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
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
Anders Tegnell is either a hero or villain, depending on whether you think Sweden’s approach to Covid-19 has saved the economy and respected individual freedom or whether you think it has needlessly cost lives. But is the country’s refusal to impose a lockdown a result of his wisdom and judgement – or was the Swedish
Just how a big a deal is today’s announcement that the steroid anti-inflammatory drug Dexamethasone has been shown to be effective at lowering the death toll of Covid-19 patients? At first sight, this is a modest breakthrough. The drug was shown to reduce the death rate among patients on ventilators by a third and among
Beijing’s renewed outbreak of Covid-19 could not possibly, of course, have originated within China. It had to be implanted on the population via imported salmon. But thank God the manager of the city’s Xinfadi food market has been dismissed, so it won’t happen again. That, at least, is the Chinese version of events. For weeks,
The suspension of schooling has already led to fears of a lasting impact on children’s education, especially among poorer children. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, the Education Endowment Foundation has estimated that a six-month closure of schools could lead to an attainment gap of 36 per cent between children from the
Is anyone really surprised that GDP fell by 20.4 percent in April? Perhaps we should be. It doesn’t sound high enough to me. We have just been through a great economic experiment in which most shops have been forced to close, all pubs and restaurants been forced to shut their doors and the public ordered
What would happen if the government suddenly announced that from next week it was ending all lockdown measures and that life could go back to normal? Would we end up with the dreaded second spike as people were suddenly released to go and celebrate in pubs and clubs, jamming public spaces, spreading the virus as
I don’t know how much of a organisational structure there is to Black Lives Matter in Britain but if I were part of it I’m sure I would be furious at the crowd who felled the stature of Edward Colston and deposited it in Bristol harbour. They have set off a tsunami of civil virtue-signalling
Resigning in disgrace has come to take on a very different meaning than it did in the days when John Profumo withdrew from public life and dedicated himself to Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in east London. Now, it seems to mean a few weeks in the sinbin before you are allowed to creep back
At midnight last night Britain passed a milestone: it was two months since a coal plant anywhere in the country fed any electricity into the national grid. You have to go back to the 1880s for the last time this occurred – to 1882, to be precise, when a single coal-fired power station was opened
There seems to be only one certainty with Covid-19: that every day we will be bombarded with fresh evidence and scientific opinion that is contradictory and leaves us a long, long way from understanding this disease. Just when it seemed that antibody tests were indicating infection rates of no more than 10 per cent in
Are we going to see a dreaded second spike in coronavirus cases? The question has a new poignancy after a week of mass protests where all pretence at social distancing seems to have gone out of the window. Life is getting back to normal, employment is sharply on the rise again and markets are soaring.
The government has placed a lot of hope in its test and trace system, but even disregarding teething problems with the smartphone app and reports of some of the 25,000 contact tracers being left idle, is it even possible for it to achieve its objective? The problem with Covid-19 all along, and the reason it
All through the Covid-19 pandemic we have been hampered by a lack of data on just how many people have had the disease. Given that several studies have indicated that as many as 80 per cent of people who are infected show no symptoms whatsoever, it is extremely difficult to estimate this crucial figure –
Huge stock has been placed in the development of a vaccine for Covid-19, with the Prime Minister suggesting this week that the disease will not be properly defeated without one. The government has held out on the idea of a vaccine being available as early as September. The CanSino vaccine is only one of 120
You might have thought that of all people, leaders of teaching unions would be concerned about the effect of lockdown on children’s education and, in particular, on the gap in attainment between children from the wealthiest and least-wealthy households. From the beginning of lockdown in March, it became clear that children were going to have
Professor Neil Ferguson has been a little elusive of late – ever since he was forced to resign after he was revealed to have entertained his married lover at his home, thus breaking lockdown rules. But he did emerge from the woodwork this morning to give evidence to the House of Lords select committee on
Sweden has received quite a kicking for its decision to avoid a lockdown: look at its death rate, critics say, which at 435 per million is several times that of neighbouring Denmark (99) and Norway (44). But there is another country that has taken the Swedish route which is rather harder to criticise. In Japan,
