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?
From our UK edition
Climate change is giving Britain more violent weather, with ever-increasing storms tearing down our trees and whipping up waves which erode our coastlines. No one ever seems to get into trouble for saying the above – as many did yet again during Storm Floris last week – in spite of it being the inverse of the truth. Actually, Britain has been experiencing a downwards trend in average and extreme wind speeds for the past four decades.
From our UK edition
Who are all these people who keep being photographed on Bournemouth beach and elsewhere, frolicking in the midday sun? None of them, obviously, work for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) or the TUC. None of them can possibly be members of the Unite union, nor Unison, nor the GMB. It is little wonder that UK productivity is on the floor – and falling in the public sector How can I be so sure? Because if they were, they would be surely sheltering indoors, in the shade, with the fan on and their feet immersed in a bucket of cold water. All these organisations have been lobbying the government for a maximum working temperature.
From our UK edition
If you want to spend the sunny weather house-hunting in East London, you will be met with a stark message in one of the windows of a development alongside the A12. ‘Don’t buy these flats,’ it reads, ‘Too hot’. Residents complain of temperatures which do not fall below 27 Celsius even at four in the morning, leaving them feeling breathless and exhausted. The government is fixating on stuffing homes with insulation and hermetically-sealing them to prevent heat loss. Come summer and it is frying people in their homes And of course, it is all the fault of climate change. The Guardian – who else? – links to a study which claims that 10,000 of us are going to die every year as a result excess heat by the middle of this century due to rising temperatures.
From our UK edition
There really is no hiding place for Rachel Reeves in this morning’s employment figures. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) release shows that 164,000 payrolled positions have been lost in the 12 months to July, Labour’s first year in office. Those figures are still provisional, but the figures for the 12 months to June show pretty much the same picture, with the number of payrolled positions falling by 149,000. In May alone, 26,000 jobs were lost. The unemployment rate rose to 4.7 per cent. For those who are in work, the figures show a healthy rise in real earnings of 0.9 per cent.
From our UK edition
From Lord Kinnock’s demand for a wealth tax and VAT on private health fees to Gordon Brown pressing for gambling taxes, it is plain that Labour has run out of ideas other than dreaming up new ways to part us from our money. Even so, Kemi Badenoch is ill-advised to go on an all-out attack on council tax reform, as she did in a Mail on Sunday column yesterday. You don’t have to be a socialist or even a Labour supporter to see that council tax is horribly regressive According to the Conservative leader, Rachel Reeves is plotting to do as Labour have done in Wales: to set up an IT system to analyse our homes – even down to the size of our garden shed – in order to use it as a valuation tool for new council tax bands.
From our UK edition
Will yesterday’s cut in interest rates bring relief to the government in its economic problems, offering a breather to people who feel that their living standards are declining? That is unlikely for two reasons. Firstly, people buying homes with mortgages – the most obvious beneficiaries of a cut in interest rates – are more likely nowadays to be on fixed rates. Few will benefit from an immediate cut to the Bank of England base rate; in fact, there are still many homebuyers who are coming off five-year fixed rates they took out at the height of Covid, when interest rates were still at near-zero. They will experience a shock, regardless of the fact the Bank of England’s base rate has just come down.
From our UK edition
As the man who first gave Britain a £150 billion deficit, I don’t think Gordon Brown is the best person to advise the current government on its fiscal policy. But even so the gaping hole in his call for higher gambling duties does raise the eyebrows. Brown seems to think that higher gambling taxes are capable of lifting half a million children out of poverty. Writing in the Guardian, he claims that raising online gaming taxes from 25 per cent to 50 per cent will raise an extra £1.6 billion, jacking up general betting duty from 15 per cent to 25 per cent will raise an extra £450 million and increasing the duty on physical slot machines from 25 per cent to 50 per cent will raise an extra £880 million.
From our UK edition
Are civil servants throwing sickies en masse in protest at being forced to go back into the office to work three days a week? The order to return to the office, made by the previous government, seems to have coincided with a sharp rise in the number of days which staff are taking off sick. At the Home Office, staff took an average of 7.4 days of sickness absence in 2024/25, up from 6.6 days in 2023/24. At the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MCLG), the average absence rate for staff in its core department rose from 5.0 days in 2023 to 5.6 days in 2024. In the ministry’s executive agencies there was an even sharper rise, from 5.9 days to 8.8 days.
From our UK edition
High levels of migration might not always be good for community relations if large numbers of new arrivals descend on one neighbourhood, but at least it helps boost GDP by providing Britain with a source of eager workers whom employers struggle to find in Britain. That sums up the view of some economists, but it has just been thoroughly rejected by one important voice. David Miles, who sits on the committee of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR), has written today that it is wrongheaded to think that Britain can solve its economic problems by opening its doors to overseas workers.
From our UK edition
We can’t stop the illegal migrants, so let’s crack down on legal ones instead. That pretty well sums up the government’s policy on migration. Last year foreign students earned Britain £12.1 billion in revenue. They are one of our strongest export industries (while the students might physically be entering Britain, they are an export because it is the direction the money is flowing in which matters). Some universities have become truly international institutions – Imperial College and UCL now draw more than half their students from abroad. Mickey mouse courses aside, UK higher education has become one of Britain’s success stories.
