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
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
There has been predictable frothing at the suggestion by Professor Averil Macdonald, Chairwoman of UK Onshore Oil and Gas, that more women than men oppose fracking because women are more prone to follow their gut instinct than the science behind fracking. I am going to keep out of that debate, not because I fear for
How easy it would be to scorn the environmentalists who are up in arms about George Osborne’s new pet project, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. You can understand their anxiety: subsidies for green energy are being slashed, yet the Chancellor will do anything — and pay anything — to get this project up
How easy it would be to scorn the environmentalists who are up in arms about George Osborne’s new pet project, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. You can understand their anxiety: subsidies for green energy are being slashed, yet the Chancellor will do anything — and pay anything — to get this project up
Futurology is a cursed science, but just occasionally I feel I can already write a news story years into the future. Watch out about the year 2040 for a headline: ‘Building HS2 wasn’t worth it, ministers admit.’ It gave a us a gleaming new Euston station, it will go on to say, and regenerated the
What fun it is watching again all those smug Volkswagen ads on YouTube, featuring men in mid-life crisis revving up their Golfs and Passats. German carmakers vie with French farmers for their sacred status in the European Union. That it has taken US authorities to sniff out the company’s cheating on emissions tests doesn’t say
That the Conservatives came up with the idea of extending the right-to-buy to housing association tenants was a symptom of their failure to believe they could win this year’s general election. Such an ill thought-out policy can only have made it into the manifesto in the expectation that it could be used as a bargaining
The idea of private schools as bastions of academic achievement has taken me some getting used to. When I left school 30 years ago, private schools were places of cold showers, beautiful but crumbling buildings and expansive playing fields. But good exam results? We never knew, of course, because exam results were not published, but
The liberal-left is very rapid to react when a terror suspect faces deportation or an extremist preacher is put under house-arrest. So why isn’t it on the streets chanting the name of Honey Rose? Ms Rose is an optometrist who appeared in court on Tuesday charged with manslaughter by gross negligence after allegedly failing to
Why doesn’t the Office of National Statistics want us to know that Mohammed is the most popular boys’ name in England and Wales? Yesterday, it put out its annual survey of the top 10 baby’s names. In 2014, it reported, the most popular boys’ names were Oliver, Jack and Harry. This contrasts somewhat with a
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/theosbornesupremacy/media.mp3″ title=”Isabel Hardman and George Parker discus how George Osborne rules Westminster” startat=38] Listen [/audioplayer]Against the heavy artillery fire of the Labour leadership battle, the struggle of the Conservative leadership contest goes almost undetected outside Westminster. It is no less intense, even though the Conservatives will not elect a new leader for at least
I know that the comments beneath online newspaper pieces aren’t exactly where you go if you want sane, balanced opinion, but the forum which followed the Guardian’s news story about Tony Blair’s speech yesterday nevertheless took me aback. Appropriately enough, there were 666 comments when I read them. And how many had anything positive to say
Housing associations are a bit like Network Rail. They are what Tony Blair christened his ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and socialism, in the hope they would combine the best elements of both. Instead, they combine some of the worst: public sector lethargy and private sector greed. According to a forthcoming investigation by Channel 4 News,
The right to free movement of people and goods across the EU is, as we keep being told when the government proposes to trim benefits for Romanians, a fundamental and inalienable principle of the Treaty of Rome. Why then does the European Court of Justice show no interest in the French ferry workers whose strike has
If you were deliberately trying to obtain a record high temperature reading an international airport would be a good place to take your thermometer. With huge concrete aprons and planes spewing out large quantities of hot air, airports have a microclimate of their own. That is one reason not to get excited by today’s record
No matter how desperate the banana republic, the international airport is always a shimmering palace of perfume and croissants. It is only when you get out onto the dirt roads that you realise where you are. The government seems determined to take the same approach to our own transport system: all the money gets sucked
