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?

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Is this Boris’s ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ moment?

From our UK edition

Will it turn out to be Boris Johnson’s Jim Callaghan moment? Briefing reporters on his plane to the US on Sunday, the current PM tried to play down the energy crisis, saying:  'It’s like everybody going back to put the kettle on at the end of a TV programme, you’re seeing huge stresses on the world supply systems.'  The gas price spike would be over just as soon as it occurred, he implied, and was caused by nothing more than the global economy rebounding after many months on the Covid couch.

Ross Clark

Green bonds offer nothing but virtue-pleasing

From our UK edition

Would you touch a ‘green gilt’ issued by the government, with an interest rate of just 0.87 per cent? Some people, apparently, would. The Treasury announced yesterday that it had shifted the first £10 billion tranche of ‘green gilts’ to raise finance for projects such as zero-carbon buses, wind farms and other green things. Indeed, the bond – which matures in 2033 – was ten times oversubscribed. The government had already planned to issue a further £5 billion, and might now be encouraged to issue far more.

Monday

Ross Clark

Are low wind speeds to blame for Britain’s energy crisis?

From our UK edition

Why has Britain suddenly been plunged into an energy crisis, with day ahead auction prices for electricity rising to over £400 per MWh, ten times what they were this time last year? The spike in global gas prices caused by economic recovery from Covid has been commented on often enough, as has the failure of Britain to maintain sufficient gas storage reserves – we have closed a large gas storage facility as other countries have been building up theirs’. So, too, we have learned of the failure of many smaller energy companies to hedge the prices of their energy, thus putting them at risk of spikes in wholesale prices.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Is the inflation panic over? Probably not

From our UK edition

So, is the post-Covid inflation panic over? That is how it looked last month, when the government’s preferred inflation index, CPIH, fell to 2.1 per cent from 2.4 per cent a month earlier. We will have the latest news on Wednesday morning, but for the moment it appears that consumer prices inflation hasn’t taken off like we feared. It is a similar story in the US, where inflation fell back from 5.6 per cent in July to 5.3 per cent in August. The fact that house prices have risen so strongly throughout the deepest recession in modern times ought to be a warning sign Yet there are good reasons to suspect that the summer slowdown in inflation is a lull and that a rebound is coming. Just look at US producer prices, which ratcheted up to 8.

Friday

Ross Clark

Do vaccines pose a risk to young boys?

From our UK edition

Should we be vaccinating children against Covid-19? While some countries have been enthusiastically administering vaccines to under-18s — greatly contributing to their overall vaccination rate — the idea has greeted more coolly in Britain. The government and the NHS were relatively slow in making Covid vaccines available to 16 to 18-year-olds — although it was approved. Although we are still awaiting a formal government decision on jabbing 12 to 15-year-olds, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has recommended that members of this age group only be offered a vaccine if they are especially vulnerable to the virus, citing the risk of myocarditis — an inflammation of the heart muscle — following receipt of the Pfizer vaccine.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Are we trapped in an inflationary spiral?

From our UK edition

Are we heading for a 1970s-style inflationary spiral? Not according to Catherine Mann, former chief economist at Citigroup, who argues that we are now less exposed to fluctuations in oil prices than we were then. She also makes the case that businesses are more reluctant to put up prices and that the link between inflation and wages is weaker than it was in the years of high inflation when wages often rose three or four times a year and prices in the shops were jacked up more frequently than now. Her opinion matters because she is the latest recruit to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, which is charged with setting interest rates to try to keep inflation within set limits.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Was Hurricane Ida really caused by climate change?

From our UK edition

It’s climate change, innit? No sooner had Hurricane Ida smashed into the coast of Louisiana with winds of around 150 mph than the usual claims began to be made, the ones we get every time a hurricane makes landfall in the US: that it has been caused in part by man-made climate change. Climate models have tended to predict that tropical storms will become stronger as warmer seas lead to more energy being absorbed by the storms. Trouble is, observational evidence does not suggest that this has happened — at least not yet.

Ross Clark

Can schools return without disruption?

From our UK edition

A lot of people won’t want to take much notice of Mary Bousted, joint-general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), who warns today that schools face significant disruption by the end of September as Covid-prevention measures have to be reintroduced. It was the NEU, after all, which not only opposed the return of schools after the first lockdown, but simultaneously advised its members not to take part in online lessons either. The NEU has often given the impression of being motivated first and foremost by a desire to obstruct the government’s plans.

Sunday

Ross Clark

The NHS blood tube shortage should concern us

From our UK edition

One of the great lessons from the early stages of the pandemic was the need to shorten supply chains and make them more robust. This was especially true for medical supplies. Just-in-time supply chains have been developed over the years to increase efficiency, but had never been tested in a global crisis when demand for certain medical products is high and supply is weak. The government ended up paying huge sums for PPE which, in some cases, was not even suitable for use. The shortage raises eyebrows because a plastic tube is, after all, a plastic tube It seems the lesson has not entirely been learned. There is now a shortage of blood tubes – the small plastic tubes which are used for collecting samples of blood.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Natural immunity is stronger than vaccination, study suggests

From our UK edition

At times this summer, the government has been accused of fighting Covid-19 with an undeclared strategy that concentrates on vaccinating the old while allowing the young to build up herd immunity. The effort that the government has put into persuading young people to have the vaccine suggests this is more conspiracy theory than reality. Nevertheless, might it be a good strategy? The preprint of a yet-to-be-published Israeli study comparing the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine with immunity gained through natural infection suggests that the latter may be more effective and longer-lasting.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Fact check: what caused the German floods?

