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
Later today, barring last minute developments, Labour and SNP MPs will temporarily unite with the Conservatives’ religious right to defeat the government’s plans to liberalise Sunday trading laws — echoing the defeat which Mrs Thatcher suffered on the same subject 30 years ago. The Left will chirrup, but why is it apparently in favour of
The finance director of EDF, the French energy giant, has quit over its plans to build George Osborne’s new pet project : a new power plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset. At first glance, this seems odd: isn’t the whole problem that the Chancellor has pledged so much taxpayers’ money to this white elephant so
So, FTSE 100 company bosses have come out in favour of staying in the EU – even if, as Ed West notes, the 198 signatories in a letter to the Times represent only 36 companies. I wonder if anyone dropped out at the last moment to reduce the tally below the figure of 200. Of
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thenextrefugeecrisis/media.mp3″ title=”Simon Barnes and the Sea Watch Foundation’s Dr Peter Evans discuss whales” startat=1400] Listen [/audioplayer]Imagine if a bunch of Bollywood celebrities turned up in Britain to protest outside steak houses, lie down in front of abattoir trucks as they tried to leave beef farms and started describing Britain as ‘barbaric’ for killing cattle.
At the risk of sounding like Neville Chamberlain, how bizarre that we should be panic-selling our stock-market investments in reaction to the news of a slight economic slowdown in a faraway country to which we export little and whose direct investments in our own economy created fewer than 5,000 new jobs last year. Throughout the
An Oxford College has done something really offensive, and it doesn’t involve a statue of a white supremacist. Lady Margaret Hall has appointed Benedict Cumberbatch as a visiting fellow. It gets worse. It has elected Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys and Emma Watson from the Harry Potter films to the same post. Why
It is very sporting of John McDonnell to release his tax return for us all to inspect. It is reassuring to see that he isn’t posing as a hero of the working man while living off rent from a property portfolio, and that he hasn’t been working on the side for Vodafone or Google while
In 2007 Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF’s UK arm, made the now-infamous promise that by Christmas 2017 we would be cooking our turkeys using energy generated at Hinkley C nuclear power station. That has already been put back to well into the 2020s. But if you are making plans for Christmas 2025 it
The whole purpose of parliamentary select committees was supposed to be to help inform policy-making. Instead, they have sunk to becoming rather vulgar kangaroo courts used by wannabe barristers of the backbenchers to boost their egos. It took about five minutes at today’s session of the Commons Home Affairs Committee to establish that neither G4S
Was there ever a less convincing scandal than the revelation that a landlord who rents houses to G4S for housing asylum-seekers in Middlesbrough chooses to paint all their doors bright red? This, apparently, is ‘apartheid’, according to a hyperbolic Times headline yesterday morning. As if that were not enough, Ian Swales, former Lib Dem MP for Redcar, said the firm’s decoration policy
Retail empires, like the political and military kind, are tragedies. They grow from modest beginnings, pushing all others aside until they reach their apogee when all competitors seem to have been vanquished. Then they collapse from within. The only difference is that instead of leaving us magnificent cathedrals and palaces they leave us enormous tin sheds.
The Today programme often has one choking on one’s porridge, but this morning’s edition had an item even more infuriating than usual. A barrister who had represented one of the men accused in last April’s Hatton Garden raid - in this case acquitted - was invited onto the show to speak of his ‘grudging admiration’ for the men who
Should we sell everything because Andrew Roberts (not the historian but an analyst at RBS) tells us to in the expectation of crash? Before you press the ‘sell’ button, it might just be worth reflecting on the fact that there has always been a time when some analyst somewhere has been handing out the same advice.
The tragedy of Sir Philip Dilley’s short reign as chairman of the Environment Agency, which ended when he resigned today, is that until he chose to stay in Barbados rather than travel back to Britain to take control of the response to the floods, he was unusually well-qualified for the job. With his appointment in
If you are going to try to put people beyond the pale on the grounds of what they have said it pays at least to be consistent. This week, left-wing MPs were cock a hoop at achieving the required number of signatures on a petition calling for Donald Trump to be banned from the UK
To adapt Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous dictum on the failure of the Germans to tackle Hitler, ‘First they came for the smokers and I did not speak out because I was not a smoker…’ How right the smoking lobby was when it warned that once the health Nazis had banned smoking in enclosed public spaces
Jeremy Corbyn wants to get rid of the British Empire Medal and David Cameron wants to ditch the Human Rights Act. But I have a different nomination for the national institution most desperately in need of abolition: the FTSE 100 index. It is harming our economy by consistently underplaying the returns to be made on
Have 425,000 children really been abused during the past two years? That is the extraordinary claim suggested in a report put out earlier this week by the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, which was swallowed whole by the Today programme and many newspapers. Not even the normally-inquisitive John Humphrys raised the slightest doubt about the figure when he interviewed a
In a TV stunt, a Brazilian actress recently lay on a beach asking male passers-by to rub suncream into her back. Many were eager to oblige only to recoil, when she turned over and they saw a bulge – a prosthetic penis – in her bikini. It is a good job she didn’t try it
The weather chart does not usually echo social trends, but Monday might be an exception. We could be about to be blown about by the world’s first transgender storm. This week, the Met Office began the practice of naming storms to strike the UK, in the manner that tropical hurricanes have been named by the