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
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
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
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
Did anyone really expect Huw Edwards to return the £200,000 he ‘earned’ – or, more correctly, was paid – between his arrest in November 2023 and when he finally resigned from the BBC the following April? The BBC’s chairman, Samir Shah, appeared to think so when he faced the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media
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
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.
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
It was reported over the weekend that the government has dropped ‘the right to switch off’ from its Employment Rights Bill. Such a right, it has been widely asserted, had appeared in Labour’s manifesto for last year’s general election, promising that employees would be granted a legal right to ignore their boss’s emails outside their
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This week: Nigel’s gang – Reform’s plan for power.Look at any opinion survey or poll, and it’s clear that Reform is hard to dismiss, write Katy Balls and James Heale. Yet surprisingly little is known about the main players behind the scenes who make up Nigel Farage’s new gang. There are ‘the lifers’ – Dan
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
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
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
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
I am not sure about the capacity of AI to take over the world and suppress humanity, but big tech certainly has the ability to spark a trade war. There is a fuss brewing right now over an encryption system known as Advanced Data Protection available on iPhones and other Apple devices. Several weeks ago,
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
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
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,
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
Is it any wonder that the economy is struggling in spite of an apparently booming jobs market, with employers finding it difficult to hire recruits and average earnings rising by 5.9 per cent in the past year? Here is a shocking statistic which goes a long way to explaining the apparent paradox: there are now
Several weeks ago, just in advance of Donald Trump’s second presidency, there was a mass withdrawal of US financial institutions from Mark Carney’s Net Zero Banking Alliance – which committed members to adopt policies of reducing lending to fossil fuel companies and to take other measures aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Are UK banks now
