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
Is there anything we use in everyday life which was not, at some point on its journey to acceptance, denounced as a menace? Certainly not cars, bicycles, trains and aeroplanes, all of which were accused of various hazards and temptations. To take trains, for example, some confidently predicted that their passengers would suffocate at high
Thierry Breton, the European Commission for the internal market, lost no time in rattling his sabre at Twitter as soon as it was announced that the company had accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy it. Even though Musk had made no announcement on how he intends to run the company, beyond stating his belief in
Why does Elon Musk really want to buy Twitter? Is it vanity, political activism, or a shrewd financial move? Musk’s reputation lies in building companies from scratch, yet Twitter is a mature business. It is hard to see why that should excite him anything like transforming the car industry or creating a market for space
Any Conservative who doubts that Labour’s promise to abolish non-dom status could seriously damage the government needs to look at the fate of Rishi Sunak. So recently the heir apparent to the Tory leadership, Sunak has this week plunged to bottom in a poll of the most popular cabinet members. It comes, of course, just
If Boris Johnson is forced from office by his own MPs, partygate will only be part of the story. Another huge part of it will be his failure to appreciate the full scale of the cost of living crisis now washing over millions of households – especially his reluctance to address the issue of energy
We have yet to see the first sample papers for the new GCSE in natural history to be announced by education secretary Nadhim Zahawi this week, but the fact that it has come about after lobbying by Caroline Lucas, Chris Packham and other green activists is a pretty good guide as to what might be
Remember how David Cameron’s government was going to end Nimbyism by having local communities vote for new housing developments on their doorsteps? That didn’t end so well. Last October, following a shock defeat in the Amersham by-election, the Prime Minister gave up on building more new homes in the shires in favour of reverting to
Boris Johnson made a big error, alright. But it wasn’t walking into a room where his wife had prepared him a surprise birthday cake. It was in overriding his liberal instincts and imposing highly prescriptive lockdown rules in the first place. If, in March 2020, he had stood up to advisers and said that no,
How tempting it must be for Rishi Sunak to chuck in his job as Chancellor. ‘My chances of ever becoming PM have plummeted to next to nothing,’ he must be thinking, ‘so why not go off and earn some serious money instead, away from the spotlight?’ I have no insight into the state of the
The political story for the moment is the cost of living crisis. But by the end of the year could we be talking about a recession instead? We shouldn’t read too much into one year’s economic growth figures, especially given how often they are revised upwards or downwards. But February’s figures, published this morning, have
Today’s Energy Security Strategy puts energy security at the heart of the debate over energy and environmental policy, where it always should have been. There is little question that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought about a big change to the tone of energy policy, but will today’s announcements really wean us off Russian
As they say in the music business, where there’s a hit, there’s a writ. It is something that no one knows better than Ed Sheeran, who yesterday won a legal battle over claims that his song Shape of You plagiarised an earlier song, Oh Why by Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue. The judge ruled that
This week’s rise in National Insurance has caused the government enough trouble, but it faces potentially an even bigger problem next year – when it tries to prise the extra £12 billion raised in NI away from the NHS and use it to fund social care instead. The extra revenue from NI has been earmarked
It is been a familiar story in recent years: a Budget that sounded reasonably good when delivered, but that unravels in subsequent days. Rishi Sunak’s spring statement was no exception. When he delivered it a fortnight ago, he said he was going to compensate low-earners by raising the primary threshold for National Insurance, bringing it
When allied military operations go well or badly, we very quickly hear about them. But what about sanctions? It is about time that we started to ask: are they hitting their target, or are some of them slewing off, out of control, straight into civilian targets? Notionally, sanctions have been a success – or at
Brexit, as Boris reminded us many times during the referendum campaign, would give Britain the power to make its own laws, unencumbered by constant directives from the European Commission. But it will take a long while to disentangle UK laws from the influence of the EU, as the government may be about to discover in
Labour will try all it can to bring up the subject at every opportunity; as will a few backbench MPs. But partygate just doesn’t feel likely to prove fatal to Boris Johnson anymore. War in Ukraine has changed the dynamic: fussing over lockdown parties seems trivial and out of date. Keir Starmer’s continued plugging away
The private motor car is, of course, an environmental vandal which needs to be driven out of our towns and cities for the good of the planet and for the benefit of residents who are being killed by traffic fumes. We know this because we keep being told by some of those on the left
The tank columns are stalled; one or two towns captured from the Ukrainians have been retaken. Russia’s war effort has been going nowhere fast for the past fortnight – unless you count the constant pounding and destruction of apartment blocks a form of progress. But then is the economic war being waged against Russia making
Did Joe Biden mean to threaten Russia with a chemical weapons attack? That seemed to be what he implied at yesterday’s Nato summit when he said Russia using chemical weapons in Ukraine ‘would trigger a response in kind’ from the US. To respond ‘in kind’ means to respond in the same way – i.e. by
