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
Has Boris decided this election is in the bag? I ask because this afternoon he’s made just about the first bold policy announcement of the campaign. After a safety-first manifesto and little other announcements so as not to frighten the horses, he has stuck his neck out and suggested that the TV licence might be
Why can’t the great and good of the climate establishment mention higher temperatures, disappearing sea ice and rising sea levels without also throwing in floods, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires? Al Gore does it, David Attenborough does it and UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres did it at the opening of his annual climate beanfeast in Spain
Another day, another uncosted bribe from Labour. This time, Corbyn is promising to slash a third off rail fares and allow children to travel for free. What wonderful, munificent people we have putting themselves forward to lead us. And of course, it won’t cost the taxpayer an extra penny because, as Labour’s transport spokesman, Andy
Whoever wins the election, three things are certain: borrowing is going to rise, taxes are going to have to go up – and there will be a lot more trees. There may even be enough trees to replace those lost to produce all those Lib Dem election leaflets and bogus newspapers. The election campaign has
Labour is, of course, wholly committed to gender equality. So why then is it proposing to borrow £58 billion to perpetuate a blatant form of discrimination: the gap in retirement ages between men and women? There is, of course, a straightforward answer to this: on Friday’s Question Time special, Boris Johnson was asked if he
This election campaign has long since descended into a contest to see who can spray around the largest sums of cash. So it should come as no great surprise that the Conservatives promised an eye-catching initiative to outdo Labour on nurse numbers. Jeremy Corbyn wants to provide an extra 20,000 new nurses but Boris has
It is quite a challenge to boil down the Labour manifesto to its 10 silliest ideas, but here are my nominations: 1. ‘Within a decade we will reduce average full-time weekly working hours to 32 across the economy, with no loss of pay, funded by productivity’ – as well as introducing four new bank holidays
I have already decided how I am going to vote in the general election: for whichever party produces a manifesto with the fewest uses of the phrase ‘green jobs’. Was there ever such a numb-skulled phrase? It has become the fallback for any politician who hasn’t the faintest idea of how we are going to
John McDonnell this morning invited Phones4U entrepreneur John Caudwell around for a cup of tea. If I were Caudwell I would treat it a bit like an invitation to afternoon tea in Miss Marple’s village – and keep a keen nose out for the smell of bitter almonds. No good will come of the invitation,
‘Elect me once more and we will finish off socialism for good,’ declared Mrs Thatcher before the 1987 general election, or words to that effect. Not so fast. Thirty two years on and we are engaged in an unseemly contest as to which party can increase public spending, and with it the size of the
When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise
Donald Tusk has been ridiculed for suggesting that Brexit marks the end of the British Empire. But he has a point. The 31 January 2020 – assuming the date doesn’t move again – should finally bring to a close Britain’s involvement in colonial delusion. And that is exactly why we are right to leave. Like the
I’m sending someone down to the supermarket later to do a bit of shopping on my behalf. I have given them a rough idea of what I want but my main instruction is that they must spend the entire £150 that I am giving them. If that was really how I did my shopping
One wonders what Tom Watson would have left in his vocabulary if the Conservatives announced a policy of kicking away the crutches of the elderly – given, that is, that this morning he described the ‘Tory’ policy of abolishing free TV licences for the over 75s as ‘utterly callous’. Ending universal free licences for the
For once, Jeremy Corbyn is right. The government’s announcement of a moratorium in fracking is an election stunt – and attempt to snatch a few leave-voting seats in the North at the expense of damaging Britain’s energy policy for the next couple of decades, as well as causing higher carbon emissions. Announcing the block on
Until this morning, Nigel Farage’s creation of the Brexit Party stood as an object lesson in how to found a new political party in a two party system. Many have tried this of course, from David Owen to Chuka Umunna, and all have floundered – some quicker than others. The Brexit party, by contrast, went
It has been bizarre to hear the London Fire Brigade taking the brunt of the blame for the deaths of 72 people at Grenfell Tower. Its commissioner Dany Cotton certainly deserves condemnation for persisting in telling residents to stay put when it ought to have been clear early on that fire was engulfing the building
Yet again, listeners to the Today programme awoke this morning to hear a dire forecast for the economic consequences of leaving the EU – with no critical analysis nor even explanation of how the forecast was arrived at. This morning’s horror story came courtesy of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), a
We are, of course, on the cusp of an exodus of UK businesses as they leave to set up home in other EU countries. We know this because Remainers keep telling us so. Banking jobs are going to disappear to Frankfurt, manufacturing jobs to France or the Czech Republic. Or maybe not. It is not
As of this afternoon, we really are getting close to the endgame. Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters today: ‘If we have a deal we have a deal and there is no need for prolongation. That is the British view and that is my view too.’ According to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, when asked what would happen if
