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?
From our UK edition
It is not often that the NHS gets accused of being too good at negotiating down costs. But that seems to be gist of the case levelled against it regarding the cost of drugs. AstraZeneca has paused the expansion of a research facility in Cambridge and US pharmaceutical firm Merck has cancelled a plan to
From our UK edition
Keir Starmer should be thankful for Lord Mandelson. Were it not for scandal over the Mandelson’s connections with Jeffrey Epstein, more people might have noticed an even greater disgrace this morning. The Prime Minister’s promise of ‘growth, growth, growth’ has ploughed spectacularly into the ground. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) reports today that there
From our UK edition
When even green energy tycoons are telling him to embrace the North Sea oil and gas industries, Ed Miliband really is beginning to look somewhat isolated. Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity and a Labour donor (as well as a former donor to Just Stop Oil, no less), has made an extraordinary intervention today, suggesting that
From our UK edition
A very warm welcome for Margaret Thatcher inside autism’s ever-growing tent – if she can find space to wield her handbag. I could even lead the welcoming party myself as I am in there – according to some of my friends – on account of my unusually good ability to recall dates and a liking
From our UK edition
Are Britons getting sicker and sicker – or is our health improving? There seems to be something of a paradox. According to figures from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) the number of sickness absences has increased from an average of 5.9 days per worker in 2019 to 9.4 days in 2024. Interestingly,
From our UK edition
Here is a rather delightful fact. For 13 years between 2010 and 2023 Britain had a quango called the Office for Tax Simplification. You may never have heard of it, but it really did exist. Its annual report for 2021/22 shows that it was chaired by someone called Kathryn Kearns and had a budget of
From our UK edition
Angela Rayner must resign as Housing Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, obviously. How could she sit on the front bench through a tax-raising budget without everyone’s eyes gravitating towards her, as the minister who thinks tax rises are for everyone else, not her? But the fate of Rayner obscures the bigger scandal here, which is
From our UK edition
What’s the most idiotic question ever posed by an interviewer? There was the real-life Sally Jockstrap who asked David Gower whether he considered himself a batsman or a bowler. Or the Radio 1 DJ who asked Marc Almond – at the height of his fame with Soft Cell – whether he was going steady with
From our UK edition
Will the compulsory ID card lobby ever give up? For more than two decades it has been trying to exploit every national crisis to push its product on the country: terrorism, violent crime, Covid and now illegal migration. Apparently the answer to all of them is to force all of us to carry about a
From our UK edition
Trying to work out what is going on with global trade doesn’t get any easier. Just as the world was settling down to the new reality of Donald Trump’s trade war and governments were stitching up hurried trade deals to minimise the sweeping damage from the tariffs announced on ‘Liberation Day’ in April, the Court
From our UK edition
Rachel Reeves’s error before last autumn’s Budget might have been written off as the act of a ministerial rookie. She kept making us miserable by telling us about fiscal black holes and telling us that huge tax rises would be required to fix it – with the result that, come Budget day, the outlook for
From our UK edition
Gosh, Labour really does hate private landlords. Rachel Reeves’ latest property tax proposal to be dangled before the public is to charge National Insurance contributions (NICs) on income from rental properties. This would set it aside from other forms of investment income, which are liable for income tax but not NICs. It would also represent
From our UK edition
So, according to the Met Office, Britain is reaching the end of what will ‘almost certainly’ be the warmest summer on record. The average temperature across Britain up until 25 August was 16.13 Celsius, compared with 15.76 Celsius for the previous record-holder, 2018. There is still a week to go, of course, and it is
From our UK edition
Quietly, without even a press release let alone a fanfare, Britain over the past 12 months has just passed a grim milestone. The number of people on out of work benefits has surpassed the peak reached in the early 1990s. Indeed, it is higher now than it was at the peak of Covid-19 in 2020.
From our UK edition
Are our scientific institutions being colonised by activists less interested in pursing objective truth than in spinning a political narrative? It is worth asking given an extraordinary spat which is developing among evolutionary biologists as to whether life on Earth is experiencing a ‘sixth mass extinction’. The trouble with all these extrapolations is that they are
From our UK edition
Just how thick are the public sector unions? The RMT’s announcement of a week-long strike on the London Underground in September is little short of a death wish. The unions spent 14 years trying to get rid of a Conservative government and its hated ‘austerity’. Within days, an incoming Labour government had awarded public sector workers
From our UK edition
If ever there was a symbol of the decline of the European car industry it is my wife’s Citroen. For the past two months it has sat out on the driveway, inert. We can’t drive it, we can’t sell it and we cannot get it fixed. It is a waste of space, but one that
From our UK edition
That’s the trouble of trying to measure everything through the metric of race: sooner or later you will arrive at a situation very different from that which you intended. Namely, that in some cases it is white people who appear to be at some kind of disadvantage. At least Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is not
From our UK edition
Rachel Reeves’s rather crude strategy is becoming painfully clear. Between now and the Budget she intends to float ideas for so many painful tax rises that, come the day, we will all feel pathetically grateful that only a few of them have come to pass. Her latest suggestion – reported from an anonymous briefing, needless
From our UK edition
Keir Starmer’s government continues to show off its remarkable ability to please absolutely no one. Reintroducing grants for electric cars (EVs) always was an outrage. Why is a government which rails against privilege when it comes to public schools, second homes, etc., splashing out taxpayers’ money to subsidise the second cars of relatively well-off motorists?
