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

Did female leaders trump men in dealing with the pandemic?

From our UK edition

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen if an academic produced a paper claiming that countries led by men were more entrepreneurial or are better at negotiating international deals. The sky would fall in on them before the ink was dry. Their paper wouldn’t find a mainstream journal to publish it, anyway, but the mere existence of the study would be enough to have them denounced by students and thrown out of their university. But if you were to publish a study claiming that countries led by women have coped better with the Covid-19 pandemic, with fewer cases and fewer deaths than countries led my men?

Ross Clark

Why weren’t we wearing masks at the start of the crisis?

From our UK edition

The rise of the face mask has been one of the remarkable features of the later period of the Covid-19 epidemic. Yesterday, France announced that face coverings are going to become mandatory in workplaces where more than one employee is present. It is quite a cultural change for a country that previously banned face coverings in public. Could mask-wearing have been used as an alternative to economically-ruinous lockdown? Compulsory masks in shops are becoming the norm around the world – and in many cases the obligation now extends to the streets and other outdoor public places too.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why are more people dying at home?

From our UK edition

The death drought continues. For the eighth week in a row the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has recorded fewer deaths in England and Wales than would be expected at this time of year. In the week ending 7 August, 8,945 people died, one fewer than the previous week and 157 (1.7 per cent) lower than the five-year average for this week of the year. There is, however, a geographical divide: deaths in the East Midlands are running five per cent higher than the five-year average. While deaths in the North East and North West are slightly higher than usual. What should be worrying the government is the sharp rise of people dying in private homes With the number of deaths across England and Wales below average, the figure for ‘excess deaths’ for 2020 is also down.

Monday

Ross Clark

A-levels and the dangers of predictive modelling

From our UK edition

It turns out we’re not quite so in awe of predictive modelling after all. How different it was back in March when Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College published their paper predicting 250,000 deaths from Covid unless the government changed course and put the country into lockdown. It was ‘the science’; it was fact, beyond question. Yet no sooner had the A-level results been published last week than a very different attitude began to prevail. How terrible, nearly everyone now says, that an 18-year-old’s future can be determined by an algorithm which tries to predict what grade they would have achieved had they sat the cancelled exams.

Friday

Ross Clark

Was Sweden’s refusal to lockdown a gruesome mistake?

From our UK edition

Was there ever a jury destined to spend so long over its deliberations as the one considering whether Sweden made a terrible error over its refusal to go into lockdown? Just when you think the data points in one direction, another piece of data nods in the other. The case against Sweden rests largely on its death toll being significantly higher than that of its Nordic neighbours: 572 per million compared with 107 for Denmark, 60 for Finland and 48 for Norway. But then it also happens to be lower than several countries which had especially severe lockdowns, such as Spain (612), Britain (609) and Italy (583). But what of the economy? The counsel for Sweden can point out that the country’s GDP fell in the second quarter by 8.

Ross Clark

Boris’s French quarantine makes no sense

From our UK edition

Covid-19 has brought us a Dunkirk spirit alright. Once again we have hundreds of thousands of Brits in a mad scramble to get back to Britain from France, as soon as a flotilla of ships will let them. It is just that this time around it feels a little more self-inflicted than last time. Have ministers learned nothing from the fiasco of Spain a couple of weeks ago? Holidaymakers then were given a few hours notice before quarantine rules were brought in, leaving many desperately trying to book flights at horribly inflated prices or else risk having to self-isolate for 14 days upon their return. It went so well that the government has repeated it with France, where 450,000 Britons are currently thought to be on holiday.

Thursday

Ross Clark

What’s the true cost of lockdown on our kids’ futures?

From our UK edition

We’ve heard endless statistics on the likely death toll from Covid-19, and over the past week we have learned just how great was the economic devastation in most countries in the second quarter as they locked down to deal with the disease. But what about the global impact on children’s education? That is something the World Bank has attempted to estimate. School closures, it concludes, effectively reduce the times spent in education by between 0.3 and 0.9 years. Globally, before the pandemic, the average child went through 7.9 years of schooling. For the Covid generation this will be reduced to between 7.0 and 7.6 years.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Summer flu is now more deadly than Covid

From our UK edition

We are, of course, in the middle of a deadly pandemic of a novel infectious disease. It’s just that it is not, at present, killing remotely as many people in England and Wales as that boring old disease which no-one seems ever to worry about: the summer flu. Winter flu, yes – sometimes we worry about that overwhelming the NHS. We take the precaution of vaccination the elderly and other vulnerable groups. But the summer flu? It hardly registers. Yet few seem to have noticed, while we fret about whether reopening schools, bars and so on will cause a second wave of Covid-19, that flu (and pneumonia) appears to be killing five times as many people in England and Wales.

Monday

Ross Clark

How Covid spread in Sweden’s care homes

From our UK edition

Why did Covid prove so lethal in care homes? Between 2 March and 12 June, there were 66,112 deaths of care home residents in England. Of these, 19,394 ‘involved’ Covid (in the Office of National Statistics’s own terminology) – 29.3 per cent of the total. As has been apparent from the beginning of this crisis, the risk of dying of Covid-19 sharply rises with age, so in that sense it is not surprising for deaths among care home residents to be high – but why has it proved so difficult to protect residents from the disease, not just in Britain but in many countries?

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Is Sturgeon right to brag about Scotland’s coronavirus response?

From our UK edition

What political opportunities Covid-19 has presented for Nicola Sturgeon. Day after day in recent weeks she has appeared at her press conference, presenting a picture of a Scotland where the disease has been all but eliminated – placed in contrast with England where, she says, the government is merely trying to contain the disease, and not very well at that. It is an image which, naturally, aides the cause of Scottish independence. To remind us of the game she is playing, she has several times pointedly raised, or failed to rule out, the threat of imposing quarantine on visitors from England. But is the image of a Covid death-free Scotland fair? Interesting analysis by Sam Taylor lays bare the accuracy of Sturgeon’s – and other nationalists’ – claims.

