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
The existence of the Laffer Curve can be proved by thought-experiment alone. If a government levies an income tax rate of 0 per cent it will raise zero revenue. If it levies a rate of 100 per cent it will also raise zero revenue, as no-one will bother to earn any money – or at
Richmond Park has been in the news a bit lately. It is portrayed as a bastion of wealth and privilege, whose residents stand accused of trying to lord it over ordinary voters. But never mind blocking Brexit, do the people who live there deserve the right to an uninterrupted view of St Paul’s? Outrage has
‘The people of Richmond Park and North Kingston have sent a shockwave through this Conservative Brexit government,’ said Sarah Olney, the victorious Liberal Democrat candidate in the Richmond Park by-election. She went on to announce that she would interpret the result as a personal mandate to vote against the triggering of article 50 if it
Whatever happened to all those great liberal internationalists who damned the vote for Brexit as a case of isolationist Britain turning its back on the outside world? Julian Barnes, for example, is so pro-EU that not only was he against Brexit, he recently told the FT that he would still like Britain to join the Euro. It
Remember how rises in global temperatures were reported earlier in the year? Here is a taste from the Guardian in July. Funny thing is, though, global temperatures are now falling equally sharply – and no-one, with the exception of the Mail on Sunday last weekend, seems to be bothered about reporting it. Not even Nasa
One of the bonuses of a Trump presidency – of which there will be many negatives – is the prospect of a distinct lowering of temperature in relations between Russia and the West. Now, it seems that Vladimir Putin is destined to have a friend in Western Europe, too. The new favourite for next year’s
Under Robert Chote, the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) was meticulous about positioning itself as politically neutral. Since he left to run the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) and Paul Johnson took over it has been far more relaxed about its political position. Increasingly it comes across as yet another centre-left think tank attacking the
Facebook and Barack Obama have said they both want to tackle ‘fake news’ on the internet. The battle should start with government economic forecasts. Does anyone really believe the figures for economic growth up to 2020 made by the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) and pumped out by Philip Hammond in his Autumn Statement? Growth
So, austerity is to end. Or that is what the briefings for Wednesday’s Autumn Statement seem to indicate: Philip Hammond will loosen the purse strings, relax his fiscal targets and give the economy a big public spending-induced buzz – if indeed buzz is quite the right word for what happens when governments spend money. There
However tempting it would be to think otherwise, I don’t think we will be seeing ‘JS’ on Earth again. She is the 14 year old girl who died of cancer and whose mother has won in the high court the right to have her body cryogenically-preserved in the US – against the wishes of her
The BBC was recently exposed for buying more copies of the Guardian than of any other paper. I imagine they must get through quote a pile of Guardians at Oxford Dictionaries, too. How else could they have come up with the idea of making ‘post-truth’ their word of the year? The trouble with the concept
So, another post-Brexit horror story fails to materialise. When the stock market failed to crash and the economy failed to slump, the continuing Remain campaign hit on another fear: inflation. When the CPI rose in September to one per cent, it was predicted to be merely the beginning of a trend which would see prices
One searches in vain on the Guardian website for the name Nissar Hussain. This is odd because the newspaper seems to have spent the past few months engaged in a campaign against hate. Virtually every day there is a column or leader grimly claiming that the vote for Brexit has unleashed a spate of hate.
If there were any doubt that there are too many lawyers in Parliament it has been removed by the meeting, on Monday evening, between backbench Conservative MPs and the justice secretary Liz Truss. The subject was Truss’s alleged failure to defend the judiciary from criticism of last week’s High Court judgement on the enactment of
Is there anything more absurd than hearing a bunch of Remainers claiming that they have achieved a great victory for Parliamentary democracy in today’s High Court ruling that Parliament should vote on the exercise of Article 50, beginning Britain’s exit from the EU? Parliament voted for a referendum, in which the British people voted to
Right, that’s it. No more paying through the nose for sun-dried tomatoes. I am boycotting Waitrose and I urge others to do the same. I am not buying my groceries from a company which has caved into the unscientific balderdash coming from the anti-GM lobby. Waitrose has just announced that it will no longer use
So, there will be no public inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave in 1984, and no left-wing lawyers making a fortune. Maybe Andy Burnham, who seems to have appointed himself as Shadow Minister for Ancient Grievances, would have got further had he demanded an inquiry that was less overtly political, and looked at the violence
So the GMB and the two Uber drivers who thought they ought to receive holiday pay and be guaranteed the national living wage have won their case. An employment tribunal has ruled that Uber was wrong to classify them as self-employed as their contracts placed too much demand on them to work at particular times
So now we know. The recession that we were told would be ‘inevitable’ if we voted to leave the EU was not quite so inevitable after all. In fact, it hasn’t happened at all. The Office of National Statistics’ first estimate of economic growth for the third quarter has the economy growing by 0.5 per
Another day, another backtracking in the doom-laden predictions of what would happen as a result of a vote for Brexit. Back in May, World Trade Organisation (WTO) chief Roberto Azevedo told the Financial Times that Britain would not simply be allowed to ‘cut and paste’ its terms of membership with the WTO. We would, he
