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
Not for the first time, metropolitan-based commentators and MPs have proved themselves to be out of kilter with the wider population. But there is an especially interesting disparity over the government’s proposals for ten-year jail sentences for travellers who try to conceal they have travelled from one of 33 ‘red list’ countries in order to
If your local pub ever reopens, don’t be surprised if one thing is missing: the till. The anti-cash lobby is seeking to take advantage of the pandemic to rid us of our banknotes once and for all. When UK Finance — the trade body for the banking and payments industry — pushed the government two
Coronavirus, we have been warned many times, has brought scammers out in force. But lobbyists are not far behind. Their activities may not be illegal, but they are pretty disgraceful nonetheless. Hardly had the coronavirus outbreak begun in January than my email inbox began to fill up with press releases claiming that the contagion was
Reports have filtered through this morning about Public Health England’s assessment of the efficacy of the two vaccines so far administered to the public. The results have not yet been published, but the efficacy rates quoted in the Sun suggest that the Pfizer vaccine has proved to be between 79 and 84 per cent effective at
Scottish Widows is committed to net zero alright. For years, the endowment policy I had with it was worth pretty well just what I had paid into it. Although, on second thoughts, maybe Maria Nazarova-Doyle, head of pension investments at Scottish Widows, wasn’t referring to the returns on its policies when she said this week:
Schools in England, it seems, will reopen fully on 8 March at the earliest – a full two months after they closed. The Prime Minister has declined to bring this forward, in spite of new Covid cases falling at a rate of 25 per cent per week. The Scottish and Welsh governments have both said
What to make of the news this morning that Oxford University is to ask for volunteers to take part in a trial to ‘mix and match’ the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines? Researchers will ask for 820 volunteers, all over 50 years old, who will be given two shots of a vaccine, two weeks apart. Some
Almost a year after the statistics were first published, the country remains horrified by the daily total of Covid 19-related deaths. Meanwhile, we are rather less apt to notice other statistics related to harm and death, which may be an unintended by-product of the fight against Covid-19. The Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) latest figures for the
I’m not a great fan of economic modelling. Remember, for example, the Treasury’s infamous claim that unemployment would rise by between 500,000 and 800,000 within two years of a vote for Brexit (i.e. before we had actually left). In the event, unemployment fell in 2018 to reach the lowest level since the mid-1970s. Yet having
Last year, when Rishi Sunak, after some dithering, came up with a scheme to help the self-employed during the pandemic, he made clear that it would come with a quid pro ro: higher taxes for the self-employed in the longer run. With his second Budget coming up on 3 March will he take the initiative
Ever since the Oxford-AstraZeneca team announced the results of its Phase 3 trials last November, there has been a suspicion among some that their vaccine is the poor relation of the messenger RNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. It might be cheap compared with the others, it might be easy to store and transport,
A year on, in one sense we’re pretty well back to where we started — with the government attempting to snuff out the South African variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the same way as it did the original Wuhan version. It didn’t work then, and we rapidly moved to the second phase of the
A year ago today Britain awoke to a rather muted celebration – which seemed to consist largely of a bubble car driving around Parliament Square with a Union Jack in tow – ready to face up to a brave new future outside the EU. Who would have imagined then that the Observer would mark the
When Donald Trump returned to the White House after a brief spell in hospital with Covid-19 last October he made a video attributing his rapid recovery to a drug he called ‘Regeneron’. ‘They call it a therapeutic drug, but to me it wasn’t therapeutic – it made me better,’ he said. ‘I call that a
Who doesn’t wish they hadn’t tucked away a few GameStop shares at the beginning of this year? It’s not a great company – more a Blockbuster Video whose time has come and gone, another bricks and mortar retailer destroyed by a shift to online sales, in this case of video games. But what does that
Imperial College’s React study was in the news again this morning. The latest instalment swabbed 167,642 people between 6 and 22 January and found that 2,282 of them tested positive. A weighted average suggested that 1.57 per cent of the population had the virus between those dates. The study concluded: ‘Prevalence remained high throughout, but
As Mark Twain didn’t quite say, there are only three certain things in life: death, taxes and yet another government-backed bung for the housing market. The latest instalment is the 2021 to 2023 Help to Buy scheme, which carries on the theme of offering subsidised loans to first-time buyers – and only first-time buyers. Here’s
Just how strong an immunity do Covid patients develop after they have acquired the infection and how long does it last? The question is vital to the likely future passage of the pandemic, and to how well vaccines will protect us in the long term. Several studies have suggested there is a sharp decline in
Schools were the last institutions to close and can be expected to be the first to reopen. But just how big a part do schools play in the spread of Covid-19? The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has published a review of the evidence from 17 countries and concluded that the reopening of
Yesterday, the news was dominated by Imperial College’s React study which suggested – in contrast to the fall in recorded new infections – that the prevalence of Covid-19 in the general population was either static during the first ten days of lockdown (between 6 and 15 January), or could even have risen slightly. This morning,