From our UK edition
Maybe Trump doesn’t always chicken out after all. Rapid trade deals with the UK, Japan, the EU and others in recent weeks may have given the impression that the trade war was essentially over. Today, though, comes Trump's Ardennes offensive, with immediate tariffs of 35 per cent announced for Canada. Other countries have been given a week to prepare for steep increases: India will be subject to 25 per cent tariffs, Taiwan 20 per cent and Switzerland – far from neutral in this particular conflict – 39 per cent.
From our UK edition
Wes Streeting was recently revealed to have said in private that junior doctors (or resident doctors, as they now like to be called) must be made to ‘feel pain’ for going on strike – for fear of encouraging other public sector workers to copy their example. Today comes a reminder of why he said it: the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has just voted to reject the 3.6 per cent pay deal offered by the government, with 91 per cent voting to dismiss it – although the turnout was only 56 per cent. Is it any surprise that nurses are not content with the offer? Two years ago, after a round of strikes, RCN members thought they were doing the responsible thing by voting to accept a pay deal worth between 4.5 and 6 per cent, depending on their grade.
From our UK edition
The most remarkable thing about today’s air traffic control failure, which has led to at least 45 flights being cancelled and many more disrupted, is how few people are bothering even to question whether this could be the work of hackers employed by a foreign power. In recent years almost every systems failure that afflicts UK infrastructure has caused speculation that the Russians or Chinese are to blame – followed by the gradual realisation that, no, we did this to ourselves through our own incompetence. What does it say about the priorities of the industry when perfume shops at Heathrow seem to be more adequately staffed than air traffic control?
From our UK edition
Given the perilous condition of Britain’s public finances, perhaps we ought to start taking the IMF and its World Economic Outlook a little more seriously. It is not impossible to foresee Rachel Reeves or her successor having to repeat what one of her Labour predecessors, Denis Healey, had to do in 1976: and beg the IMF for an emergency loan. What the IMF thinks of the prospects for the UK economy will be key to what sort of deal she might be able to secure. The IMF has, at least, ceased to make out that Britain is doomed to suffer a self-inflicted, Brexit-generated recession all of its own. On the contrary, it sees the UK economy expanding by 1.2 per cent in 2025 followed by 1.4 per cent in 2026 – compared with 1 per cent and 1.2 percent respectively for the Eurozone.
From our UK edition
Maybe it is Donald Trump’s way of getting back at Keir Starmer for Labour sending activists to campaign for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election. Either way, the US president seems to have no intention of obeying the convention that leaders of democratic do not delve into the domestic politics of their counterparts in other nations – and especially not while they are on a foreign tour. Today, Trump has doubled down on his attack on the windfarms he says are spoiling the view from his golf courses in Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire. Posting on his Truth Social account he asserted that UK government ministers ‘have essentially told drillers and oil companies that “we don’t want you”. Incentivise the drillers FAST.
From our UK edition
Donald Trump is often treated in Britain as a know-nothing who speaks off the top of his head on subjects he does not understand. No one is keener to try to make this point than the BBC. Yet not for the first time, it turns out that he is bit more on the ball than some of his critics. After his game of golf at his Turnberry course in Ayrshire, western Scotland on Sunday, the president retorted: 'It’s probably the best course in the world. And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills at the end of the 18th. I said: ‘Isn’t that a shame?’'. The wind farms which Trump feels are spoiling the view from his Scottish golf courses are not just unsightly It was enough to provoke the BBC into providing what it saw as an explainer.
From our UK edition
The more you look at the trade deal negotiated between the US and the EU, the more you want to ask: why couldn’t Britain have dealt with the EU like that? Why has every UK Prime Minister since Theresa May acted so feebly in the face of the EU’s tactics and ended up getting such a poor deal out of the EU? Why did UK Brexit negotiators never threaten punitive tariffs on German cars and French wine? Trump has get pretty much everything he wanted. Goods imported into the US from the EU will in future be subject to tariffs of 15 per cent – half the rate that Trump had threatened but far higher than existed prior to ‘Liberation Day’ on 2 April. What has Ursula von der Leyen got in return? Nothing at all, other than the punitive tariffs being dropped.
Trump has got almost everything he wanted in the trade deal between the United States and the European Union. Goods imported into the US from the EU will now be subject to tariffs of 15 percent - half the rate that Trump had threatened but far higher than existed prior to "Liberation Day" on April 2. What has Ursula von der Leyen got in return? Nothing at all, other than the punitive tariffs being dropped. She has agreed to lowering tariffs on imports from the EU, in some cases to zero. She has also agreed to the EU buying more products from the US, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), making a mockery of the EU's net zero policy.
From our UK edition
Just a few weeks ago the trade union movement seemed to be on a high. It has got rid of its hated Tory government. Legislation which made it harder to call strikes had been hastily abolished by the incoming Starmer government. There were generous public sector pay rises all around. If you were a trade union leader, you had every right to feel pleased with yourself. How things can change. As a trade union leader, you really don’t want a Labour health secretary calling your actions ‘unconscionable’, and suggesting that your members must ‘feel pain’ in order to discourage other unions from striking too. A Conservative health secretary, sure, but a Labour government is supposed to be on your side.
From our UK edition
The official cost of the deal to surrender the Chagos Islands to Mauritius – a country which never owned the islands in the first place – has been put at £101 million a year over the 99-year term of the lease. But the real cost could end up being multiples of this. Not only did it involve putting the sovereignty of an import airbase into the hands of a nation which is close to China, but it has sent a powerful message to developing countries all around the world that Britain – or at least its current government – is a pushover which can be plundered for payments on all kinds of issues.
