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
Last Wednesday, Philip Hammond made a joke at Norman Lamont’s expense by reminding the world of how John Major’s first chancellor was sacked after a negative public reaction to his budget in 1993. Hammond, one suspects, is already beginning to regret his gag as Lamont today became the latest Conservative to damn his plans to
Theresa May’s announcement that the vote on raising National Insurance contributions for the self-employed will be delayed until after the publication of the Taylor Report in Modern Employment Practises in the autumn is presumably meant to reassure us that the government is taking seriously the many objections which have been levied against the policy in
There is a very big winner from today’s budget. Not adults in social care, not schools, but Ukip. Philip Hammond has handed a huge political opportunity: to position itself as the party of the self-employed: the taxi driver, the brickie, the plumber, the small shop-owner. These used to be natural Tories. From today, with Hammond
Were I a Labour party strategist I wouldn’t be too distressed by the news that the party has lost 26,000 members since last summer. On the contrary, I would regard it as the possible beginning of a very long road back to power. Until Jeremy Corbyn came along there was a received wisdom that modern
If you want to know why we never seem to be able to develop a sensible and proportionate policy towards prosecuting sex offences look no further than the comment threads beneath this morning’s story about Chief Constable Simon Bailey. Bailey, speaking on the Today programme, suggested that men who view child porn should not automatically
What calamity could possibly be worse than waking up to find that the small, rarefied town near your weekend cottage has lost its bookshop, leaving you nowhere to go browsing for the latest tome by George Monbiot or Naomi Klein before going home for tea and crumpets? Answer: when a new bookshop opens up, purporting
So, Ukip is finished. So says Matthew Parris in the Times this morning, as well as Marina Hyde in the Guardian – who takes Paul Nuttall’s declaration that he is ‘going nowhere’ in a slightly different way that he intended. The emerging narrative of Thursday’s by-elections is that Labour had an appalling night from which
When you hear of universities rewarding their vice-chancellors fat salaries – they averaged £277,000 last year, up 5 per cent on the previous year – it would be easy to think that they have evolved into businesses, driven by a great spirit of enterprise. When universities minister Jo Johnson made the proposal for two year
Just when you were minded to think that Supreme Court judges were a bunch of diehard liberals whose fundamentalist belief in the application of human rights overrides common sense, they deliver a judgement which makes them look like the pathetic toadies of an authoritarian government. This morning the court upheld a rule that forbids British
Many farmers, asserted the Earl of Sandwich in a Lords debate last July, were now experiencing ‘regrexit’ – having voted to leave the EU they were now realising that the £3.2 billion worth of subsidies they had received from the EU in 2013 were now under threat. Or were they? Whether any farmers really did suffer
Another week, and more good economic news which has not been awarded the attention it deserves. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has released economic growth figures for December, which show a much stronger-than-expected economy. Construction output in December was up 1.8 per cent on November, and 0.6 per cent up on December 2015. Manufacturing
In contrast to the many stranglers and IRA terrorists who have become cause célèbres for justice campaigners over the years, there has been no audible campaign claiming that Rolf Harris, jailed in 2014 for 12 historic sex offences, is a victim of a miscarriage of justice. Nevertheless, the failure yesterday of an attempt to convict
It has been clear for some time that the pre-referendum warnings made by Bank of England governor Mark Carney were wide of the mark. Last May, he said that a vote for Brexit would pose an ‘immediate and significant threat’ to the UK economy, increasing unemployment, hitting growth, possibly to the point of recession. Today,
I am no fan of Donald Trump, but I can stand far enough back from his presidency to see that many of his critics are inadvertently already doing his re-election campaign for him. Today, Starbucks has reacted to Trump’s US travel ban on citizens of seven Middle Eastern and African countries by defiantly saying that
Can there be a bunch of more self-serving individuals than the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which annually presents its assessment of global politics in the form of its ‘Doomsday Clock’? Yesterday, the organisation announced that it was moving its clock forward by 30 seconds so that it now stands at two
I don’t know about Donald Trump’s press conferences, but there are certainly enough ‘alternative facts’ being spewed out by the Remain lobby. This morning the Office of National Statistics (ONS) produced its first estimate for economic growth in the last quarter of 2016. It came out at 0.6 per cent, a notch up from the
Older readers might remember the night in April 1992 when, unexpectedly, a tyranny of the majority returned John Major’s Conservative government to power. That same night a local bunch of tyrants in Huntingdon sent Major back to Westminster with a majority of over 30,000, while a tyrannical mob up in Nottingham did the same for
So Madonna says she doesn’t really want to blow up the White House. Her remarks at Saturday’s women’s march — ‘Yes, I’m angry, yes, I am outraged, Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House’ – have, she says, been ‘taken wildly out of context’. She has missed the point.
You would think there was enough financial scandal in the world to keep MPs exercised without denouncing the owners of private boxes at the Royal Albert Hall. But no. Sharon Hodgson, member for Washington and Sunderland West, has just shown once again that what really gets a Labour MP seething with indignation is not wrongdoing
A hard Brexit, currency markets seemed to indicate yesterday, would mean an even weaker pound. How, then, to explain this afternoon’s surge in sterling, which surged from just over $1.20 to just under $1.24 within a couple of hours of Theresa May’s speech? The rise more than reversed the falls since Monday morning, when the
