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 last time that US inflation hit 7.5 per cent, Ronald Reagan was a recently-elected president. And he, older readers might recall, partly owed his election to inflation. He memorably said during his campaign: ‘inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hitman.’ But what of Britain?
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Is now the right time to lift all Covid restrictions, as the Prime Minister suggested he might do from 24 February? The news was met with howls of outrage from some quarters. For example, Zubaida Haque, who runs an equality think-tank and serves on the self-styled ‘Independent Sage’, last night tweeted: One of the chief
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Look up this year’s performance of the shares and bonds which make up your pension fund and you will see that BP and Shell are the rare chinks of light. BP is up 15 per cent and Shell up 20 per cent, with both enjoying bumper profits on the back of high oil and gas
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The emergence of Covid provoked a worldwide economic crash. That lasted a mere four weeks. By the time western countries were locking down, a bull market had begun afresh. Through months of lockdowns, soaring case rates and death rates, shares were not just rebounding but marking new highs – firstly involving tech shares and online
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There would have been times when the news ‘Bank of England doubles interest rates’ would have been met with a shudder. But when the move takes rates merely from 0.25 per cent to 0.5 per cent it hardly ranks as a shock at all. The days when the base rate reached 15 per cent seem
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Did lockdowns save lives? We will never have a definitive answer to this vital question because it was impossible to conduct controlled experiments — we don’t have two identical countries, one where lockdown was imposed and one where it wasn’t. Nor is it easy to compare similar countries, for the simple reason that every country
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I’m boycotting Spotify. I am doing this for the same reason as I don’t have a Netflix subscription: I refuse to subsidise the efforts by Harry and Meghan to monetise their royal fame. If either company terminates its relationship with the couple I will consider using its services, but for the moment I will stick
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Health Secretary Sajid Javid now looks set to drop his plans to sack unvaccinated NHS staff. It was almost inevitable given the practical difficulties that come with sacking more than 70,000 workers who showed little sign of changing their minds — all while the NHS is desperately trying to catch up with missed treatments following
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England has been described by some as an outlier in that the government is lifting Plan B restrictions in spite of Covid infections remaining high – daily numbers are still higher than at any point prior to the emergence of the Omicron variant. Some have even accused the Prime Minister of lifting the restrictions in
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There is a lesser-known Robert Redford film, The Candidate, in which he plays a no-hope Democrat taking on a popular and well-liked Republican in a Californian election. After engaging unexpectedly well with the public and winning an improbable victory, he turns to one of his aides and asks, bewildered: ‘What do we do now?’ The
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So is this really it: the end of the era of virtually zero interest rates? There was a marked pullback in US markets on Wednesday when Jay Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, indicated that yes, he really did mean it: interest rates are on the way up, if not quite yet. ‘The committee
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Today is England’s last day under Plan B restrictions, brought in by the government at the beginning of last month to curb the spread of Omicron. Work-from-home guidance was scrapped last week, while mandatory face coverings in shops and on public transport — as well as the need to show vaccine passports at large venues
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Last week it was ‘operation red meat’, designed to recapture wavering Tory voters. This week something very different: changes to the Highway Code are coming into effect, which threaten to upset the not-insignificant number of car owners. Sure enough, the Alliance of British Drivers, the trade union for Mr Toads, has complained bitterly. Responding to a
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There must come a time when even Beth Rigby starts to ask whether she is too fixated on a small staff party which happened nearly two years ago and not quite enough on the highest inflation rate in 30 years and the prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. But to be fair to Sky
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Warning to the working classes: the government is coming after your pleasures again. It is you who are being blamed for environmental degradation and you who will be made to pay the price. The latest wheeze of environment secretary George Eustice is to ban plastic sachets of tomato ketchup, soy sauce and whatever else from
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For once, yesterday’s Downing Street press conference included a worthwhile question, and not of the ‘why aren’t you locking us down?’ variety. In fact, it had nothing to do with Covid at all. Harry Cole of the Sun asked why, given that the Prime Minister had once cited the ability to remove VAT from fuel
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‘A stain on our soul’. That was how Gordon Brown, in his latest missive on the subject, described the failure of the west to ensure that the whole world is vaccinated. In a previous attack on western policy — at the end of November, just as Omicron was emerging — he wrote of “hoarding” and ‘vaccine
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Two weeks ago, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Imperial College both published modelling showing frightening scenarios if the government did not react to the Omicron variant by imposing immediate restrictions on our day to day lives. The former suggested that hospitalisations could peak at 7,190 a day in January in
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It’s climate panic again. This time, under headlines such as ‘Baked Alaska’, we are informed that the most northerly US state has experienced ‘absurd’ temperatures for December. ‘In December when temperatures would normally be well below zero,’ states the Independent, the town of Kodiak has registered a temperature of 67 degrees Fahrenheit (19.4 Celsius). ‘In
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It’s post-Christmas, and there are already murmurs about supermarkets with empty shelves. Just as with the petrol shortage in September and shortages of loo paper at the beginning of the first lockdown, these things can rapidly develop into major crises, purely as a result of panic-buying. Tesco, whose store on the Isle of Wight is reportedly especially
