Ross Clark

Ross Clark

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

Think you’re so clever boycotting Tesla?

How difficult life has become for earnest, liberal-minded motorists who like to show off their environmental credentials through their choice of car. Until recently, they were buying Teslas by the car park-load. But now they seem suddenly to have gone off them. European Tesla sales have plummeted since Donald Trump’s election victory brought Elon Musk

Labour will struggle to reform the civil service

The need for the civil service reforms which Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden is proposing is glaring. It can be summed up in the evidence that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey presented to the Commons Treasury Committee last week: that since the pandemic, productivity in the public sector has shrunk by 7 to 8

Ross Clark

The disturbing rise of Defend Our Juries

On 29 March 2023, a retired social worker from Walthamstow, Trudi Warner, was arrested for standing outside Inner London Crown Court and holding up a banner saying: ‘Jurors you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.’ Inside, four Insulate Britain activists were on trial for causing a public nuisance. The

Is Labour brave enough to say the unsayable about the NHS?

Will this finally be the government which gets on top of the voracious financial monster that is the NHS and tackles its chronic over-spending? No, I can’t quite see that, either. But it has to be said that the new interim Chief Executive of NHS England – Sir Jim Mackey, who has replaced Amanda Pritchard

Ross Clark

Matt Wrack will be a hardline teaching union boss

It has a whiff of the old trailer for Jaws 2, the one where viewers were disabused of the idea that it was safe to go back into the water.  In January, Matt Wrack, the left-wing, Corbyn-supporting general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) lost his attempt for re-election. But if anyone thought it

Why is the UK economy stalling?

Giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee this afternoon, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey doubled down on a point he has previously made to the committee: the economy is being pulled down by an extraordinary fall in productivity in the public sector. Relative to 2019, he said, productivity across the public sector is now

Ross Clark

Trade unions are calling the shots under Labour

Is Angela Rayner really being sidelined in this government, having been steamrollered by the rush for growth championed by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves? That is a hypothesis which has been put forward many times in recent months, but it is not true to judge by the reaction of businesses to the Employment Rights Bill.

Ross Clark

Why the left hates Gail’s

Is there any more evil influence on the world than Gail’s the bakery? It has thrown thousands of poor people out of their homes by gentrifying their neighbourhoods; it has destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of hard-working owners of independent coffee shops by drawing away business; it has scorned the poor by throwing away its

Ross Clark

How I became a missing person

The Forcan Ridge off Glen Shiel can be a tricky place this time of year. There wasn’t a huge amount of snow, but the rocks in places were encased in ice. Without crampons, an ice axe and a head for what you are doing there are plenty of opportunities to fall to your death, but

The Climate Change Committee is living in cloud cuckoo land

Energy bills may be going up and the economy may be flatlining, but not for long. Thankfully, the government’s Climate Change Committee has the answer. In a press release introducing the committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget, published this morning, interim chair Piers Forster declares: ‘The committee is delighted to be able to present a good news

Why BP is ditching renewables

Among the big, bad oil companies in borstal for environmental offenses, BP has long been the relatively benign one, the class pet. Remember how former chief executive Lord Browne two decades ago promised to take the company ‘Beyond Petroleum’ to a golden future of clean energy? In 2004, in a forerunner of the ESG indices

Is Britain’s ‘net zero economy’ really booming?

If you live opposite the vacant site in Northumberland that was supposed to become the Britishvolt ‘gigafactory’ pumping out batteries for the electric car industry, or near the Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight where half the 600 workers have been told they face redundancy, you might just struggle to believe that

The online shopping boom is well and truly over

So much for ‘dry’ and ‘no buy’ January. The UK public seems to have thoroughly rebelled against efforts to persuade them to work off the excesses of the festive season. In particular, we seem to have stuffed our faces somewhat. The retail sales figures put out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning

Ross Clark

The shame of Big Energy’s £3.9 billion profit windfall

It is one of the world’s great mysteries: if wind and solar energy are supposed to be so cheap then why does the UK – which generates a higher proportion of its electricity from wind or solar than virtually any other developed country – have higher electricity prices than any other member of the International

Why did Starmer rush the ennoblement of Poppy Gustafsson?

Hereditary peers are for the chop, but life peers still have their uses. Last October the process of ennoblement allowed Keir Starmer to appoint a minister of state for investment in rapid preparation for his investment summit of that month. Finding no-one on the green benches who took his fancy, he turned to Poppy Gustafsson,

Ross Clark

Does Trump want to strike an Arctic oil deal with Putin?

The decision by Donald Trump to hold peace talks with Russia on ending the Ukraine war – without Ukraine actually being present – is starting to look even more disgraceful. It transpires that the war was not the only item on the agenda in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. A significant part of the day’s business