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
Is ‘workshy Britain’ a mirage caused by dodgy statistics? That is what the left-leaning think tank the Resolution Foundation is claiming in a report published this morning. The Office for National Statistics (ONS), it says, has missed 930,000 people who are actually in work. The missing numbers, it asserts, are enough to raise Britain’s employment
It is a fate which has been creeping up on Britain for years, but that doesn’t make it any the harder to bear when it becomes official. According to the OECD, we now have the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe. At 80.9, the average Brit now keels over more than three years earlier than
Farmers are threatening a national strike over the inheritance tax increases, the first in history. Given how quickly the Labour government yielded to public sector unions, it is little wonder that the farmers have sensed that strikes are the best way to achieve their goals. By 1851, the proportion of Britain’s male workforce employed on
So that’s it then: the Guardian has declared that we are all being scorched, drowned and blown over by climate change. The website Carbon Brief, it says, has found ‘stark evidence of how global heating is already supercharging deadly weather beyond anything ever experienced by humanity’. Never mind that humans were around to witness multiple
The comments by Stephen Moore, Donald Trump’s economic adviser, should not really be controversial. ‘I’ve always said that Britain has to decide,’ he said from Florida, where he is preparing the new administration’s economic policy. ‘Do you want to go towards the European socialist model or do you want to go towards the US free
Rachel Reeves is beginning to look awfully like Gordon Brown. Study the actions of this government so far and you would hardly say that deregulation was its big idea. True, Keir Starmer did claim at his investment summit last month that he was going to slash red tape. Angela Rayner wants planning laws relaxed to
I’ve got a better idea for the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which is demanding civil servants be allowed to work just four days a week for no loss of pay, claiming that a shorter working week is ‘essential for a happy and healthy life’. Why not put civil servants on a zero-day week?
Keir Starmer said he was travelling to Cop 29 in Baku intending to “lead the world on climate change”. But it must surely be obvious that he is, instead, barking at a world that is heading in the opposite direction. Last year’s grand talk about “phasing down” fossil fuels at Cop 28 notwithstanding, today’s Global
‘It’s not about telling people how to live their lives. I’m not interested in that’ said Keir Starmer of his new target for Britain to reduce its carbon emissions by 81 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. Really? In that case perhaps he would like to tell us how he does intend to reach
With an urgency not always noted in plumbers, Charlie Mullins announced earlier this year that he was leaving the country, before even waiting for the Budget fallout. He put his £12 million penthouse on the market and is busy buying up properties in Spain and Dubai, between which he will now spend his time. Inheritance
If you think Donald Trump’s victory is hard enough on Kamala Harris’s campaign staff, spare a thought for the world’s climate activists and their assorted luvvie hangers-on. Just Stop Oil lost no time in spraying the US embassy in Battersea, claiming that democracy has been ‘hijacked by corporate interests and billionaires’. Billy Porter, an actor
On the face of it, Donald Trump’s threat to impose general import tariffs of 10 to 20 per cent on all goods – and much higher levies on those from China – is bad news for Britain, the US and the world. That protectionism makes us poorer is a lesson which seems to have to
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, watching the mood change in the BBC’s election studio has been delicious. It was like a New Orleans funeral in reverse – a carnival turning a corner and transforming into a wake. This was supposed to be a historic night. But then it wasn’t just the BBC. The liberal
Six days on from the Budget, and things don’t look any better for Rachel Reeves’s claim that her Budget won’t negatively affect working people. Today and tomorrow, it is the turn of the Commons Treasury Select Committee to pick through the wreckage. What have we learned so far? David Miles from the Office for Budget
If I were president of the National Farmers’ Union I know what my first task would be today: ring up Sir James Dyson and plead with him to keep his trap shut. It isn’t that Dyson, one of the few living Britons who has set up a manufacturing business of worldwide reputation, isn’t worth listening
It was the absence of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s judgment that was blamed for the bond market crisis after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had rushed to enact their vision for a fast-growing economy without waiting for the wisdom of the government’s official fiscal watchdog. For Truss, the OBR is
Is there any word more laughably misapplied than ‘tsar’? We have already had an ‘antisemitism tsar’ and now we are going to have a ‘value for money’ tsar. Had you suggested to a Russian peasant that their monarch was value for money I suspect you might have ended up floating on the Neva River alongside Rasputin.
It wasn’t an aggrieved business leader, facing a sharply increased wage bill thanks to the Budget, that led the 8 a.m. news bulletin on Radio 4 this morning, but the reassuring verdict of the IMF. ‘We support the envisaged reduction in the deficit over the medium term, including by sustainably raising revenue,’ the body declared.
It has been a good day for investors in the Alternative Investment Market (Aim), with the index of the top 100 Aim shares up 4.3 per cent. But that merely serves to undermine the damage that Rachel Reeves had done to the market by previously suggesting that she might remove the exemption whereby Aim shares
It is tempting to think of this Budget as a triumph in expectation management. Rachel Reeves’s minions have briefed us on so many potential tax rises that surely the actual speech, when finally delivered, can’t be as bad as feared. Having been conditioned to expect the worst, we will all end up feeling pathetically grateful