Ross Clark

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 over 75s is not, of course, a Conservative policy – it was a decision made by the BBC itself in order to preserve the earnings of Gary Lineker, although to be fair to Watson the government did hand the BBC the power to make that decision.

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 fracking on Radio Four on Saturday morning, business secretary Andrea Leadsom said the government had reached its decision because the Oil and Gas Authority had concluded that it was impossible to predict when ‘earthquakes’ might be caused and what magnitude they might be. This followed a tremor measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale in August.

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 think tank which claims the economy will be 3.5 per cent – or £70bn – smaller in 10 years’ time than if we had never voted to leave the EU. The NIESR claims the economy is already 2.5 per cent smaller than it would have been had we voted to remain in 2016 and that this loss will last ‘in perpetuity’. Well, there it is.

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 quite how the World Bank sees it. Its latest survey of the world’s best countries in which to do business – which takes into account such things as tax and regulatory barriers as well as access to energy and other services – ranks Britain as eighth out of 190 countries, one place higher than last year and higher than any other EU country except Denmark. Most EU countries do not score highly. Germany is at 22, France 32, Belgium 46 and Italy 58.

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 country had changed its mind since the 2016 referendum and now wanted to remain. It had to be pointed out to her that her party has, in fact, just adopted a policy of reversing Article 50 without a referendum – so much for letting the people decide. The truth is that like so many Remain campaigners, Swinson will banter on about letting the people have a say when it suits her while knowing it would be fatal to her cause to have another referendum at the moment.

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 works.  Housing minister Robert Jenrick has suggested that the government might be minded to cut or even abolish inheritance tax, complaining about its ‘fundamental unfairness’ and claiming that it amounted to ‘paying tax twice’. Disturbingly, Sajid Javid also made a hint about cutting inheritance tax at Tory conference, suggesting that it might be emerging party policy.

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 scrapes with native charm. Just look at the reaction to the allegation that Boris groped a young female journalist, Charlotte Edwardes, beneath The Spectator’s dining table two decades ago    Yes, Donald Trump survived groping allegations too, but not without stirring up a hornets’ nest of outrage, culminating in a mass protest following his inauguration. Trump survives by escalating outrage against him, thus uniting his enemies’ enemies behind him.

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 – only the political pressure for being seen to act on climate change. It is possible, of course, that some as-yet unknown technology will arrive to make it feasible to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles from 2035. But we are no nearer discovering it yet. Without it, the government is heading for a very big policy failure. I wrote here about electric cars in August 2017, just after the then environment secretary Michael Gove had announced the 2040 date.

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 would mean fewer drugs being developed at all. Corbyn cited the case of nine year old cystic fibrosis sufferer Luis Walker, who is being denied the medicine, Orkambi, because the drugs manufacturer is refusing to sell it to the NHS at an affordable cost.

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 democracy is where the electorate vote for something in a plebiscite and then government carries out its instructions; in the other corner are those who believe that democracy is Parliament and the courts acting together in what they see as the best interests of the people. As I have written here before, the correct term for what the latter group advocate, and what was demonstrated in the show of power by the Supreme Court this morning is Kritarchy, rule by judges.