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
Anniversaries are very interesting, of course, but all the same I think a news programme ought to revolve around, well, the day’s news. That is something which increasingly seems to be missing from the Today Programme, once the BBC’s flagship news programme. Overnight, as I have read elsewhere, stock markets have plummeted around the world.
Ever since Labour published its manifesto for the snap election it became clear to me that tackling Jeremy Corbyn is going to require a bit more than simply calling him a bearded Trot. This is because some of his prominent policies, while notionally quite left wing, are actually rather popular with many natural Conservative voters.
As Donald Trump makes his State of the Union address this evening his many opponents have an increasingly large problem: the US economy. Whatever else you might say about the President it is becoming impossible to deny that the economy has done extremely well in the year since he became president. Growth accelerated from 1.5
So was it Corbyn’s appeal to younger voters what swung last year’s general election in his favour? Not according to the British Election Study (BES) which today publishes a paper questioning the received wisdom that Labour’s unexpectedly strong showing was down to a surge of support from younger voters who managed to cast off their apathy
Theresa May has a very big failure to her name, but strangely few people seem to want to pick her up on it. The latest crime figures show a sharp increase in recorded offences in England and Wales, especially in knife crime, which rose 21 per cent to 37,443 incidents. This continues a trend which
The Presidents Club dinner is not the type of event to which I tend to be invited and neither do I suspect I would go were I to be asked – although in truth that is as much down to my native tightfistedness as to the reports of boorish behaviour from this year’s event. I
Has an albatross ever wielded so much influence? The bewildered chick who regurgitated a plastic bag in front of Sir David Attenborough’s camera crew — fed to him by his mother after she had scooped it from the sea — has caused one of those regular ructions in public opinion. The supermarket chain Iceland has
How many times have you heard in recent months that the era of low inflation is at an end? The case for that assertion is beginning to look somewhat shaky. This morning brings news that the rate of inflation last month – at least as measured by the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) – fell slightly
Now that the EU has agreed to move Brexit negotiations on to a trade deal there will be much focus on financial services. An industry which produces annual revenues of £200 billion, accounts for 7 per cent of UK GDP and employs 1.1 million people is going to be a crucial part of any deal
Were I a politician observing Henry Bolton’s embarrassment with glee I think I might just stop short of demanding his resignation as leader of Ukip. What point, anyway, in trying to destabilise a party which has destabilised itself to the point at which nearly every credible challenger for the leadership seems already to have left
The anti-Trump forces have been having a field day on Twitter with the hashtag #ICancelledMyTriptoLondon – poking fun at Donald Trump’s claim why he called off his trip to London to open the new £880 million US embassy. The President claims he can’t bear to cut the ribbon because the Obama administration got itself a
Was there ever a more pathetic piece of political posturing than the attempt by New York mayor Bill de Blasio to sue five oil companies, including BP and Shell, for the cost of building £14.8bn ($20bn) worth of sea defences to protect vulnerable parts of the city? To add to his virtue-signalling, de Blasio has
Virgin Trains has announced that it will no longer sell the Daily Mail on board its services nor offer it free to first class passengers on the basis that ‘We’ve decided that this paper is not compatible with the VT brand and our beliefs’. It goes on to say its staff have objected to the
Britain has a productivity problem – it lags behind Germany, France and the US, even Italy. But what, if anything, do we need to do about it? Over time, says economist Gerard Lyons, productive economies outperform less productive ones, but productivity statistics are not everything. Unskilled people who in Britain are working in less productive
Predictions of the death of the shop have become as much a ritual of New Year as fireworks and the singing of Auld Lang Syne. The two big retailers which have so far reported on their business over the Christmas period have provided the usual ammunition. Next reported sales up by 1.5 per cent in
A Martian visiting Britain in recent months might be a little confused as to the nature of human morality – not to mention as to where on the body we have our sexual organs. First the country becomes consumed by the wicked behaviour of man who lightly touched a woman’s knee. Then, a man who
The Spectator, in association with Tate & Lyle Sugars, brought together MPs, representatives from Tate & Lyle, the Fairtrade Foundation and the Australian High Commissioner to discuss the future of the UK sugar sector following Brexit. This is a report of the discussion which followed. The sugar industry is an interesting case study for the
Yet again this morning comes a demonstration of the enormous gulf between gloomy economic forecasts pumped out by those opposed to Brexit and much more positive data from the real world. And guess which received the biggest headlines. Britain, claims PwC, is about to miss out on a surge in global growth – the best in
As the Brexit ‘war cabinet’ meets this morning to discuss what future trading relationship Britain would like with the EU there is a grim inevitability about the next few months. We know what we want – free trade with the EU, in services as well as goods, as well as free trade with the rest
This morning has brought predictable outrage about Tory ‘traitors’. The Prime Minister has been undermined, Guy Verhofstadt has had his fun describing it as a ‘good day for democracy’. The government has been reduced to damage-limitation, suggesting that last night’s defeat – which means that Parliament will now have the final say on a Brexit
