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.
Angela Rayner has announced that the government will aim to build 370,000 new homes, up from the 300,000 a year implied in the party’s manifesto. But if the deputy prime minister really thinks that all she needs to do to achieve that target is to take on Nimbys – as Rayner and chancellor Rachel Reeves
There is one over-arching question hanging over Rachel Reeves’s speech today, in which she claimed that a £21.9 billion hole has opened up in the current political spending for this financial year: why, if there is such a large ‘black hole’ in the public finances, is there suddenly money available for £9.4 billion worth of
Oh, the suspense. It seems that we will have to wait until next week to discover the details of the £20 billion ‘black hole’ which chancellor Rachel Reeves has supposedly discovered in the public finances. Don’t get too excited, though. The revelation will be no greater a surprise than the ending of James Cameron’s blockbuster film
The UK climate is getting ever more extreme. We know this because the BBC keeps telling us so, most recently in today’s reporting of the annual Met Office/Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) State of the Climate Report for 2023. ‘Climate change is dramatically increasing the frequency of extreme high temperatures in the UK,’ writes climate editor
Three weeks into the new Labour government and it is already becoming clear where some of its weaknesses lie – none more so than Ed Miliband’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid, save consumers money and boost the economy with many thousands of ‘well-paid green jobs’. Today the Royal Academy of Engineering weighs in with
Well, that didn’t last long. Having preached to us about fiscal responsibility and ‘securonomics’, Chancellor Rachel Reeves appears to be about to cave in at the first opportunity – by hinting that she will grant 5.5 per cent pay rises to teachers, NHS workers, and other public sector workers. At the heart of Reeves’s problem
Is the retail sector ever going to recover from Covid-19? The rest of the economy seems to be purring quite nicely at the moment, with GDP up 0.7 per cent in the first quarter (not adjusting for population growth). But the good times have yet to reach the retail sector, where sales volumes fell by
‘We cannot let the challenges of the recent past define our relationships of the future,’ declared the Prime Minister ahead of today’s meeting of the European Political Union at Blenheim Palace. The meeting, he added, ‘will fire the starting gun on this government’s new approach to Europe’. The subtext to this is: the grown-ups are back
Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has promised the ‘most ambitious programme of devolution this country has ever seen’, with new powers for local councils and more directly-elected mayors. But this will not apply, it seems, when it comes to planning. On the contrary, the centrepiece of the King’s speech today will be planning reforms aimed
Few will notice, yet this year England and Wales are almost certainly going to cross a remarkable threshold: the number of deaths will exceed the number of births. In the year to mid 2023 – figures for which have been published today by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) – there were 598,400 births and
Don’t bother going after the Reform UK vote – the next Conservative leader should target voters lost to the Lib Dems instead. So says George Osborne, who told ITV ‘the Conservative party over a number of years vacated the central ground of British politics and allowed the Labour party to move from the Corbynista position
Just Stop Oil continued its campaign by spreading orange paint over road junctions in Westminster this week, but why bother when the organisation seems now to be in power? Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband is said to be weighing up blocking new licenses for oil drilling in the North Sea. Labour has previously said
Less than a week in to his government and Keir Starmer is already facing an ideological battle within the Labour party – over the nationalisation, or non-nationalisation, of the water industry. News that Thames Water has been put in special measures at the same time that Ofwat has given permission for other water companies to
What country ever went wrong with a sovereign wealth fund? It is easy to envy Singapore and Norway – the latter of which now has £1.3 trillion squirrelled away, equivalent to £240,000 for every citizen. Britain would be in a much better situation now had it, like Norway, invested its windfall from the North Sea, rather than
What a surprise. South Cambridgeshire District Council has declared its controversial experiment with a four day week – which put council staff on a 32 hour rather than 40-hour week with no loss of pay – a tremendous success. The council, whose chief executive Liz Watts was revealed last year to be doing a doctorate
On the eve of the election the then shadow minister without portfolio Nick Thomas-Symonds appeared to be getting Labour’s excuses in early. If an incoming Labour government started to look at the books and realised that things were even worse than they had thought, he said, then the new government’s fiscal policy might have to
I know it has only just begun, but it is not too early to start wondering: what will it be that causes the Starmer government its first serious problem? A likely surge in arrivals of illegal migrants seems one possibility, given that some of those encamped in northern France appear to be well aware of
It’s a disaster, a cataclysm, a wipeout. Half the cabinet will lose their seats, and Labour will be in power for a decade. All those things will be true if the BBC exit poll is anything close to reflecting reality – but hang on a minute. At the risk of sounding like one of those
I recant. On a number of occasions I have asserted that the European Union is run by lobbyists acting on behalf of French farmers and the German car industry. It seems I was wrong – or perhaps that I have become wrong as the politics of global trade has shifted. A more accurate way of putting it
I have a theory about intra-Johnson family politics. Some time in 2017 or 2018 Stanley agreed to shut up about his opposition to Brexit if Boris dropped his climate scepticism and threw himself wholesale into green issues. A truce between father and son certainly seemed to emerge around that time, and Boris, the man who