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

Will the economy really rebound after lockdown?

From our UK edition

Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane last week described the UK economy as a ‘coiled spring’ waiting to rebound just as soon as lockdown restrictions are eased. But is it a spring like the one on which Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout used to bounce around, or is it like a Slinky – the toy you place at the top of the stairs and watch, fixated, as it furls and unfurls itself right down to the bottom? Haldane, it is fair to say, sees it much like the former. He describes the economy as full of 'pent-up financial energy'. While the bank sees lockdown number three causing output to fall by 4.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2021, thereafter it sees a steady recovery.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Do school closures slow infections?

From our UK edition

Will schools in England reopen on 8 March, and if so will it be partially or fully? It is likely to be the first firm measure to be announced when the Prime Minister presents his roadmap back to freedom next Monday. He has, after all, promised to give schools two weeks’ notice of when they will be expected to reopen, so he will be forced into a decision on 22 February. It was only six weeks ago that Boris Johnson was resisting calls to close schools and was reportedly the last cabinet minister left arguing that they should remain open. The rationale of those arguing for closure was that they had not been closed during the November lockdown, and that that lockdown had not been sufficient to bring cases of new infections under control.

Monday

Ross Clark

Why are so many health workers turning down the vaccine?

From our UK edition

On Saturday the government hit its target of administering a first vaccine dose to 15 million of the highest-risk groups for Covid 19. By now, everyone over the age of 70, all healthcare workers and vulnerable groups should have been offered a vaccine. It is an impressive achievement which stands in contrast to many of the other things that have gone wrong over the past year. But there is a rather large fly sitting in the ointment. While 90 per cent of eligible members of the general public have turned up for their appointments (97 per cent in the over-80s), the same is true of only 80 per cent of healthcare workers. In some places, the take-up among healthcare workers is even lower.

Friday

Ross Clark

Why aren’t we in a recession?

From our UK edition

Well, that’s alright, then — we’re not going to have another recession. True, the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee expects the economy to shrink by 4 per cent in the first quarter of this year — following a fall of 9.9 per cent fall last year, itself the deepest plunge in economic growth in modern times. By the spring, we may have several million unemployed as the furlough scheme comes to an end. Many thousands of businesses could go bust as they run out of money and government help is withdrawn. But at least we won’t be in recession: because that ended last June and now we’re back in an era of economic growth. No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Critics of the 10-year Covid jail sentence are right, but out of touch

From our UK edition

Not for the first time, metropolitan-based commentators and MPs have proved themselves to be out of kilter with the wider population. But there is an especially interesting disparity over the government’s proposals for ten-year jail sentences for travellers who try to conceal they have travelled from one of 33 ‘red list’ countries in order to avoid hotel quarantine. The proposal caused outrage among Conservative MPs as well as legal commentators such as Jonathan Sumption. Sir Charles Walker, vice-chairman of the 1922 Committee, accused the government of going ‘full North Korea’.

Ross Clark

Covid is hastening the creep towards a cashless society

From our UK edition

If your local pub ever reopens, don’t be surprised if one thing is missing: the till. The anti-cash lobby is seeking to take advantage of the pandemic to rid us of our banknotes once and for all. When UK Finance — the trade body for the banking and payments industry — pushed the government two weeks ago to increase the limit on contactless card payments to £100 (it was raised from £30 to £45 at the beginning of the pandemic), it was a new offensive in a campaign for a cashless society which has been going on for years.

Ross Clark

The cashless lobby is cashing in on Covid-19

From our UK edition

Coronavirus, we have been warned many times, has brought scammers out in force. But lobbyists are not far behind. Their activities may not be illegal, but they are pretty disgraceful nonetheless. Hardly had the coronavirus outbreak begun in January than my email inbox began to fill up with press releases claiming that the contagion was being spread by banknotes and coins – coming, er, from businesses with a vested interest in cashless payments. In Britain, the payments industry seized the moment to lobby the government – successfully – for the limit on payments via contactless cards to be raised from £30 to £45. The new limit duly came into effect on 1 April.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

How effective are the Covid vaccines?

