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
There is no positive spin to be put on this morning’s inflation figures, which show the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rising from 2.6 per cent to 3.5 per cent in a single month. If you want to do the trick of stripping out energy and food prices to arrive at so-called ‘core’ inflation (how you
From our UK edition
Rachel Reeves is perhaps not a great fan of Donald Trump, but she should be grateful to him nonetheless, and Ed Miliband even more so. The trade war sparked by Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs is about to lower energy prices for UK consumers. According to a forecast by consultants Cornwall Insight, Ofgem’s price cap will
From our UK edition
The bleak future of the UK’s public finances can be summed up in a few statistics. For the financial year just ended, the Office for National Statistics’ provisional estimate for the government’s deficit – the gap between income and expenditure – is £151.9 billion. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s estimate is that spending on welfare
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The Environmental and Rural Affairs select committee is surely right that the government imposed the inheritance tax changes on farmland without proper consultation – and ignored the likelihood that they will cause serious hardship for family farms. Never mind the threshold which Rachel Reeves claims will mean most farms can still be passed on IHT-free
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If the government was deliberately trying to encourage union militancy, it could not be making a better job of it. It is reported that junior doctors – or ‘resident doctors’ as we are now supposed to call them for fear of implying that they might be less qualified than consultants who have been doing their
From our UK edition
If the consequences of Labour’s heavy losses in the local elections were not already clear, they became so in this morning’s press conference to relaunch the government’s migration policy. Reversing years of generally friendly attitudes towards migration, dating back to Tony Blair’s day – when the UK opened its doors to migrant workers from Eastern
The President was meant to be against price-fixing
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Here’s a question: do you think that Bill Gates would have started and built up his Microsoft empire had the top rate of US income tax been 99 per cent? I don’t know Gates but I think the answer is obvious. Why would he have put in all those hours and taken all those risks
From our UK edition
We had the shock of ‘Liberation day’ when punitive tariffs were levied on imports from virtually every country in the world. That was the destructive part of Donald Trump’s trade war. Now we enter phase two: trying to put things back together again. The announcement of trade deal with a ‘big and highly-respected country’ (believed
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Wasn’t a trade deal with India supposed to be one of the big gains from Brexit – an example of how Britain, once free from the protectionist grip of the EU, could go ‘out into the world’ and free up trade with fast-growing economies, rather than be stuck trading with Europe’s stagnant ones? Markets certainly
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You can say it for Wes Streeting: he doesn’t hang about. Reacting to the heavy loss of council seats in last week’s elections, he is proffering £102 million of money for extra GPs’ appointments – hopefully to end what has been termed the “8am scramble”: a kind of Hunger Games which NHS patients have to
Investors would be rash to bet against the US, and in particular its tech industry
From our UK edition
A man from John Lewis came yesterday to measure up for some window blinds. When he started struggling with the mobile broadband on his phone – which he required to be able to give a quote – I made what I thought was a straightforward offer for him to sign onto my home broadband. He
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There is little disguising what is surely going to be the prevailing story as council election results pour in from lunchtime onwards: Reform UK has had a very good night, Labour a poor one and the Conservatives a disastrous one. To win a by-election – even by just six votes – in Runcorn, will enliven
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Here’s a pub quiz question: which European country has no net zero target? I don’t mean which country is not bothering too much about conforming with its net zero target, because that is most of them, but which one doesn’t even have such a target in the first place? The surprising answer is Norway, which
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The facade of Garden Court Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is reassuringly traditional. The barristers who work there occupy buildings which were once home to the Earl of Sandwich and the Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval. If there were any building in London in which wigs and gowns would seem a natural form of dress,
A touted US-India trade deal suggests that could be the case
From our UK edition
Ouch! Tony Blair had only recently left office when Ed Miliband, a protégé of Gordon Brown, drove the Climate Change Act through the Commons, committing the UK government to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent, compared with 1990 levels, by 2050. That target was upgraded to a net zero target – with minimal debate
From our UK edition
Rachel Reeves may have helped run up a £151 billion deficit in the past 12 months (with a little help from Jeremy Hunt), but for some people it is not nearly enough. A snapshot into Reeves’s world is provided by the Resolution Foundation today, which has claimed that Reeves’s plan for £100 billion of additional
From our UK edition
It was supposed to be the broadest shoulders who were going to fund the government’s overspending. Now it seems to be the broadest bellies, too. The government is to extend George Osborne’s sugar tax to milkshakes and other milk-based drinks. It is also to consult on lowering the threshold at which the sugar tax becomes