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
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could debate climate change for five minutes without hearing about polar bears or being subjected to footage of them perched precariously on a melting ice floe? But that is a little too much to expect. Polar bears have become the pin-ups of climate change, the poor creatures who are
How excited should we be about the latest news of the Oxford vaccine? At least this time – in contrast to previous updates, which have tended to come via Downing Street briefings – we have a paper in a scientific journal, the Lancet, to go by. The paper reports that 1,077 people took part in
Will Labour ever stop pushing for punitive taxation? Not content with gifting the Conservatives an 80 seat majority in December, the supposedly more moderate Labour party under Keir Starmer is already dreaming up ways it can extract large sums from our pockets. Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds floated a ‘wealth tax’ at the weekend, so that
It is steadily becoming clear where the woke brigade will go once the current moral panic over racism has run its course (which can’t be long, following the news that London estate agents have stopped using the term ‘master bedroom’ to avoid its connotations with slavery). A week ago Andrew Willshire wrote here of how
Without going into the ins and outs of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s withdrawal from royal life, still less the merits of the Duchess’s privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, a claim made by her lawyers this morning cannot be allowed to pass without comment. They claim: ‘This contribution of public funds towards
Just why has Leicester been locked down, its economy placed back in the deep freeze and many more of its citizens condemned to lose their jobs? Since the announcement, the country has gone back into panic mode. Leicester, according to much reporting, is in the midst of a second spike – and is surely just
The declaration by US authorities that Huawei and fellow Chinese comms firm ZTE are national security threats is likely to have a clear outcome. It will knock the UK government further down the path it already seemed to be travelling: reversing its decision to allow Huawei to play a role in Britain’s 5G communications network. Boris Johnson’s government surprised
Imagine if a vaccine for Covid-19 was approved tomorrow, and that within weeks we had all been vaccinated. Would life be able to go quickly back more or less to normal? Don’t bet on it. The long shadow of Covid-19 will mean mass panic every time another novel virus comes to light. Indeed, news of
Antibody tests on random samples of the population have so far shown much lower levels of general infection than the government’s scientific advisers claimed would be necessary to attain ‘herd immunity’. In London, for example, tests have shown that 17 per cent of the population have antibodies to Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. In
One of the mysteries of the Covid-19 crisis is how the disease seemed to bubble up out of nowhere in Italy at the end of February – at a time when it seemed to be under control in China. In spite of local quarantines and the isolation of individual patients, the epidemic quickly took hold.
How helpful of the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen to reveal that there are two or three people in America who are happy to join in a sing-along containing the line ‘Liberals, what we gonna do? Inject them with the Wuhan flu.’ Trouble is, it really only was two or three people. If Baron Cohen really
Imagine if a European agency had just announced that it was to close a site in the Midlands, withdrawing from Britain and taking jobs of scientists with it. It isn’t hard to work out where that would feature on BBC news – up top. It would be presented as another cost of Brexit, another result
The Covidiots are at it again – crowding onto beaches in flagrant breach of lockdown rules, treating the pandemic as if it were an extended bank holiday. Pictures of crowded beaches on Thursday inspired Chris Whitty to tweet that Covid-19 is ‘still in general circulation’, and worked Matt Hancock into such a froth that he
Will Britain turn into Zimbabwe or Japan? In other words, will the fallout from the economic crisis precipitated by Covid 19 lead to hyper-inflation or to deflation? Are we going back to the 1970s – or to a strange world of which no living Briton has any recollection? Or, more graphically, will it be savers
As is often said, choose your statistics carefully and you can use them make just about any point you want to. But rarely does the Office for National Statistics put out two releases on the same day whose statistics point in totally opposite directions. If you listened to the BBC midday news, you may have
Infections up 15 per cent in a fortnight, with 37,000 recorded in a day. For those who are inclined to see it that way, the graph of US Covid-19 cases is confirmation of the folly of reopening society far too soon, and ‘throwing away’ all that hard work during lockdown, as Matt Hancock likes to
With the Covid alert level being reduced from 4 to 3 it is surely only a matter of days before the government announces that it is relaxing the two metre rule – a move for which the hospitality industry has been lobbying for heavily, warning that pubs and restaurants will not be able to reopen
Cynics might wonder whether the timing of Matt Hancock’s announcement this morning that the Covid alert level is to be reduced from four to three is an attempt to deflect the government’s embarrassment from the failed test and trace app. The cynics may well be right with the timing (although the decision is ultimately in
Police were no match for the Black Lives Matter mob that pulled down a statue of Edward Colston last week and threw it in Bristol harbour. But the Scouts are evidently a force to be reckoned with. No sooner had Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council announced that it was planning to take down a statue
It would not have been obvious to those drafting the Conservative manifesto last autumn that they were planting a very large bomb beneath the government. After all, the triple lock had already featured in three general election campaigns and had yet to cause the public finances a problem. But the very special circumstances of the
