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
Does anyone really think that spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence would make Britain ‘battle-ready’, as Keir Starmer claims? (Assuming, that is, that he really did spend all that money rather than merely have an aspiration to do so). Here is the statistic of the day, to remind us of what a wartime
It wasn’t long ago that Nigel Farage seemed a hopeless sell in Scotland. In 2013, on his way to campaign in a by-election in Aberdeen, he didn’t get further than Edinburgh’s Royal Mile before he had to be escorted from a pub by police for his own safety. Ukip, which he then led, had a
Keir Starmer has already folded on the winter fuel payment, promising a partial reversal of the policy by reinstating it for pensioners in receipt of pension credit. How much longer before the proposed £4.8 billion cuts to welfare benefits go the same way? This morning, the Health Foundation think tank has issued a pronouncement that
It is beginning to feel a bit like 1998 all over again. That was the year of the first countryside march when it – supposedly – rose up in anger at the Blair government over its plan to abolish hunting, introduce the right to roam and build some houses for people to live in. Landowning
Who would have guessed that caving into union militancy and paying a whacking above-inflation pay rise, with no strings attached, would lead to even bigger pay demands? In one of its first acts after coming to power last July the Starmer government awarded junior doctors a 22 per cent pay rise, which they accepted and
Some of the most infamous words in politics are ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ – uttered by George H.W. Bush as he accepted the nomination as the Republican candidate for the 1988 US presidential election. It helped him win that year but contributed to his downfall in 1992 as he failed to stick to
How much longer are Reform’s critics going to be able to get away with calling it a right-wing party? It is an odd kind of right-wing party that proposes to reinstate welfare benefits that even Labour has decided are too expensive; that pledges to nationalise the steel industry and 50 per cent of utilities; and
Has there ever been a day when Brexit seemed such a good idea? The story of Brexit began to change on ‘Liberation Day’ on 2 April when Donald Trump announced a 10 per cent tariff on imports from the UK and a 20 per cent tariff on those from the EU. No longer was it
Did anyone really think that the incoming Starmer government was going to appease the public sector unions for long by stuffing their mouths with gold – awarding them fat pay rises without any requirement to improve productivity? When he awarded junior doctors a pay rise of 22 per cent last July, Wes Streeting told us
Finally, in a horrible week for Rachel Reeves which has seen inflation surge, the public finances take a dive and her authority undermined by Angela Rayner’s memo and the Prime Minister’s U-turn on the winter fuel payment, a glimmer of good news. Retail sales rose by 1.2 per cent in April. The Office for National
The answer, according to Ed Miliband in an infamously toe-curling rendition of the Bob Dylan song, is blowing in the wind. But no longer, it seems, if you are on the board of SSE. The energy company, which was one of the first UK electricity companies to commit in a big way to renewable energy,
We can thank Rachel Reeves for one thing: setting up a real-world experiment to show the Laffer curve in action. April’s figures for the public finances, like yesterday’s figures for inflation, are truly dreadful. April should have been a bumper month for tax receipts, being the month that the rise in Employers’ National Insurance Contributions
One of Keir Starmer’s first mistakes in office was to remove the winter fuel allowance from all pensioners other than those in receipt of pension credit. His latest big error is performing a U-turn and telling us that the government is, after all, looking at loosening the eligibility criteria, so that many more pensioners will
Rachel Reeves may have killed off growth with her raid on employers’ National Insurance contributions, but today comes a reminder that she is nevertheless the relatively mild face of the Starmer government. We can at least be thankful that Angela Rayner is not Chancellor. Labour’s deputy leader has written a memo to Reeves suggesting a
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
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
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
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
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
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
