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?
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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
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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
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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
It isn’t going to be Vladimir Putin who swings the 2020 election. It might be Xi Jinping
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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
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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
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How fortunate that electric vehicle technology has moved on to the extent that transport secretary Grant Shapps is able to announce he in looking at bringing forward to date on which petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2040 to 2035. Or maybe not. On closer examination, it isn’t battery technology which has advanced
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I am sure that Tooba Gondal, the latest Isis bride to beg for a return to Britain, would, as she says, rather face justice in a British court than in the detention camp where she is being held in a Kurdish-controlled part of Syria. Maybe she really is the “changed person” she claims to be
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Amid Labour’s jubilation over the Supreme Court decision yesterday it would have been easy to miss Jeremy Corbyn’s latest attack on the market economy. But it shouldn’t go unremarked because what Corbyn proposed would seriously damage the pharmaceuticals industry – either meaning that taxpayers would have to bear the enormous costs of developing drugs, or
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In one respect Gina Miller is right. Today’s Supreme Court decision is bigger than Brexit. We are now in a civil war without bullets – between two sides who both claim to be fighting for democracy but who have very different ideas of what it entails. In the one corner are those who believe that
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The biggest victim of the failure of Thomas Cook is the worldly reputation of its eponymous creator – a sober cabinet-maker from Leicestershire whose pioneering and fantastically successful package tours used a network of temperance hotels. His name is now synonymous with a company whose senior executives paid themselves millions while it crashed and burned.
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So once again we learn just how committed the EU is to free trade. A trade deal with the South American bloc Mercosur – comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay – has been under negotiation for 20 years. The icing appeared to be on the cake, the ribbon about to be cut – but at
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“The Earth is dying”, “the world is on fire”, we’re undergoing an “environmental extinction”: just three of the sentiments which have been expressed by today’s climate “strikers” and which, unlike even moderate expressions of scepticism on matters of climate science, seem to escape without challenge. While it is tempting to think of today’s climate “strike”
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I can understand why Ben Stokes and his mother would rather not be reminded of the murder of the cricketer’s half-siblings by their father in New Zealand in 1988, three years before Stokes was born. His reaction, calling the Sun’s publication of the story as ‘immoral and heartless’ and ‘contemptuous to the feelings and circumstances
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Lord Hall of Birkenhead is feeling pretty bullish about the quality of the organisation he leads. “We’re not Netflix, we’re not Spotify. We’re not Apple News,” the BBC’s director general will apparently tell the Royal Television Society on Thursday. “We’re so much more than all of them put together.” To which the obvious answer is:
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Another week, another step along the road to Britain’s transformation into a kritarchy – rule by judges. Last week, the Court of Session in Edinburgh and the High Court in London both ruled that Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament for five weeks had been lawful. But if you thought it was all over you
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According to John Bercow he has chosen to step down on 31 October because it would be the ‘least disruptive and most democratic course of action’ if he stayed on for the votes on the Queen’s speech expected in the last week of October. But there is a somewhat glaring reason for choosing the last
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That the obsessions of Westminster do not necessarily coincide with those of the country has been obvious for a long time, but even so, the dislocation between last week’s news and this weekend’s opinion polls looks bizarre. The government looks in a greater shambles than any in history. We have a Prime Minister who has
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So there goes the reputation of Boris Johnson’s henchmen as cunning operators. It has been a bad week for Dominic Cummings and others in the Downing Street bunker who were widely assumed to have gamed every possibility and to have some genius strategy for delivering Brexit by 31 October, in spite of the assembled forces
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Was there ever such a principled stand over a such a feeble cause? If today’s Tory rebels were intent on overturning the 2016 referendum result because, in all their conscience, they could support a policy of leaving the EU, I would not agree with what they were doing, but I would have some grudging respect
