Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero and The Road to Southend Pier.
When I read that police were invoking emergency powers at an Extinction Rebellion protest in Cambridge I thought: about time, too. It meant, I presumed, that they were not going to make the same mistake as the Met Police last April, when they were too slow to stop this bunch of anarchists closing down public
Like the Trumpton fire brigade, Britain’s disaster planners have had precious little opportunity to show off their skills over the past few decades. Plans for a nuclear war merely gathered dust. Global pandemics failed to arrive, as did a no-deal Brexit. Just about the only crisis requiring nationwide emergency planning concerned foot and mouth disease
Given what he has previously said about Brexit it would be a bit much to expect departing Bank of England governor Mark Carney to say that leaving the EU is a good thing for Britain. Nevertheless, it is still a bit of pleasant surprise to hear him in what – in Carney-speak – is presumably
I imagine that in recommending Philip Hammond and Ken Clarke for peerages, Boris Johnson sees himself in engaging in a Tory healing process. ‘I may have kicked them out of the parliamentary party,’ he is saying, ‘but let bygones be bygones – I’m big enough to honour my former enemies.’ And of course, unlike David
The BBC has a penchant for staging debates on the decriminalisation of drugs. I should know because I am often drafted in as the right-wing loon to provide a bit of balance to the enlightened drugs expert putting the more fashionable view. These debates always go the same way. I argue that if a substance
Brexit voters are, of course, mostly fools who don’t know what is good for them – in contrast to all those Remain voters with their degrees and analytical skills. But none are so dim-witted as those in Sunderland who, like turkeys voting for Christmas, chose a course of action which will inevitably lead to them
I have always loved the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who refused to believe the Second World War was over and stayed hiding in the Philippines until his former commanding officer was brought out of retirement and ordered him to surrender. That was in, 1974, 29 years after the end of hostilities. But
What a joy it is to travel on trains in Germany, where services are fast, efficient and always seem to arrive on time. Why can’t we have Deutsche Bahn running our own trains, rather than those imbeciles at Northern Rail, whose slovenly late-running services using rattling old rolling stock from the 1980s were so bad
How nice to hear Sir Mike Penning, chairman of something called the all-party parliamentary group for Roadside Rescue and Recovery, condemn ‘smart’ motorways as the death traps they are. The motorways use a variety of ‘smart’ methods to vary traffic flow, including part-time hard shoulders managed from a central control room and enforced using electronic
If there is one thing that could yet save HS2 it is the ‘letting down the North’ argument. Didn’t Boris make a speech in the early hours of 13 December promising the party’s new-found voters in the north that he would never take their votes for granted and never forget them? How, then, would he
Hands up if you have ever heard of Brian Moles? No? Then what about Anne Sacoolas? Yep, I bet that is registering a bit more. Sacoolas, as pretty well the whole country now knows, was spirited out of the country by US authorities after allegedly causing the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn by driving
In contrast to prophets of doom, who get invited to Davos, asked to address the UN and are able to build entire careers around their scaremongering, there are few rewards for those who play down fears – even if they turn out to be correct. If there were, then perhaps I wouldn’t have to draw
A headline in the Times this week appeared to speak of a boom in house prices since the general election: “Housing Market Enjoys Boris Boost as Prices Rise at Record Rate”. Given Britain’s history of house price booms and busts that sounded dramatic indeed, so what did it really mean? The ‘record’ which turned out
It was pretty inevitable that once rain finally started to fall in South Eastern Australia, extinguishing some of the bushfires which have been raging for weeks, the wet weather, too, would be blamed on climate change. ‘Climate apocalypse starts in Australia,’ a human rights lawyer tweeted in response to golf ball sized hailstones falling in
There is one qualification which ought to be vital for Tony Hall’s replacement as director-general of the BBC, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the BBC Board, which is charged with making the appointment, will regard it instead as a disqualification. The new director-general needs to accept that the licence fee will disappear
In two weeks’ time, we will finally escape the European Union, freeing ourselves from its monumental waste. Waste, that is, like continually shifting MEPs and their staff between the two seats of the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg – a farce which the European Parliament itself calculated in 2013 was costing it 103 million
Gavin Barwell is a decent enough chap, but the more you read of his time as Theresa May’s chief of staff, the more you realise why her government was doomed. He paints a picture of a low-energy government in the midst of high-energy national crisis. Nothing demonstrates this better than the corresponding reading lists of
What would it take to convert Afua Hirsch to the cause of capitalism? We now know the answer because the Guardian columnist has enthusiastically backed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex as the couple seek ‘financial independence’, by such means as registering the trademark ‘Sussex Royal’. As for those who have criticised the Duke and
The biggest news of the week, obviously, is the conclusion of the drama which has rocked Britain for the past 12 months: the moment the EU Withdrawal Bill finally made it through the Commons. Blanket coverage of Thursday night’s vote may have led to some readers being unaware of some of the other news stories
It is easy to construct a scenario in which tit for tat actions by the Americans and Iranians lead to all-out war, close off the Gulf, send oil prices soaring, crash the global economy – and, if you are really going to go for it, end in nuclear conflagration. But what about the alternative outcome:
