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
Cue the Guardian headlines of ‘exploitation’ in ‘Dickensian’ Britain. Nearly 700,000 people are now working on zero-hours contracts, a rise of 100,000 in just one year. Is that really such a problem? Not among the many people who want flexible work because they want to fit the business of earning money around studying, travelling or
Buy jerry cans and fill them while you can. You won’t want to be caught out by the great oil shortage of 2016. Maybe that is exaggerating a little, but when you start hearing people talking about the world being ‘awash’ with oil, and read of oil companies slashing exploration and towing rigs to be
The House of Commons’ Environmental Audit Committee wants a moratorium on fracking so that what it calls the ‘huge uncertainties’ of its impact on the environment can be resolved. If they hadn’t noticed, we already have had a moratorium on fracking. All activity ceased in 2011 after a couple of minor earth tremors near Blackpool
Matthew Parris is obsessed by an unsolicited app which landed on his smartphone and which, thanks to GPS tracking, is able to tell him how far he has walked in the past 24 hours. ‘I can’t stop checking, sometimes every 10 minutes, my average daily distances,’ he wrote in the Times last week. He has discovered, to
Peter Mandelson’s famous quote about New Labour being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich has a suffix that is often mischievously omitted: he added ‘so long as they pay their taxes’. But there are a few more things which many Labour members would have put on the end: so long as you don’t earn
The French liberal-left and George W Bush are not natural bedfellows, but today the former are sounding just a little bit like the latter. The ‘Je suis Charlie’ banners they are carrying in reaction to yesterday’s murders at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are effectively saying, to borrow the former US president’s
Haiti is an object lesson in how chronic aid – as opposed to emergency aid in reaction to a disaster – can lay waste to a developing economy. For decades, rice imports subsidised by the US government and well-meaning gifts of clothing undermined what should have been two of the country’s biggest industries: agriculture and
Post-war Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton had to resign for letting slip the contents of his Budget speech before he delivered it. Nowadays, everyone leaks in advance, including PR people. The following press release was received from the Fire Brigades Union at 11 am, giving its ‘reaction’ to a speech which did not start until 12.30:
We might not have much of a coherent energy policy, but we do at least have the honour of breaking the record for the most expensive object ever built. According to Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, speaking at the Spectator Energy Forum, the cost of Hinkley C nuclear power station, Britain’s first nuclear power plant
There is an app you can load onto your smartphone, called UK Energy, which can tell you how much electricity is currently being generated in Britain and what percentage is coming from different sources. This afternoon the contribution from wind increased sharply from 1.3 per cent to 2.8 per cent as the wind picked up
Has the West found a secret new weapon in its battle with Putin’s expansionist ambitions: reversible gas pipelines? Putin has never made a secret of his willingness to use energy as bludgeon against his neighbours. In 1999, the year before he became Russian leader, he wrote a pamphlet making the case that energy exports provided
The city of Denton, Texas, doesn’t often make the news, but last month it did: it became the first city in the US – by a margin of 59 per cent to 41 per cent – to vote to ban fracking. Is the US love affair with shale ending? The industry has not been its
The year 2014 will be remembered for an unprecedented juxtaposition of events. Two oil-producing countries in the Middle East were in a state of crisis. Relations between the West and Russia slumped to a new Cold War low. And oil prices have slumped, to $66 a barrel for Brent Crude this morning, half its recent
Two headlines on successive days speak volumes about the scaremongering which is endemic in the way in which learned bodies disseminate information on climate science. Yesterday, the Royal Society published a report, Resilience to Extreme Weather, predicting that by 2090 four billion people around the world each year will be subjected to heatwave events, with dire
In 2006, on the day that the government’s estimated cost for the 2012 Olympics was jacked up from £2.75 billion to £4.25 billion, I promised to eat my hat on the steps of the Olympic stadium if the bill came to less than £10 billion. Although the official figure now stands at a mere £8.92
Have a read of the following list and see if you can guess its significance: lubricants, iron ore, steel, oil, pharmaceuticals, ships, telecoms, food packaging, oil, property. With the exception of telecoms and property, and perhaps pharmaceuticals, are they just boring, old, dirty industries which are part of Britain’s industrial heritage but play a declining
Want your sprog to be toughened up on the playing fields of Eton but can’t afford the fees? From September there is an intriguing alternative. You can send him instead to Holyport College, a free school which is opening in the shell of an old special school six miles away. Though the chairman of governors,
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_31_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Ross Clark and Lara Prendergast discuss the demise of individualism”] Listen [/audioplayer]Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. As for the
Will the military ever see any wrong in the execution of 306 soldiers for cowardice and desertion in World War One? I ask only because I have tried and failed to stage a new musical drama on the subject in a military museum. The Imperial War Museum said straight away that it had organised its own programme
I used to feel smug when plumbers, bricklayers and the like used to complain of Eastern European migrants coming over here and taking their work. They might be able to replace a ballcock and lay a line of bricks but the one thing these Poles won’t be able to do, unless they happen to be Joseph
