhar

From our UK edition

Of all the scientists who became household names during the pandemic, few divide opinion as much as Devi Sridhar. The Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh turned adviser to the Scottish government and Guardian columnist is, according to your point of view, either a voice of reason who could have prevented the bungling at Westminster and steered Britain through the pandemic with a death toll as low as that of New Zealand, or a hectoring advocate of an impossible ‘Zero Covid’ strategy. She complains of having received hate mail – a baleful occupation hazard for many in public life, but perhaps all the more shocking if you were previously little known outside academia.

Friday

Ross Clark

Bristol proves it: England doesn’t want elected mayors

From our UK edition

Among the many council election results coming in today, the decision of the voters in Bristol to ditch the post of elected mayor, by a margin of 59 to 41 per cent, could easily get missed. Why does it matter? Because the government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda proposes to establish elected mayoralties all over England – on the assumption that it is something we will all welcome as a way to bolster local democracy. Yet Bristol is just the latest in a long series of results which prove the opposite: we keep telling the government that we don’t want elected mayors and yet it keeps trying to force them on us anyway. Since 2001, there have been 54 referendums on whether or not to introduce an elected mayor. In only 17 cases have people voted yes.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Bill Gates vs Elon Musk? I know who my money is on

From our UK edition

Is Bill Gates shorting Tesla? He certainly didn’t deny it in an interview with the Today programme. The suggestion is that he has upset Elon Musk, who has complained that he couldn’t take Gates’s philanthropy on climate change issues seriously if he was betting against the share price of the world’s biggest electric car-maker. But Musk’s outburst rather evades the issue: is Tesla’s share price destined to fall? You could be the most ardent climate change campaigner, the biggest enthusiast for electric cars in the world – and still think that Tesla is overpriced.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

What we get wrong about local elections

From our UK edition

Friday morning’s headlines can pretty much already be written: Conservatives suffer heavy losses in local elections; a humbled Boris Johnson addresses the nation saying that lessons have been learned; backbench MPs resume plotting, trying to decide whether to move now or in a few months’ time. Former Tory voters will be feeling pleased with themselves that they have left the government with a bloody nose, and who knows? Maybe it will be the jolt that succeeds in getting the government to concentrate on what really matters at the moment – the cost of living crisis – and to stop faffing around with other things.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why Meghan Markle’s Netflix show was cancelled

From our UK edition

In their post-royal careers, Harry and Meghan have learned two lessons in quick succession: firstly, that membership of the royal family opens the door to media deals less well-connected celebrities could only dream about. Secondly, they have learned that even royal fame will not, ultimately, help one of the biggest media organisations in the world sell a product that the public finds unappealing. No doubt Meghan thinks mightily of the concept of Pearl, her proposed animated Netflix series in which a 12-year-old girl is inspired by great women in history. But it seems potential viewers are rather less enamoured. Netflix has cancelled the series before it was even made.

Monday

Ross Clark

Right-to-buy won’t fix Britain’s housing crisis

From our UK edition

The biggest long-term threat to the Conservatives is neither partygate nor even the cost of living crisis – but declining rates of home ownership. As Mrs Thatcher understood, when people are able to afford their own home, they become more conservative in outlook. They put down roots in their local area and they gain a vested interest in capitalism – just look how Mrs Thatcher won and held on to aspirational areas such as the new towns. That the rate of home ownership plunged from 70.9 per cent to 62.6 per cent between 2003 and 2017 (it has since recovered slightly) goes quite a long way to explaining why Jeremy Corbyn became such an attraction for young people in the general election of that year.

Thursday

Ross Clark

The electric scooter ban doesn’t make sense

From our UK edition

Is there anything we use in everyday life which was not, at some point on its journey to acceptance, denounced as a menace? Certainly not cars, bicycles, trains and aeroplanes, all of which were accused of various hazards and temptations. To take trains, for example, some confidently predicted that their passengers would suffocate at high speeds – or that they would encourage prostitution or criminality by providing greater opportunities to travel. It should come as no surprise, then, that e-scooters have been treated in much the same way. It is possible to be bowled over by an e-scooter while crossing the road – but that seems somewhat preferable to being hit by a car, bus or lorry The government does, however, seem poised to act.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Why Brussels fears Elon Musk

From our UK edition

Thierry Breton, the European Commission for the internal market, lost no time in rattling his sabre at Twitter as soon as it was announced that the company had accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy it. Even though Musk had made no announcement on how he intends to run the company, beyond stating his belief in free speech, Breton felt it necessary to warn Twitter that if it ‘does not comply with our law, there are sanctions – 6 per cent of the revenue and, if they continue, banned from operating in Europe.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Can Elon Musk make Twitter profitable?

From our UK edition

Why does Elon Musk really want to buy Twitter? Is it vanity, political activism, or a shrewd financial move? Musk’s reputation lies in building companies from scratch, yet Twitter is a mature business. It is hard to see why that should excite him anything like transforming the car industry or creating a market for space tourism. Twitter is currently a business without any obvious prospects for substantial growth. The company, which was formed in 2006 and floated in 2013, has never set the world alight like other businesses in the tech sector. Even after Musk’s $44 billion (£34 billion) offer, the share price is only modestly higher than it was at the company’s flotation nearly nine years ago.