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
Would Labour’s plan to impose VAT on private school fees really raise £1.6 billion, as the party claims? Not according to a research paper by the education think tank EDSK. The £1.6 billion figure is often attributed to the Resolution Foundation, yet the original source, says EDSK, is a paper by the Fabian Society in 2011
If you think nothing works in Britain now, just wait. Wait, that is, until a future government (I’ll guess a Labour one, but can never tell with the Conservatives any more) introduces a universal basic income – that is a guaranteed, unconditional income for everyone, regardless of means, and regardless of whether they are working,
Another week, another extravagant claim for climatic doom goes unchallenged. Speaking on the Today programme on Wednesday morning, Dale Vince – the founder of Electrocity and donor to both Don’t Stop Oil and the Labour party – asserted: ‘40,000 people across Europe died from excess heat last summer. That’s part of the climate crisis. People
Liz Truss’ fallen star has been rising again of late (at least a few degrees above the horizon) as gilt yields return to the heights they reached during her brief premiership. Together with sluggish GDP figures this has led many to wonder whether she was not right, after all, to make growth the absolute priority
Not for the first time, a gulf has opened up between house price indices. This morning, Nationwide reports that average prices fell by 0.1 per cent in May (following a surprise rise of 0.4 per cent in April), taking annual house price inflation down to minus 3.4 per cent. That will surprise no-one, given the
It is nearly a year now since the latest round of rail strikes began. They have cost union members thousands of pounds in lost income. But according to Mick Whelan, general secretary of Aslef, on the Today programme this morning the union has made ‘zero progress’ in its negotiations with the Rail Delivery Group, which
Has food price inflation finally peaked? Figures released by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) this morning reveal that food prices were up 15.4 per cent in the past 12 months, down from 15.7 per cent in the year to April. Last week’s figures from the Office of National Statistics also showed a small fall, from
So, Just Stop Oil is now His Majesty’s Official Opposition. Keir Starmer has adopted the group’s main demand – no development of new oil and gas reserves – as his own. Presumably he hopes to attract green votes, especially in Scotland where the SNP has a similar policy. But it means going into the next
It wasn’t long ago that supermarkets stood accused of selling food too cheaply. Their price wars and two-for-the-price-of-one deals were destroying farmers, undermining local shops and making us fat. How long ago that now seems, with the government now considering 1970s-style price controls. While the measures would apparently be voluntary, they would fix the prices
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, not at the beginning of the year when the wise and good were confidently predicting that Brexit-bound Britain would turn out to have the worst economy in the developed world in 2023. The UK economy would be contracting, they said, while almost everyone else’s expanded. We have
So much for price-fixing. The energy price cap is finally set to fall, with the result that the average household should have to pay no more than £2,074 a year for its energy from 1 July. The price cap itself has fallen from £3,280, but bills were in practice limited by the government’s other great
Is there anything that might cause the much-predicted crash in UK house prices? Not – evidently – a pandemic (which perversely caused prices to surge). A sharp, upwards jerk in the Bank of England’s base rate to 4.5 per cent didn’t do it either. The latest edition of the Office for National Statistics’s UK House Price
Last week it was President Macron who was rowing back on green measures. In a speech he asserted that Europe has, for now, gone far enough – if it introduces any more regulations without the rest of the world following suit then it will put investment at risk and harm the economy. This week, the
The name Chris Whitty will forever be associated in people’s minds with Covid-19. But in a recent cri de coeur he reminded us not only that he continues to exist following the end of his daily appearances on our TV screens, but that there are many other ways in which pathogens are out to get
BT has announced that it will cut up to 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade. The company currently employs 130,000 staff, and it could cut up to 42 per cent of its workforce. BT has struggled in recent years as the one-time nationalised giant has had to keep up with a rapidly-evolving communications
Keir Starmer has made the anodyne demand that Britain seek a ‘closer trading agreement’ with the EU. But why doesn’t he go the whole hog and make it Labour policy to rejoin the single market? The Labour leader could hardly be accused of seeking to reverse Brexit. Some Leavers, prior to the 2016 referendum, wanted Britain
The contrast couldn’t be greater. In Britain a wealthy cabinet minister goes on television to boast of how he is installing a heat pump in his home – something his government is proposing to force on millions of British homeowners over the next few years in spite of them costing many thousands of pounds more
Whatever happened to Singapore on Thames? Weren’t we, after leaving the EU, supposed to be forging a future as a deregulated, low-tax, business-friendly enclave situated 20 miles off Calais? It isn’t quite looking that way at the moment. We are reinventing ourselves as Brussels on Thames – only more so. Do our bureaucrats really need
As they call yet more strikes today and tomorrow, rail unions are the leading candidates for the most miserable and destructive institutions in contemporary Britain. Train operating companies, though, are not far behind. Having ripped us off for years by ruthlessly exploiting the local monopolies gifted to them through the franchise system they can’t even run
If there ever were a couple of policies the government desperately needs to give it a chance of being re-elected next year it is rental reform and leasehold. Both in their own way would make life a good deal less miserable for the younger voters who have drifted away from the party in recent years.
