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
It is still a little too early to say for sure that George Osborne’s gloom-laden economic forecasts for post-Brexit Britain were bunk. But never mind the future, it now emerges that he wasn’t much good at telling us what was happening in the present. Throughout the referendum campaign he could barely disguise his contempt for
Like Owen Smith, I have an interest to declare when discussing Pfizer. Somewhere on my bookshelf I have a Pfizer physics prize – a school prize funded by the US pharmaceutical giant which at the time had a research facility nearby. Later, Pfizer helped fund an extension to the school which, appropriately enough given its
Of today’s corpses piled up in Downing Street, none has caused more shock than that of Michael Gove. That Nicky Morgan, who signed Gove’s nomination papers to be leader, has also gone hints at some kind of personal animosity. But might the explanation be more straightforward than that – simply one of his policy and approach
The award for most pathetic remark of the week goes to Tim Farron who earlier released a press statement saying this: ‘Just 13 months after the last election the Conservatives have plunged the UK into chaos. It is simply inconceivable that Theresa May should be crowned Prime Minister without even having won an election in
‘I’m a gay woman with strong northern working-class roots,’ Angela Eagle told Robert Peston on Sunday. ‘I think I’m the right person for this job at this time.’ In case we didn’t get the point she followed it up this morning by boasting: ‘I’m a northern working-class girl who understands modern life.’ How outrageous that
While frustrated Remain campaigners continue to speak of economic Armageddon, a very significant move happened yesterday. Business secretary Sajid Javid flew off to Delhi to begin preliminary negotiations for a trade deal between Britain and India. It is significant because this is exactly the sort of deal that we have been forbidden from doing for
So now it is certain: the Conservatives will produce Britain’s second female Prime Minister, after Andrea Leadsom eliminated Michael Gove from the leadership contest and will now go head-to-head with Theresa May in a vote of Conservative members to be announced on 9 September. So why isn’t the Left cheering this social advance? Instead, the
The Conservative party’s electoral system won an unlikely compliment this afternoon from Labour MP Ian Austin, who declared that it showed how a ‘serious party’ operated. It might look serious compared with the fiasco of Labour’s leadership crisis, but does the election of a new Prime Minister really have to be dragged out over two
Just when you were beginning to wonder whether we have done the right thing, along comes Jean-Claude Juncker to remind you exactly why Britain voted for Brexit. It is ‘not going to be an amicable divorce’, he tells us. Why can’t it be amicable? We’ve decided that we’ve grown apart, not run off with the
A vote to leave the EU would cause economic Armageddon. We know because David Cameron and George Osborne have told us so, claiming that there is a wide consensus among economists on the matter. But what if – as now seems increasingly likely – we vote to remain but then have a recession anyway? The
‘The war on drugs has failed,’ asserted Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public health in the latest propaganda coup for the pro-drug lobby. Her society, along with the Faculty of Public Health, have parroted the familiar call among metropolitan liberals for drugs to be decriminalised. Their argument is that we should
Is Google racist? That is the charge made in a short video in which someone types ‘three white teenagers’ and ‘three black teenagers’ into the Google images and finds that while the former brings up images of happy, smiling students, the latter brings up what appear to be police mugshots. Given that Google searches do
What would you say if a powerful cyclists’ pressure group ganged up on the NHS and lobbied it to provide free cycle helmets to anyone who asked for one, accusing it of having on its hands the blood of every helmet-less cyclist who died while the NHS tried to spurn the demand? I think I
A discussion between two medical ethicists on the Today programme this morning ended with them agreeing on one point: whether or not it is right to breed pigs so that their organs can be harvested for transplantation into humans (as the University of California is experimenting with), the first thing we should do in order
That’s the trouble with conducting a strike via social media — press the wrong button and what was supposed to be private becomes very public. A leaked cache of WhatsApp messages has revealed the junior doctors’ strikes for what they were: a politicised dispute which always was about more than the finer details of when
Apparently, there are secret Jewish schools in Britain where children are taught nothing but the Jewish faith, where they are exposed to homophobic literature, where all music and the arts are banned and where they are indoctrinated by extremists. How do we know? Because Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw has told us. Admittedly he didn’t quite
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get through just a week of political debate on the EU, or indeed any other subject, without old Adolf being dragged into it. It won’t be this week, obviously, not now that Boris has likened the expansive fervour of the EU to the Third Reich. Last week Hitler
Of all the things wrong with the BBC, it would be hard to argue that a shortage of gay people making and presenting programmes is one of them. As Andrew Marr observed a decade ago: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young
An EDF board meeting today could spell the end of the wretched Hinkley Point C nuclear power station and its hugely over-priced electricity, for which electricity distribution companies would be obliged to pay double the current wholesale electricity price for 35 years. EDF’s finance director Thomas Piquemal resigned in March claiming that the project could
As Isabel Hardman wrote yesterday, many interpret Labour’s failure to fail on a bigger scale in yesterday’s election results as the worst possible result for the party. Sadiq Khan, who had nominated Corbyn for the leadership, won comfortably in London. Predicted to lose 150 or more council seats, by midday Labour was down a net 26
