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
Who believes that bird flu may cause as many as 50 million deaths? Ross Clark doesn’t, and here’s why I don’t personally know anyone suffering from malaria or tuberculosis, but I imagine that if they have been following the Western media they must have found the past week somewhat surreal. Half a billion people are
In these pages recently Elisabeth Anderson wrote about, but declined to give the name of, a website that gives the price of any property sold in England and Wales during the past five years. Actually, it’s called www.nethouseprices.com, and a quick nose around the site reveals that flats up Liz’s way, Marylebone, are selling for
I have some native sympathy with the lackeys struggling to handle the Inland Revenue’s computers which, like a berserk one-arm bandit, have just spewed out an excess £1.9 billion in tax credits. I am not sure I am the best-qualified person to expound on the inadequacy of government IT systems. My own computer bears the
Ross Clark says that the government’s PFI deals allow private companies to prosper at the public’s expense Imagine you are a left-leaning Guardian reader with a social conscience. You are not a communist, but your attitude towards private enterprise is less one of enthusiasm than grudging tolerance. If we are going to let private companies
Like many of my countrymen, I find the cantankerous figure of Charles Clarke somewhat alarming. In fact, I think on balance I would rather live next door to David Boag. It would certainly be more entertaining. Boag, a 28-year-old warehouseman from Dechmont, West Lothian, is a man of unusual habits. He likes to watch the
Thirteen local authorities have been chosen by the government to be Cultural Pathfinders, showing how culture and sport can help to deliver government priorities across public life. The government’s social, environmental and economic agenda is to be promoted through cultural initiatives at local level. In a joint initiative with the Local Government Association (LGA), the
Natural environment and rural communities draft Bill published A Bill designed to address better the real needs of rural communities and the natural environment through modernised and simplified arrangements for implementing policy was today presented in draft to Parliament by Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Mrs Beckett said: ‘The
Government continues drive for better, more efficiently organised public servicesIn a guidance pack sent out today to Leaders and Chief Executives of all local authorities in England, the government outlines how local authorities will measure and report efficiency gains they have achieved by means of a three-stage self-assessment process. This method has been determined following
Douglas Alexander tells UK music industry: Government pledges continuing help to reach US and China.This year 20 music events are being organised (up six on last year) and UK Trade & Investment will allocate nearly half a million pounds to promote the industry overseas in key markets like the US and China…. Douglas Alexander, minister
From this week, we will be picking out some gems from the Panglossian world of government press releases, a world in which our hard-working ministers and civil servants make valiant efforts to better the lives of a grateful public. The title of this column, Everyone Benefits, is a frequent phrase which crops up in New
Ross Clark says that the existing law allows us to defend ourselves robustly against burglars. We don’t need a licence to murder them This week sees an event about as common as a total eclipse of the moon: an alignment of views between the House of Commons tearoom and the taproom down at the Dog
The national ‘giveathon’ provoked by Boxing Day’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean is an admirable response to an emergency. Rather less can be said of the thousands who fell for this year’s fashionable Christmas present: sending a goat to the Third World. Oxfam, one of several charities to run a ‘give a goat’ scheme, says
Gordon Brown does not usually receive support from this column but he deserves some congratulation on one initiative. He has written to the European Commission to request that it lifts the threshold above which duty becomes payable on goods brought into the EU for personal use. For the past 10 years it has been frozen
A loftily named environmental pressure group called the Food Commission has been upset by the sale of bottled water from Fiji in Waitrose supermarkets. The water, it complains, has clocked up 10,000 ‘food miles’ before it reaches Western consumers. ‘Transporting water halfway across the world is surely the most ludicrous use of fossil fuels when
When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there
Jonathan Dimbleby has been frightening late-night audiences on ITV with a documentary called the New World War. Using interviews with Ethiopean coffee-producers and reels of library footage of hurricanes, Dimbleby explains his thesis: ‘Global terrorism, global poverty and global warming form a toxic trio that promise a catastrophe that will make the horrors of 9/11
The Conservative leader Michael Howard says he owes everything to Britain for saving his family from persecution by the Nazis. It is just a good job for him that his own manifesto on asylum and immigration was not in force in Britain in the 1930s. Sandwiched between the personal passages in his conference speech Mr
If there was one reason above any other for the British electorate’s flight to socialism in 1945, it was surely the means test. In some ways the national government’s grudging state charity of the Depression years was worse than nothing. For his ha’p’orth of black pudding, the 1930s welfare claimant had first to surrender his
Don’t you just love those socio-economic league tables which put Britain a miserable 25th, virtually down among the developing nations, while Scandinavian nations emerge on top? The first time I went to Denmark I wasn’t quite prepared for the frumpiness, so often had I seen its social democratic model depicted by left-leaning academics as a
With the Athens games out of way, the Boycott Beijing campaign is now in full swing, arguing that China’s lousy human rights record should disqualify it from holding the 2008 Olympics and imploring the West to repeat the snub which marred the Moscow games of 1980. Admittedly China isn’t the sort of country you would