From our UK edition

Reports have filtered through this morning about Public Health England’s assessment of the efficacy of the two vaccines so far administered to the public. The results have not yet been published, but the efficacy rates quoted in the Sun suggest that the Pfizer vaccine has proved to be between 79 and 84 per cent effective at stopping symptomatic infection after two doses. After one dose – which is all that most people have had so far – efficacy is reported as 65 per cent. Among the over 80s it is very similar, at 64 per cent. No figures are given for the AstraZeneca vaccine but it is suggested that the efficacy is 'similar'.

Ross Clark

Green energy is a Dot-com bust waiting to happen

From our UK edition

Scottish Widows is committed to net zero alright. For years, the endowment policy I had with it was worth pretty well just what I had paid into it. Although, on second thoughts, maybe Maria Nazarova-Doyle, head of pension investments at Scottish Widows, wasn’t referring to the returns on its policies when she said this week: 'Moving to net zero will protect savings against climate-related risks and uncertainty and offer longer-term sustainable growth by accessing low-carbon transition opportunities.' The firm says that as an interim target it wants to halve the emissions from its share portfolio by 2030. What exactly it means by this isn’t clear.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Brace yourselves for ‘Bidenomics’

Is there anyone left who still believes in sound government finances? After the 2008/09 financial crisis there was a lively debate between fiscal doves, who wanted government spend its way out of recession, and hawks, who thought it a good idea that governments at least attempt to live within their means, because nasty things would happen in the longer term if they did not. Such arguments seem almost quaint now. Where is the resistance now that Joe Biden is about to spray the US economy with a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, including helicopter money of $1,400 per household? In 2008/09, there was some justification in that economic activity was extremely weak and many households were in debt — you could argue that the economy needed a lift, at whatever price.

bidenomics
Ross Clark

The class of Covid will pay the price for years to come

From our UK edition

Schools in England, it seems, will reopen fully on 8 March at the earliest – a full two months after they closed. The Prime Minister has declined to bring this forward, in spite of new Covid cases falling at a rate of 25 per cent per week. The Scottish and Welsh governments have both said they will partially reopen schools in February. What was looking like being half-a-term's lost schooling is now looking to be closer to a full term's worth. That comes on top of over two months of school closures last year – and some interrupted education in the autumn terms as teachers and pupils were forced to self-isolate on many occasions. What will be the long-term cost of the lost months of education? The OECD has had a go at estimating it.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Can we boost immunity with the vaccines we have now?

From our UK edition

What to make of the news this morning that Oxford University is to ask for volunteers to take part in a trial to ‘mix and match’ the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines? Researchers will ask for 820 volunteers, all over 50 years old, who will be given two shots of a vaccine, two weeks apart. Some will receive AstraZeneca followed by Pfizer, some the other way around and some — the control group — will be given two doses of the same vaccine. Britain has set itself apart from the EU, not just in the speed and extent of its vaccine procurement programme but also for its willingness to experiment.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

How alcohol deaths hit a record high during lockdown

From our UK edition

Almost a year after the statistics were first published, the country remains horrified by the daily total of Covid 19-related deaths. Meanwhile, we are rather less apt to notice other statistics related to harm and death, which may be an unintended by-product of the fight against Covid-19.  The Office of National Statistics' (ONS) latest figures for the number of deaths related to alcohol-specific causes, published yesterday, received little attention. But they make for dreadful reading. There were 5460 such deaths in the first three quarters of 2020, a shocking rise of 16.4 per cent compared with the same nine-month period in 2019.

Ross Clark

Will Sturgeon admit to the cost of independence?

