Ross Clark

Another day, another uncosted bribe from Labour. This time, Corbyn is promising to slash a third off rail fares and allow children to travel for free. What wonderful, munificent people we have putting themselves forward to lead us. And of course, it won’t cost the taxpayer an extra penny because, as Labour’s transport spokesman, Andy McDonald, said this morning, it is all coming from a ‘repurposed’ pot of money – money raised through vehicle excise duty, which had been earmarked for road-building. Except, of course, road-building is capital expenditure and subsidising rail fares is current spending. For all its guff about investing in Britain’s future, what Labour is proposing is a sly trick to rob investment spending and blow it on day-to-day spending.

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 descended into a manic contest to see who can promise to plant the largest number of trees. The Conservatives have promised 30 million a year for five years, the Lib Dems have upped that to 60 million. The Greens have chipped in with 70 million a year for ten years. Never to be outdone, Labour has promised 100 million trees a year for 20 years. So there. It is all beginning to look like a Monty Python sketch.

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 would compensate the so called ‘Waspi’ women who feel they have been ill-treated by having their retirement age raised from 60 to 65, in line with men, and said that regretfully he didn’t have the money to do this. Overnight, Labour sniffed an opportunity: why not announce a compensation package and scoop up those Waspi votes?

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 now promised an extra 50,000 - topping the Labour leader (until tomorrow morning, of course, when Corbyn can be more or less guaranteed to up his offer to 100,000 nurses). We seem to be heading for the NHS equivalent of a military state. Instead of seeing people in military uniforms on every train, bus and street corner, we will have a Benny Hill-esque society where every other person is in a nurses’ uniform. But are the numbers remotely credible?

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 on national saints’ days and establishing a Working Time Commission to advise on raising holiday entitlements. How we are going to find the time to build Corbyn’s new Jerusalem I haven’t a clue, but it is greatly going to add to the cost of the NHS and other public services 2. 'Introducing a legal right to collective consultation on the implementation of new technology in workplaces.

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 meet these self-imposed targets to eliminate all carbon emissions by 2050, 2030, 2025, next Tuesday or whatever. Are you worried that we might end up with no heavy industry, that you won’t be able to fly or drive anywhere, that the gas grid will be turned off and your house left freezing? Never mind, we’re going to have lots of ‘green jobs’ – which sounds like what Martians do when they crouch down for a crap in some dusty crater.

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, that is for sure. Day by day, it is becoming clear McDonnell really is engaged in what he has described in his Who’s Who entry as ‘fermenting the overthrow of capitalism’. Today’s offering is to impose a maximum 20:1 ratio of the highest-earning employee to the lowest-earning in any company which bids for government contracts – and to threaten to delist any company which fails to reach decarbonisation targets.

'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 state, the most. The latest wheeze on Corbyn's part is to promise us all free broadband. Yes, you, I, the Duke of Westminster, Barclays Bank: we will all qualify for internet on the house. It won't really be free of course. Labour's compulsory purchase of BT Openreach will cost up to £25 billion, on top of which will come the cost of maintaining the broadband service. The income from subscriptions, such as my £46 a month, will no longer be available.

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 their status so that they could start paying taxes and contributing to the country in other ways? When this magazine reprised the issue last week, the usual objections were recycled: why reward criminality? But the actual cases are more complicated. Trevor Rene is one such case. He was born in Dominica in 1969 when it was still a British colony, so as a child he had a British passport.