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
‘The British public is running out of patience with a state that does not work, where interactions with public services are beset by inconveniences and delays even as outcomes slip and costs rise.’ The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is not wrong there, but what is its solution? Not to sack the state’s clock-watchers
The OECD expects the UK economy to outperform the eurozone and grow by 1.4 per cent over the year. But there is a downside to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s latest figures: the body expects the UK’s inflation problem to persist, ending this year at 3.5 per cent, down just a touch from the
Donald Trump’s apparent suggestion that people could protect themselves against Covid by injecting themselves with bleach marked a low point in his first administration. It provided his critics with evidence that he was an erratic president trying to ride roughshod over scientific evidence as well as common sense. It is easy, therefore, to dismiss the
How refreshing to hear transport secretary Heidi Alexander approve plans for a second working runway at Gatwick Airport, taking on the ‘eco warriors’ she has previously attacked for blocking airport expansion. Just the one thing, though. Does she really think she has heard the last from them? If she thinks she is going to drive
There really is no good news for Rachel Reeves as she prepares her second Budget. This morning’s borrowing figures are not just bad; they hint at a sense of hopelessness, that Britain is sliding inexorably towards a very deep fiscal crisis. This is yet another fiscal black hole for Reeves to fill, along with another about
Policymakers must, of course, stick to the evidence and base their decisions around proper, peer-reviewed research. Until, that is, the evidence starts to tell you what you don’t want to hear. The Mayor of London’s office appears to have been caught red-handed in refusing to publish a study it had itself commissioned into the behaviour
For some time, the Budget on 26 November has been looking as if it might be Rachel Reeves’ final fling before she is pulled away from the levers of the UK economy. But if so, it appears she may be preparing to go out in style. According to a report in the Financial Times, she
The government promised to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of this parliament. How close are they to reaching the annualised rate? We don’t yet have government statistics to cover the whole of Labour’s first year in office, yet in the year to March construction began on just 138,650 new homes across the
It is not often that the NHS gets accused of being too good at negotiating down costs. But that seems to be gist of the case levelled against it regarding the cost of drugs. AstraZeneca has paused the expansion of a research facility in Cambridge and US pharmaceutical firm Merck has cancelled a plan to
Keir Starmer should be thankful for Lord Mandelson. Were it not for scandal over the Mandelson’s connections with Jeffrey Epstein, more people might have noticed an even greater disgrace this morning. The Prime Minister’s promise of ‘growth, growth, growth’ has ploughed spectacularly into the ground. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) reports today that there
When even green energy tycoons are telling him to embrace the North Sea oil and gas industries, Ed Miliband really is beginning to look somewhat isolated. Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity and a Labour donor (as well as a former donor to Just Stop Oil, no less), has made an extraordinary intervention today, suggesting that
A very warm welcome for Margaret Thatcher inside autism’s ever-growing tent – if she can find space to wield her handbag. I could even lead the welcoming party myself as I am in there – according to some of my friends – on account of my unusually good ability to recall dates and a liking
Are Britons getting sicker and sicker – or is our health improving? There seems to be something of a paradox. According to figures from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) the number of sickness absences has increased from an average of 5.9 days per worker in 2019 to 9.4 days in 2024. Interestingly,
Here is a rather delightful fact. For 13 years between 2010 and 2023 Britain had a quango called the Office for Tax Simplification. You may never have heard of it, but it really did exist. Its annual report for 2021/22 shows that it was chaired by someone called Kathryn Kearns and had a budget of
Angela Rayner must resign as Housing Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, obviously. How could she sit on the front bench through a tax-raising budget without everyone’s eyes gravitating towards her, as the minister who thinks tax rises are for everyone else, not her? But the fate of Rayner obscures the bigger scandal here, which is
What’s the most idiotic question ever posed by an interviewer? There was the real-life Sally Jockstrap who asked David Gower whether he considered himself a batsman or a bowler. Or the Radio 1 DJ who asked Marc Almond – at the height of his fame with Soft Cell – whether he was going steady with
Will the compulsory ID card lobby ever give up? For more than two decades it has been trying to exploit every national crisis to push its product on the country: terrorism, violent crime, Covid and now illegal migration. Apparently the answer to all of them is to force all of us to carry about a
Trying to work out what is going on with global trade doesn’t get any easier. Just as the world was settling down to the new reality of Donald Trump’s trade war and governments were stitching up hurried trade deals to minimise the sweeping damage from the tariffs announced on ‘Liberation Day’ in April, the Court
Rachel Reeves’s error before last autumn’s Budget might have been written off as the act of a ministerial rookie. She kept making us miserable by telling us about fiscal black holes and telling us that huge tax rises would be required to fix it – with the result that, come Budget day, the outlook for
Gosh, Labour really does hate private landlords. Rachel Reeves’ latest property tax proposal to be dangled before the public is to charge National Insurance contributions (NICs) on income from rental properties. This would set it aside from other forms of investment income, which are liable for income tax but not NICs. It would also represent