From our UK edition

I’m not a great fan of economic modelling. Remember, for example, the Treasury’s infamous claim that unemployment would rise by between 500,000 and 800,000 within two years of a vote for Brexit (i.e. before we had actually left). In the event, unemployment fell in 2018 to reach the lowest level since the mid-1970s. Yet having used economic models to rubbish the case for Brexit, it becomes very difficult then to ignore forecasts which claim there would be an even bigger negative economic impact from Scottish independence. So what, in other words, will Nicola Sturgeon and other SNP politicians do about a paper just published by the LSE that claims that independence would, in the long run, reduce Scottish income per capita by between 6.3 per cent and 8.

Ross Clark

The problem with taxing the self-employed

From our UK edition

Last year, when Rishi Sunak, after some dithering, came up with a scheme to help the self-employed during the pandemic, he made clear that it would come with a quid pro ro: higher taxes for the self-employed in the longer run. With his second Budget coming up on 3 March will he take the initiative and do what governments have been threatening to do for years – and jack up national insurance to bring it in line with the rate paid by employees? The gap between NI contributions – employees generally pay 12 per cent and their employers a further 13.8 per cent, while the self-employed generally pay 9 per cent – is frequently raised as a possible source of extra revenue. Each time the self-employed fight back.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

New Oxford data supports UK vaccine strategy

From our UK edition

Ever since the Oxford-AstraZeneca team announced the results of its Phase 3 trials last November, there has been a suspicion among some that their vaccine is the poor relation of the messenger RNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. It might be cheap compared with the others, it might be easy to store and transport, but the results published last November indicated that it had an efficacy of 70 per cent compared with over 90 per cent for Pfizer and Moderna. Even that was questioned when it was pointed out that the 70 per cent figure was arrived at by mixing different trials, involving different quantities of vaccine.

Ross Clark

Can ‘surge testing’ get new variants under control?

From our UK edition

A year on, in one sense we’re pretty well back to where we started — with the government attempting to snuff out the South African variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the same way as it did the original Wuhan version. It didn’t work then, and we rapidly moved to the second phase of the pandemic plan, where it was taken for granted that the virus had become widespread and it was a case of controlling rather than eliminating it. Do we have any better chance of eradicating the South African variant?

Sunday

Ross Clark

One year after Brexit, Britain is reaping the benefits

From our UK edition

A year ago today Britain awoke to a rather muted celebration – which seemed to consist largely of a bubble car driving around Parliament Square with a Union Jack in tow – ready to face up to a brave new future outside the EU. Who would have imagined then that the Observer would mark the first anniversary by running a leading article condemning the EU as 'shambolic' and instead praising Boris Johnson’s government for something Britain did all by itself? Of course, the Observer’s judgement is only in respect to one thing: the EU’s joint vaccination procurement programme. Nevertheless, it is something rather important, on which a great number of people’s lives are dependent.

Friday

Ross Clark

Could this drug offer immediate protection from Covid-19?

From our UK edition

When Donald Trump returned to the White House after a brief spell in hospital with Covid-19 last October he made a video attributing his rapid recovery to a drug he called ‘Regeneron’. ‘They call it a therapeutic drug, but to me it wasn’t therapeutic – it made me better,’ he said. ‘I call that a cure.’ Naturally, given that Trump had on a previous occasion appeared to advocate injecting humans with disinfectant, there was an element of scepticism on the part of many viewers. However, the drug he was talking about went on the receive emergency use authorisation in November from the US Food and Drug Administration. We now have interim results from a Phase 3 trial in which the drug was used as a ‘passive vaccine’.

Ross Clark

The GameStop surge is just another Ponzi scheme

From our UK edition

Who doesn’t wish they hadn’t tucked away a few GameStop shares at the beginning of this year? It’s not a great company – more a Blockbuster Video whose time has come and gone, another bricks and mortar retailer destroyed by a shift to online sales, in this case of video games. But what does that matter when you could have bought at $20 (£14.57) and now have a share worth $197 (£143)? And that is before Wall Street opens on Friday, when the pre-market suggests it may well be up another 150 per cent. It is mad — yet not mad. The mostly young retail investors pouring into the stock are doing it for a reason: they want to destroy the hedge funds whom they see as among the many bogeymen of global capitalism.