From our UK edition

As a study in how hysteria develops, the reporting of World Weather Attribution study into last month’s floods in the Rhineland could hardly be bettered. You will no doubt have heard or seen headlines over the past couple of days claiming that climate change made the floods ‘up to nine times’ more likely. Some even ran without the ‘up to’ — such as the Times, which reported with apparent confidence: 'Deadly floods nine times likelier in warmer climate'. What ordinary readers are less likely to have done is to have read the study itself. Needless to say, it paints a very different picture of the event and any causal link with climate change.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Boris Johnson’s Macron-esque pettiness

From our UK edition

How we all hollered with outrage in May when Emmanuel Macron closed France’s borders to people arriving from Britain on the dubious basis that Britons, and Britons alone, were in danger of infecting France with the Indian variant. I believed, and I still believe, that Macron and his government were in part motivated by Brexit — it was part of our ongoing punishment for daring to vote to leave the EU. It certainly wasn’t justified on scientific grounds: if Briton had more recorded Indian variant (or Delta) cases than other European countries at the time it was largely thanks to more samples of Covid being sequenced here. Some countries, France included, were not analysing more than a tiny fraction of cases.

Monday

Ross Clark

No. 10 is distorting the economy

From our UK edition

Job vacancies at a record high, a shortage of 90,000 lorry drivers, farmers complaining about a lack of seasonal workers, care homes complaining about difficulties in recruiting staff — and 1.9 million people still on furlough at the end of June. It shouldn’t be difficult to put these figures together and work out what is going on — even if Lord Adonis, with his usual tunnel vision, has been busily tweeting blaming everything on Brexit. When the furlough scheme was introduced it was intended as a short-term measure to tide over businesses that had been forced to close as a result of Covid restrictions. So why is it still in place when the economy has almost entirely reopened?

Friday

Ross Clark

Greta Thunberg is right

From our UK edition

I am not usually on the same page as Greta Thunberg but she is absolutely right when she accuses the UK of lying about cutting its carbon emissions by 44 per cent since 1990. I have heard ministers repeatedly make this claim on radio and television while hardly ever being challenged on it — so I am thankful that Thurnberg has done what others have failed to do. The government’s 44 per cent claim is based on its official figures for territorial emissions — i.e. those physically spewed out within the UK. It excludes emissions from international shipping, aviation, the manufacture of goods elsewhere in the world for the benefit of UK consumers and the burning of biomass in UK power stations.

Thursday

Ross Clark

How are the vaccines affected by the Delta variant?

From our UK edition

Has the emergence of the Delta, or Indian, variant reduced the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and if so by how much? The fear that the Delta variant might be partially escaping our vaccines has often been expressed in recent weeks, especially given that highly-vaccinated countries such as Israel and parts of the US have suffered new peaks of infection since the Delta variant came to dominate. But there has been a lack of real-world data to prove whether or not there is any grounding to these fears. Today, however, the Oxford University Covid 19 Infection Survey published a study which seeks to answer this question.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

It’s time to scrap the triple lock

From our UK edition

For a government to break a manifesto commitment is a serious matter which, quite rightly, is sure to rebound at the ballot box. But there is one commitment in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto which has simply got to go: the promise to maintain the ‘triple lock’ on pensions which sees the basic state pension increased each year by either inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is the highest.  At the time the party made this promise it could not have foreseen the peculiar circumstances which would result in today’s remarkable ONS figures showing that average earnings are up over the past 12 months by 8.8 per cent.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Britain’s economic bounce back is less impressive than it seems

From our UK edition

The UK economy is rebounding at the fastest rate in Europe, and faster even than the United States: that is the general tone of reporting of today’s GDP figures, which show that the UK economy expanded by 4.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2021. That is compared with 0.9 per cent in France, 1.5 per cent in Germany and 1.6 per cent in the US. But hang on, dig a little deeper and there is something a little odd going on with the figures. Compare nominal and real changes in GDP during the second quarter and it produces the following: UK, nominal growth in second quarter: +3.6 per cent; real growth in second quarter: +4.8 per centFrance, nominal growth in second quarter: +1.0 per cent; real growth in second quarter: +0.

Ross Clark

The cost of net zero

From our UK edition

35 min listen

In this week’s podcast: First up, to deny the man-made climate crisis we now find ourselves in would be an act of wilful delusion. But what is the right way for the UK to try and minimise this looming disaster? In our cover story this week Ross Clark looks at the financial viability of the government’s central proposal: getting to net zero. Lara Prendergast talks to him along with James Kirkup, chair of the Social Market Foundation, who writes in this week’s magazine saying that the cost for net zero is more than worth it. (00:48)‘Ten years ago, electric cars were a work of science fiction, now the best-selling car in the UK in June was the Tesla.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The true cost of net zero

From our UK edition

When Theresa May committed the government to achieving ‘net zero’ carbon emissions by 2050, Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, likened it to President Kennedy’s 1961 promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. How we would achieve net zero might not yet be clear, but a combination of ambition and ingenuity would somehow see us through. Still, at least JFK had some idea about the cost and he did not make it a legally binding obligation for the US to visit the moon, thus inviting activists to sue the government if it failed. Rishi Sunak is now understood to be in rebellion against the costs of net zero — whatever they might be.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

What’s the truth about the UN’s ‘code red’ climate warning?

From our UK edition

Predictably enough, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has been greeted with hyperbole about fire, flood and tempest. It is 'code red for humanity,' according to UN general-secretary Antonio Guterres. 'This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet.' As ever with IPCC reports, the content doesn’t live up to the hysterical reviews. If the vision presented in it were the basis of a disaster movie you would want your money back.  No, it doesn’t say that the German floods were caused by man-made climate change – something implied by much of the press coverage, which used photos of the damage in Rhineland towns to illustrate the publication of the report.