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
Can you imagine, in the wake of a terror attack in London, a tabloid, or any other kind of media outlet, publishing a photograph of a naked and distressed child caught up in the melee? It isn’t hard to answer the question. Of course they wouldn’t publish it. It would break every rule in the
Next time it comes to redesigning the PPE course at Oxford, I suggest a module beginning with a quotation from George Osborne. It’s something he said to the Treasury Select Committee in May, back when he was still Chancellor: ‘If you look at the sheer weight of opinion, it is overwhelmingly the case that people
No group of the population voted to remain in the EU more enthusiastically than students. According to the polling organisation YouthSight, 85 per cent of them voted to remain, and among the 15 per cent who voted leave, 17 per cent say they now regret it. Moreover, the idea that students were too lazy or
So, last week’s sharp rise in the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for manufacturing wasn’t a freak. This morning its twin, the PMI for the much larger services sector, also showed a huge rebound to 52.9, more than reversing the fall to 47.4 in July and putting it marginally ahead of PMI for the Eurozone, which
In her decision as to whether to go ahead with the Chinese-backed Hinkley C nuclear power station – postponed from July apparently because of security concerns – Theresa May will find no better guidance than the advice which has been given to her and her aides while attending the G20 summit in Hangzhou this week.
Day by day, the vote for Brexit on 23 June is coming more and more to resemble Black Wednesday, the day when sterling plummeted out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Then, as now, the event was initially treated by many as a national calamity – before it steadily became apparent just how a big
Wasn’t it one of the ‘Remain’ campaign’s big arguments that leaving the EU would deprive us of the ‘clout’ we enjoy in negotiating foreign trade agreements? I seem to remember someone even warning us that in the event of Brexit we would go ‘to the back of the queue’ for a trade agreement with the
Instinctively I feel I ought not to feel sympathy for the 70,000 council house tenants earning more than £40,000 a year in London (£30,000 outside London) and who are going to be made to pay an average of an extra £1000 a year to stay in their subsidised council homes. They are better off than
If NHS England ever comes to be dismantled it won’t be because a heartless Tory government has decided that, for reasons of neoliberal ideology, it ought to be replaced by private insurance schemes. It will be because the unreasonable and limitless demands placed on it by those who claim to be its friends have inflated its budget
Imagine the reaction of Her Majesty’s Opposition if the government announced that it was to introduce a new ‘voter charge’ – a levy which citizens had to pay before they were allowed into the polling station. Just as they did with the ‘Community Charge’ over a quarter of a century ago Labour would undoubtedly –
It is beginning to look like a bit of a trend this year: the Conservatives get themselves into a tight spot, only for Labour to trump them quickly. Just as the Tories seemed to be descending into a bitter leadership crisis on the weekend after the referendum, half the shadow cabinet resigned. Now, just as
During the Blair years the security guards at Labour party conferences had a reputation for over-zealous intervention – remember the sight of octogenarian Walter Wolfgang being manhandled out of his seat and ejected from the chamber for daring to heckle Jack Straw over the Iraq War? Appropriately enough, under Corbyn, Labour’s conference security has the
If there was any remaining doubt that David Cameron’s resignation honours list was drawn up shamelessly to reward political flunkies it was removed this morning by Desmond Swayne, or Sir Desmond Swayne as we are now supposed to call him following the knighthood bestowed on him in the New Year’s honours. Sir Desmond said: ‘The
This year’s US presidential election campaign has broken the mould, apparently. Never before have two ‘anti-establishment’ candidates in the shape of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders put up such a challenge, one securing his party’s nomination and the other coming close to doing so. It is all a symptom of the ‘anti-politics’ mood that has
Yesterday was supposed to be the day the nuclear button was finally pressed – a vote by the board of French energy company EDF to go ahead with Hinkley C power station was assumed to be the moment at which the project would finally spring off the drawing board. Instead, business secretary Greg Clark announced
It is still a little too early to say for sure that George Osborne’s gloom-laden economic forecasts for post-Brexit Britain were bunk. But never mind the future, it now emerges that he wasn’t much good at telling us what was happening in the present. Throughout the referendum campaign he could barely disguise his contempt for
Like Owen Smith, I have an interest to declare when discussing Pfizer. Somewhere on my bookshelf I have a Pfizer physics prize – a school prize funded by the US pharmaceutical giant which at the time had a research facility nearby. Later, Pfizer helped fund an extension to the school which, appropriately enough given its
Of today’s corpses piled up in Downing Street, none has caused more shock than that of Michael Gove. That Nicky Morgan, who signed Gove’s nomination papers to be leader, has also gone hints at some kind of personal animosity. But might the explanation be more straightforward than that – simply one of his policy and approach
The award for most pathetic remark of the week goes to Tim Farron who earlier released a press statement saying this: ‘Just 13 months after the last election the Conservatives have plunged the UK into chaos. It is simply inconceivable that Theresa May should be crowned Prime Minister without even having won an election in
‘I’m a gay woman with strong northern working-class roots,’ Angela Eagle told Robert Peston on Sunday. ‘I think I’m the right person for this job at this time.’ In case we didn’t get the point she followed it up this morning by boasting: ‘I’m a northern working-class girl who understands modern life.’ How outrageous that
