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
Ross Clark on how the new CAP rules make it profitable for city folk to buy farms and use them as homes – with big gardens If the words ‘Get orff my land’ are delivered in future less in yokel tones than in the mid-Atlantic accent of the trading floor, don’t be surprised. The Royal
The council estates of King’s Lynn, Harriet Sergeant recently revealed, are groaning with Chinese migrant workers, 50 to a house. The Daily Mail, naturally enough, is outraged by this threat to society and house prices, playing on rumours that workers are controlled by Triad gangs. Equally upset is the Guardian, which complains that many workers
Lady Thatcher so disliked British Airways’s ethnic tailfins that she famously took out a paper napkin and covered up the tail of a model plane on the BA stand at a Tory party conference. Should she be passing a model of a BA plane in the next few days, she’ll want a tablecloth to cover
Anyone who believes that the anti-competitive ethos in state schools originates with a handful of ideologues in our local authorities should take time to study the United Nations output on education. The UN Commission on Human Rights’s ‘special rapporteur on education’ recently attacked British schools for being too competitive. Katarina Tomasevski, a Swede, complained that
What would it take for the Guardian to argue that mineworkers are a baleful influence on otherwise peaceful rural peoples, and that trees and flowers are more important than well-paid jobs down the pit? The answer is when the mining jobs in question are in Madagascar. The paper has joined the environmental groups campaigning against
The opportunity to applaud French farmers comes along once a century at most, so an overpriced, oversubsidised champagne must be in order. As I write, France is on the point of scuppering talks on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), thanks to lobbying from its dairy and cereal farmers. This is entirely predictable and
To get elected in 1997 Tony Blair championed the cause of ‘Mondeo Man’, a hard-working, hard-driving travelling salesman who had suffered from years of negative equity and suppressed bonuses. It is not Mondeo Man, however, who has ended up as the beneficiary of Labour’s six years in office. It is Principal Project Delivery Officer Person.
In China over the past fortnight, the waters have been rising in what will eventually be a 350-mile-long reservoir created by the Three Gorges Dam. When finished, the dam’s turbines will generate energy equivalent to 18 nuclear power plants. The dam will also improve navigation on the Yangtze and mitigate the flooding risk which has
Sir Edmund Hillary has demanded that the Nepalese government closes Mount Everest for a few years to ‘give it a rest’ and thereafter opens it only to serious climbers. Tourists who pay £40,000 to be led up Everest by experienced guides are not real mountaineers, he says, and they have no right to be there.
Ross Clark forecasts that in spite of its new £150 million headquarters the Met Office will still get the weather wrong Guests invited to the official opening of the Met Office’s spanking new £150 million headquarters outside Exeter should take with them an umbrella. Or perhaps a sunhat. Or a thick coat. Or maybe just
Stephen Byers has an apology to make. Not, sadly, for telling porkies or mismanaging the railways. He wants to apologise for going to the World Trade Organisation’s conference in Seattle in 1999 and doing his bit for free trade. He now says he was misguided. Now that he has been ‘meeting farmers and communities at
Investors stung by the endowment-policy and pension-plan mis-selling scandals, and in possession of poorly managed unit trusts that have failed miserably to outperform the FT-SE index, can hardly be blamed for coming to the conclusion that they might just as well make their own investment decisions rather than rely on the men in grey suits.
This column does not often find common cause with American farmers, nor with farmers of the developed world in general. But it has become necessary to do so, thanks to some brazen protectionist policies on the part of China. Last year, China announced it was going to ban the import of all genetically modified crops.
Unesco’s recent Education for All week was outwardly a campaign to boost the educational opportunities for children in the Third World. On closer inspection, however, the campaigning materials betray a political motive involving one issue alone: ‘gender parity’. ‘Educating girls yields the highest return in economic terms,’ asserts Unesco. ‘Countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have
Although much overshadowed by the war in Iraq, environmentalists, businessmen and charity workers met at the World Water Forum in Kyoto last week to discuss why 1.2 billion people still have no access to clean water. The United Nations has set a target of reducing this by half by 2015. But Michel Camdessus, the former
In a speech in Ontario a fortnight ago, Leo W. Gerard made an eloquent appeal for the formation of a new ‘worldwide movement for social justice to cure the ills of globalisation’. ‘Two decades of so-called
The BSE epidemic is in decline and British beef is once more allowed to be exported. But BSE fears still have their uses. On several occasions in the past couple of years, the United States Department for Agriculture (USDA) has withdrawn several thousand tonnes of Brazilian beef imports from the American market on the grounds
The London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have taken fright in the face of the terrorist threat. It is not all
James Tooley recently wrote in these pages of the success of private schools in Africa and India, which in the past few years have exploded in number, offering an education for as little as £3 a term – which even the poor of Somalia can afford. In contrast, he recounted how pupils of government schools
The genius of modern Europe is to have honed protectionism to such an art that in the minds of many Europeans it is synonymous with civilisation itself. It is hard to imagine that some of Europe’s greatest cities – Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam – were founded on the riches of free trade, when the current epitome