Ross Clark

Has Trump’s Covid-19 response really been so dire?

From our UK edition

The sight of Donald Trump fumbling with charts during his interview on HBO this Monday has provided much ammunition for his enemies. The words ‘train wreck’ and ‘toe-curling’ have been used multiple times to describe how the President insisted that the US has one of the lowest death rates from Covid-19, while interviewer Jonathan Swan quoted figures suggesting the US has one of the worst rates. True, Trump looked ill-prepared, but was he fibbing, as many of his critics have implied? America cannot claim to have a lower death rate than comparable western countries – but neither does it come out especially badly The truth lies somewhere between what Trump and Swan were each trying to assert.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Will reopening schools really cause a second spike?

From our UK edition

Why do so many news outlets – the BBC in particular – prefer reporting grim worst-case scenarios made by mathematical models to more optimistic real-world data? The Today programme excelled itself again this morning by putting in its lead 8.10am slot a study by UCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine into the possible consequences of the Covid-19 epidemic on reopening schools. Many listeners will have picked up on, and gone away with, one simple message: that a second spike of Covid-19 next winter could be twice as large as the first.

Friday

Ross Clark

How does the Northern lockdown square with levelling up?

From our UK edition

Remember levelling up, whereby low-income areas in the Midlands and North would enjoy a greater share of the nation’s wealth? It is pretty hard to square with the government’s policy on releasing the country from lockdown. Rather, policy seems to be construed so as to make sure that the economies of the Midlands and North suffer most. When Covid-19 was raging in London in the spring, the whole country was forced into lockdown together. People in, say, Wigan were ordered to stay at home, even though there was less circulation of the virus there than in Westminster. But now the virus is a little more active in parts of the Midlands and North than it is in the South, what happens? We have local and regional lockdowns which affect only the former.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The problem with investing in gold

From our UK edition

The gold price, we keep being told, because investors are seeking a ‘safe haven’. The first part of that sentence is true – from £1100 per ounce at the beginning of this year, gold has surged to £1500 per ounce this week. But are those buying it really doing so because it is ‘safe’ investment? Come off it. It is easy to get on the wrong side of a stock market or property boom, but gold has proved are a far more insidious destroyer of wealth over the decades. Had you fallen for the lustre of gold in 1980, when it was selling for £280 an ounce it would have taken you 25 years to get your money back, in nominal terms. In real terms, the value of every ounce of your gold would have plunged to £98.

Ross Clark

Will the speculative vaccine shopping spree ever end?

From our UK edition

Somewhere, possibly in the land of big sheds, just off the M1 in Leicestershire, must be a burgeoning NHS surplus store. Its shelves will be groaning with ventilators and testing kits which turned out not to work, surgical gloves, bibs and masks which turned out to be defective – and quite possibly, in months to come, with millions of shots of vaccines which won’t be able to be used. It was announced this morning that the government has signed up for 60 million doses of a vaccine being developed by GSK and Sanofi – although the financial details of the deal were not released. GSK says the vaccine will enter clinical trials this autumn and will – possibly – be ready for manufacture in the second half of 2021.

Ross Clark

A second wave? Perhaps, but deaths are still down

From our UK edition

'Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s happening in Europe,' the Prime Minister tells us. 'Among some of our European friends, I’m afraid you are starting to see, in some places, the signs of a second wave of the pandemic.'  Really? It rather depends on what graph you're looking at, and over which period. On Saturday, the government consigned Spain to the sin bin – with quarantine for anyone travelling from there to Britain – on the grounds that there has been an uptick in recorded cases. Sure, the number of confirmed cases has risen in the weeks since late June, and – at around 2,000 a day – is running at about a quarter the level it was in at the peak in April.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The growing evidence of a V-shaped recovery

From our UK edition

A similar phenomenon is developing with the Covid recession as happened with Brexit. News outlets – the BBC in particular – are choosing to focus on dire economic predictions at the expense of more positive real-world data. Yesterday, we heard no end of it when EY forecast that the economy would not reach its pre-Covid size until the end of 2024, 18 months longer than it had previously forecast. Yet where is the coverage today of the CBI’s distributive trades survey, which suggests that retail sales in July have been pretty much back to where they were a year ago, and that car sales are actually up on last July?

Monday

Ross Clark

Is Covid immunity fading?

From our UK edition

More data emerges on one of the central questions of the Covid-19 epidemic: just how many of us have had the infection and have, as a result, built up some immunity towards it? The question is crucial because it governs whether or not we need to fear a second spike of the epidemic.  It is possible that many people may have effective immunity without the detectable presence of antibodies in their blood In its latest weekly surveillance report, Public Health England (PHE) revises its estimate for the percentage of the English population which is carrying antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. It now says that 6.5 per cent have had the virus, compared with an estimate of 8.5 per cent it made on 4 June. In London, it estimates that 9.

Friday

Ross Clark

Might Britain’s Covid recovery be V-shaped after all?

From our UK edition

Hopes for economic recovery have faded a little of late as Covid-19 cases continue to rack up in many parts of the world. The grand reopening of bars, restaurants and the like has turned into a bit of damp squib, serving to remind everyone how far we remain from normality. Yet today comes a double bill of good news – verging, indeed, on the dramatic. The Office for National Statistics put out its figures for retail sales in June, which turned out to be 13.9 per cent up on those in May. This is way in excess of what economists were expecting – a survey for Reuters showed a consensus of around 8 per cent – and takes retail sales pretty much back to where they were before the crisis struck. Year on year, sales for June were down just 1.