Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better
This election campaign has long since descended into a contest to see who can spray around the largest sums of cash. So it should come as no great surprise that the Conservatives promised an eye-catching initiative to outdo Labour on nurse numbers. Jeremy Corbyn wants to provide an extra 20,000 new nurses but Boris has
It is quite a challenge to boil down the Labour manifesto to its 10 silliest ideas, but here are my nominations: 1. ‘Within a decade we will reduce average full-time weekly working hours to 32 across the economy, with no loss of pay, funded by productivity’ – as well as introducing four new bank holidays
I have already decided how I am going to vote in the general election: for whichever party produces a manifesto with the fewest uses of the phrase ‘green jobs’. Was there ever such a numb-skulled phrase? It has become the fallback for any politician who hasn’t the faintest idea of how we are going to
John McDonnell this morning invited Phones4U entrepreneur John Caudwell around for a cup of tea. If I were Caudwell I would treat it a bit like an invitation to afternoon tea in Miss Marple’s village – and keep a keen nose out for the smell of bitter almonds. No good will come of the invitation,
‘Elect me once more and we will finish off socialism for good,’ declared Mrs Thatcher before the 1987 general election, or words to that effect. Not so fast. Thirty two years on and we are engaged in an unseemly contest as to which party can increase public spending, and with it the size of the
When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise
Donald Tusk has been ridiculed for suggesting that Brexit marks the end of the British Empire. But he has a point. The 31 January 2020 – assuming the date doesn’t move again – should finally bring to a close Britain’s involvement in colonial delusion. And that is exactly why we are right to leave. Like the
I’m sending someone down to the supermarket later to do a bit of shopping on my behalf. I have given them a rough idea of what I want but my main instruction is that they must spend the entire £150 that I am giving them. If that was really how I did my shopping
One wonders what Tom Watson would have left in his vocabulary if the Conservatives announced a policy of kicking away the crutches of the elderly – given, that is, that this morning he described the ‘Tory’ policy of abolishing free TV licences for the over 75s as ‘utterly callous’. Ending universal free licences for the
For once, Jeremy Corbyn is right. The government’s announcement of a moratorium in fracking is an election stunt – and attempt to snatch a few leave-voting seats in the North at the expense of damaging Britain’s energy policy for the next couple of decades, as well as causing higher carbon emissions. Announcing the block on
Until this morning, Nigel Farage’s creation of the Brexit Party stood as an object lesson in how to found a new political party in a two party system. Many have tried this of course, from David Owen to Chuka Umunna, and all have floundered – some quicker than others. The Brexit party, by contrast, went
It has been bizarre to hear the London Fire Brigade taking the brunt of the blame for the deaths of 72 people at Grenfell Tower. Its commissioner Dany Cotton certainly deserves condemnation for persisting in telling residents to stay put when it ought to have been clear early on that fire was engulfing the building
Yet again, listeners to the Today programme awoke this morning to hear a dire forecast for the economic consequences of leaving the EU – with no critical analysis nor even explanation of how the forecast was arrived at. This morning’s horror story came courtesy of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), a
We are, of course, on the cusp of an exodus of UK businesses as they leave to set up home in other EU countries. We know this because Remainers keep telling us so. Banking jobs are going to disappear to Frankfurt, manufacturing jobs to France or the Czech Republic. Or maybe not. It is not
As of this afternoon, we really are getting close to the endgame. Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters today: ‘If we have a deal we have a deal and there is no need for prolongation. That is the British view and that is my view too.’ According to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, when asked what would happen if
In an astonishing interview on the Today programme this morning, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson tried to explain why she was tabling an amendment which would force a referendum on any deal the government presents to the House of Commons on the grounds that we should ‘let the people decide’. She then asserted that the
It is a good thing that there is an air pollution bill in the Queen’s Speech today. We should not have to tolerate foul air. But the suggestion that this will be addressing some dramatic and growing crisis is misplaced. The idea that Britain is in the midst of a ‘silent pandemic’ of air pollution
This year’s Nobel Prize for the silliest piece of scientific research must go to something called the Climate Accountability Institute, for revealing to the world that 35 per cent of all global carbon and methane emissions since 1965 can be traced to just 20 global companies. This week they were named and shamed in the
Just when you thought that the Tories were getting into a position where they might be capable of winning the formerly Labour-leaning seats in the Midlands and the North – which they will need to snatch in order to survive after next election – along comes a minister to chuck a spanner in the electoral
Why do so many people try to compare Boris Johnson with Donald Trump? There is a US president whose manner and approach our Prime Minister resembles, but it isn’t Trump – it is Bill Clinton. It is hard to think of anyone else who has honed to a fine art the ability to survive narrow
