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
Continuing Scotland’s reputation for outspending public services in England (courtesy of funding arrangements which transfer resources from taxpayers south of the border) the Scottish Medicines Consortium today approved the prescription of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis ( PrEP) – the drug claimed to prevent the spread of HIV from infected people to their non-infected partners. The drug is
The standard conservative response to Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal to impose VAT on private schools would be to attack it as as a policy motivated by class envy and dreamed up to please his party’s levellers — except that Michael Gove, too, questioned private schools’ charitable status a few weeks ago. Private schools might moan and
Only the EU, an organisation with four presidents, could have two ‘chief negotiators’ charged with agreeing the terms of Britain’s departure from the EU. I am not sure, then, how seriously to take the figure of Guy Verhofstadt, a Belgian MEP who has been appointed the European Parliament’s chief negotiator. If we agree something with
One looked in vain for the words ‘Islamic extremist’ in the Guardian’s reporting of the Westminster attack a fortnight ago. Even after Isis claimed the attacker, Khalid Masood, as one of its own, the paper declined to accept him as a terrorist motivated by religious extremism. And who knows, maybe it was right. Masood had
So, the Office of National Statistics has confirmed that the economy grew by 0.7 per cent in the last quarter of 2016, and by 1.8 per cent over the course of the year. Can we now please stop worrying about a post-Brexit recession and worry instead about an unsustainable consumer boom fed by interest rates
It is one of the great mysteries of modern British politics: how public schools managed to survive three periods of Labour government with their tax breaks intact. How was it that an education secretary, Anthony Crosland, could say: ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England,
The whole purpose of changing the grading structure for GCSE exams was supposed to be to guard against the curse of grade inflation – whereby, over time, it becomes easier and easier to gain a good grade. How unfortunate, then, that the government has inflated the grades before the first exam results using the new
The top half of the front cover of the Daily Mail today is of course trivial: the big story of the meeting between Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon is, obviously, the plummeting relations between Westminster and Holyrood and whether we will still have a United Kingdom in five years’ time. The big story is not
So poisonous were the relations between Nigel Farage and Douglas Carswell that no-one will have been surprised at the latter’s resignation from Ukip, nor the pleasure it generated among Farage and his supporters. It takes something to cheer the departure of your only MP; along with the funding that goes with it. Yet the irony
Predictably enough it didn’t take long for the rearguard Remain lobby, and other opponents of the government, to jump on the latest inflation figures, which show the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) for February rising from 1.8 per cent to 2.3 per cent. Frances O’ Grady of the TUC, for example, said that Britain risked ‘sleepwalking into
For once, Jeremy Corbyn was spot-on. Learning of the news that George Osborne is to be made editor of the Evening Standard he didn’t bleat about Tory domination of the press, but tweeted ‘It’s taking multi-tasking to an extreme level – what a joke’. What is wrong about Osborne’s new job is not that it
Each day, I can see more clearly a pivotal line from Theresa May’s future biography: ‘Ultimately, her downfall can be traced to one mistake: her failure to seek her own mandate and call and general election in the spring of 2017, when Labour was at its weakest and she was still enjoying a political honeymoon.’
Last Wednesday, Philip Hammond made a joke at Norman Lamont’s expense by reminding the world of how John Major’s first chancellor was sacked after a negative public reaction to his budget in 1993. Hammond, one suspects, is already beginning to regret his gag as Lamont today became the latest Conservative to damn his plans to
Theresa May’s announcement that the vote on raising National Insurance contributions for the self-employed will be delayed until after the publication of the Taylor Report in Modern Employment Practises in the autumn is presumably meant to reassure us that the government is taking seriously the many objections which have been levied against the policy in
There is a very big winner from today’s budget. Not adults in social care, not schools, but Ukip. Philip Hammond has handed a huge political opportunity: to position itself as the party of the self-employed: the taxi driver, the brickie, the plumber, the small shop-owner. These used to be natural Tories. From today, with Hammond
Were I a Labour party strategist I wouldn’t be too distressed by the news that the party has lost 26,000 members since last summer. On the contrary, I would regard it as the possible beginning of a very long road back to power. Until Jeremy Corbyn came along there was a received wisdom that modern
If you want to know why we never seem to be able to develop a sensible and proportionate policy towards prosecuting sex offences look no further than the comment threads beneath this morning’s story about Chief Constable Simon Bailey. Bailey, speaking on the Today programme, suggested that men who view child porn should not automatically
What calamity could possibly be worse than waking up to find that the small, rarefied town near your weekend cottage has lost its bookshop, leaving you nowhere to go browsing for the latest tome by George Monbiot or Naomi Klein before going home for tea and crumpets? Answer: when a new bookshop opens up, purporting
So, Ukip is finished. So says Matthew Parris in the Times this morning, as well as Marina Hyde in the Guardian – who takes Paul Nuttall’s declaration that he is ‘going nowhere’ in a slightly different way that he intended. The emerging narrative of Thursday’s by-elections is that Labour had an appalling night from which
When you hear of universities rewarding their vice-chancellors fat salaries – they averaged £277,000 last year, up 5 per cent on the previous year – it would be easy to think that they have evolved into businesses, driven by a great spirit of enterprise. When universities minister Jo Johnson made the proposal for two year
