Ross Clark

Ross Clark

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

The Brexit Party might still deny Boris his majority

The last YouGov constituency-level poll showed a significant closing of the gap between Labour and the Conservatives, with the projected Tory majority falling from 68 seats two weeks ago to 28 seats now – and with a margin of error which could take us well into hung parliament territory. The interpretation being put on this

Boris is right: it’s time to scrap the BBC licence fee

Has Boris decided this election is in the bag? I ask because this afternoon he’s made just about the first bold policy announcement of the campaign. After a safety-first manifesto and little other announcements so as not to frighten the horses, he has stuck his neck out and suggested that the TV licence might be

Don’t blame all ‘weird’ weather on climate change

Why can’t the great and good of the climate establishment mention higher temperatures, disappearing sea ice and rising sea levels without also throwing in floods, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires? Al Gore does it, David Attenborough does it and UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres did it at the opening of his annual climate beanfeast in Spain

This manic tree-planting contest has gotten out of hand

Whoever wins the election, three things are certain: borrowing is going to rise, taxes are going to have to go up – and there will be a lot more trees. There may even be enough trees to replace those lost to produce all those Lib Dem election leaflets and bogus newspapers. The election campaign has

Corbyn’s Waspi pledge only perpetuates gender discrimination

Labour is, of course, wholly committed to gender equality. So why then is it proposing to borrow £58 billion to perpetuate a blatant form of discrimination: the gap in retirement ages between men and women? There is, of course, a straightforward answer to this: on Friday’s Question Time special, Boris Johnson was asked if he

The ten worst ideas in Labour’s manifesto

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

Whatever happened to the Lib Dems’ smart approach to tax?

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

The unseemly race to increase the size of the state

‘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

Trevor Rene’s battle to stay in Britain

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

Ross Clark

The EU is the true successor of the British Empire

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

Labour and Tory NHS cash splurges are a mistake

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

Why the Tories should promise to scrap the licence fee

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

Corbyn is right to condemn Boris’s cynical fracking u-turn

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

Nigel Farage has doomed his party to failure

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

Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal won’t cost Britain £70bn by 2029

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

The myth of the Brexit business exodus

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