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
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.
It is widely expected that Justin Welby, having now screwed the crown on Charles III’s head, will shortly retire as Archbishop of Canterbury and put himself out to grass. If so, he is not going quietly. This afternoon, in the House of Lords, he launched a wholesale attack on the government’s Illegal Migration Bill, which
Is there a greater weapon of financial mass destruction than the 100 per cent mortgage? Take out a loan equivalent to the full value of your home and it only takes one bad month for the Halifax house price index to land you in negative equity. If you have bought a new home, you will almost
You might have thought that a heavy defeat for the Conservatives in the local elections would silence those claiming that the government was out to disenfranchise left-wing voters by introducing compulsory photo ID for voters at polling stations. But not a bit of it. Paul Mason was up bright and early bleating about ‘serious vote
The decline of the UK stock market has finally reached the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It has proposed to deregulate it in order to attract more companies to list in London rather than do as, for example, UK-based chip-maker ARM is doing and choosing to list in New York (it was once a UK-listed company
Are BP’s profits of $5 billion in the first quarter of this year really the ‘unearned, unexpected windfalls of war’, as Ed Miliband asserted this morning? The idea that any oil company’s profits are unearned must come as news to the geologists and engineers who are employed in the tricky business of exploring and drilling for oil.
Can a banking crisis really be going this well? After a week of panic withdrawals and a crashing share price, the First Republic Bank in the US will be taken over nearly in its entirety by J P Morgan Chase, in a shotgun marriage facilitated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). No depositors will
Boris Johnson wanted to make Britain ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’. But Grant Shapps is keen to send Britain’s green agenda in a new direction. Speaking at The Spectator’s Energy Summit on 26 April, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net-Zero announced the government’s ambitions for Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage – CCUS – where
The UK car industry is, of course, doomed. First we lost our native manufacturers and then, post Brexit, overseas manufacturers like Honda started to close down their UK factories, too. Finally came the farce of BritishVolt: the Tyneside factory which was going to transform the UK car industry by pumping out batteries, but collapsed before
There is nothing more boring than potholes. I remember that from my own days as a parish councillor. It saps the spirit every time the subject comes up, makes you wish you could be anywhere other than this damned meeting. How much more exciting it must have felt to have been the councillors in Cambridge
Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill isn’t going to win a popularity contest. Speaking on a podcast for Columbia Law School – a medium in which he perhaps felt a little less exposed than had he said it on a British TV programme – he said: ‘Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept
Lockdown ended, the economy reopened – and public sector borrowing went up. Provisional figures for 2022/23 released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the government borrowed £139.2 billion. This is an increase of £18.1 billion on the previous year, when the economy was still being disrupted by Covid. The figure
We have spent a year talking about energy security, but with inflation in food prices running at 19 per cent, how much longer before the debate turns to food security? Ideally, we would have policies which prioritise energy security as well as food security, but sadly the latter seems to have been forgotten. National self-sufficiency in
At 3 p.m. this afternoon, our phones will awaken with a screech announcing impending doom. It won’t be for real (unless a terror group decides it is an opportune moment to launch an attack) but an exercise in testing a new civil defence warning system – an updated version of the network of sirens used
Has the BBC been invaded by a cabal of Extinction Rebellion protesters who have tied up the Director General in his swivel chair? I ask because of a remarkable interview on Newsnight which marks a new low in the objectivity of the BBC’s climate coverage. The flagship BBC Two news programme last night covered the threatened
Did retail sales really fall in March because of the wet weather? This is the excuse being trotted out by the ONS and many others this morning. Or is it really more a case of February’s surprise rise in sales being too good to be true, and the economy not being as perky as we
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary never has exactly been the master of tact, but will his latest outburst make his customers finally ask themselves: do they really want to travel in his planes? Speaking at a Bloomberg event he asserted that Britain will one day rejoin the single market because ‘in the next five to ten
Just what would it take to induce a housing price crash in Britain? Evidently, more than a Bank of England base rate of 4.25 per cent combined with a cost of living crisis. The Office for National Statistics’ House Price Index – the most comprehensive of the house pries indices – shows that prices fell
You have to feel a little sorry for Rishi Sunak. When you have a wife as rich as Akshata Murty, just how do you keep tabs on all her investments, making sure that each one of them is properly declared as an interest in the House of Commons Register? The Prime Minister has suffered the
