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
Just how much longer will the government be able to sustain its assertion that the Conservatives left behind a £22 billion hole in the public finances? Confirmation that ministers are continuing to blame their predecessors for out-of-control public finances – and for expected tax rises in October’s budget – was provided this morning by Chief
The foolishness of the government’s appeasement of the unions is becoming clearer by the day. The 15 per cent pay rise for train drivers had hardly been signed off when Aslef announced a further set of strikes on LNER trains over rostering. Now, it is the turn of the Transport and Salaried Staff Association (TSSA),
What a joke the government’s promise to concentrate on ‘growth, growth, growth’ is becoming. Since the Prime Minister uttered those words on entering Downing Street, we have had road schemes cancelled and money withdrawn from a supercomputer project at Edinburgh university, that could have given Britain’s AI industry a leg-up. We have had fat pay
Is this the first sign of a bounce in the housing market? Property website Rightmove is reporting this morning that enquiries to estate agents so far this month are 19 per cent on August last year. This follows a quarter-point cut in interest rates by the Bank of England (BoE). Rightmove’s data is forward-looking, in that it
So, we were all so impressed with the swashbuckling performance of Gareth Southgate’s team that we all rushed out and bought replica England shirts and packs of lager – to the point that retail sales in July were 0.5 per cent higher than in June. No, I don’t buy that either – even though it
The government has a bit of a conundrum. Given how Keir Starmer and his Labour colleagues damned the previous Conservative administration for failing to lock down the country early enough for Covid, what are they now going to do about the new strain of monkeypox (or ‘mpox’, as we are now supposed to call it)?
It has taken six weeks, but already the government has lost control of public finances. The decision to award train drivers a pay rise of 15 per cent spread over three years, and backdated, without any requirement to reform outdated working practices, won’t break the government’s piggy bank on its own, but is has set
Today’s labour market figures ought to bring good news: they show that growth on earnings has moderated to 5.4 per cent, the lowest level in two years. That should ease fears of inflation – it is growth in pay which has most concerned the Bank of England in recent months – and pave the way
We will find out in Rachel Reeves’ first budget on 30 October whether Labour really does intend to wage a war on wealth. It is all too easy to see the Chancellor playing to her gallery by imposing punitive taxes which are designed more to achieve social engineering than to raise revenue, and which stifle entrepreneurism
The Great Barrier Reef is, of course, dying – a victim of humans’ hubris and callousness towards the natural world. We know this because we keep being told this is the case. This week, the New York Times carried the headline: ‘Heat Raises Fears of Demise for Great Barrier Reef Within a Generation’. This story,
Riotous summers seem to occur in Britain with about the same frequency as sunny ones: roughly every decade. Sometimes it’s Afro-Caribbeans protesting (Brixton in 1981), sometimes Asians (Oldham in 2001). The white working classes rioted over the poll tax in 1990 and in Southport this year. The riot in Harehills, Leeds, last month was precipitated
Ed Miliband, along with those who support his ambition to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, has long had a favourite argument with which to try to put down people who say it can’t be done: why, if it is going to be so difficult to achieve, is the National Grid ESO – the company
Few will, or should, feel sympathy for Thames Water being fined 9 per cent of its annual turnover for fouling rivers through sewage discharges. Water regulator Ofwat found numerous failings with maintenance and a lack of investment, which resulted in sewage discharges becoming a routine event rather than an emergency response to heavy rainfall. The
For a while it looked as if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were going to be lucky: they had walked into an economic recovery. The anaemic growth and market turmoil of the past few years – which Labour liked to blame entirely on ‘Tory chaos’ and absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic or energy
Today’s stock market plunge is interesting for two main reasons. First, for those of us who have never traded on the Japanese stock exchange, comes the revelation that the colours used to denote changes in stock prices are the inverse of those used on western markets: red means a share has gone up, green means
It goes without saying that the riots in Southport, Hartlepool and London are a mindless reaction to the killing of three girls, based on false information which, according to former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, may have been propagated from Russia in a deliberate attempt to stir up social unrest in Britain. But is Sir
As Kate Andrews argues here, the Bank of England were never going to cut interest rates during an election campaign for fear of being accused of favouring one side or the other. That ruled out a rate cut in June, while in July there was no meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee. But are those five
It will surprise no-one to learn that there is a trail of money which leads from climate protesters and their pranks in Britain back to the self-satisfied celebs of Hollywood. It will come as a greater – and possibly happier – revelation that this particular source of money appears to be drying up fast. If
Angela Rayner has announced that the government will aim to build 370,000 new homes, up from the 300,000 a year implied in the party’s manifesto. But if the deputy prime minister really thinks that all she needs to do to achieve that target is to take on Nimbys – as Rayner and chancellor Rachel Reeves
There is one over-arching question hanging over Rachel Reeves’s speech today, in which she claimed that a £21.9 billion hole has opened up in the current political spending for this financial year: why, if there is such a large ‘black hole’ in the public finances, is there suddenly money available for £9.4 billion worth of
