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 regulator of premium-rate telephone services, ICSTIC, is investigating television companies which dangle prizes before viewers’ eyes and then make it extremely difficult to claim them. When it has finished with that, perhaps the watchdog might turn its attention to a similar scam: Gordon Brown’s tax credits. In last month’s Budget, the Chancellor held out
Next month the Office of Fair Trading will produce its long-awaited report into parking fines. It is expected to rule that charging motorists £60 for overstaying their welcome at a parking meter is unfair, and that in future councils must charge motorists only what it costs to issue the parking ticket. Actually, that’s not quite
Ross Clark investigates the government’s plans to deal with a human flu pandemic, and finds that the preparations for mass drug treatment are in a scandalous mess — unless, that is, you are on the right list In its early days, New Labour was likened to a ‘big tent’, in which there was room not
Given that the government’s lust for setting targets has done so much to increase bureaucracy in public services Given that the government’s lust for setting targets has done so much to increase bureaucracy in public services, one could be forgiven for a little scepticism regarding the Prime Minister’s latest target: to reduce red tape by
While Tony Blair was making his valedictory speech to the Labour party conference in Manchester on 27 September, 60-year-old Elizabeth Pascoe was ecstatic. Not because she was impressed by the Prime Minister’s self-composed list of glorious achievements, but because the High Court had just stopped the government from running a bulldozer through her house. Miss
Amid the growing mutterings over his suitability to be prime minister, Gordon Brown has managed to preserve his reputation in at least one quarter. It has become received wisdom that the Chancellor played a blinder on his first day in the job in 1997 by making the Bank of England independent, giving us perpetually low
Corporate success can generally be measured by the size and strength of the campaign to boycott your business. But until very recently there was a remarkable exception to this rule: Tesco. For a supermarket group which now accounts for a remarkable one in every eight pounds taken by retailers in Britain, opposition has been remarkably
It was John Major who came a cropper while trying to restore the nation’s moral values: his ‘back to basics’ campaign was mocked to death before it had really got started. Yet Mr Major’s attempt to influence the nation’s morals was nothing compared with that of Tony Blair, who has overseen a Sexual Offences Act,
I have no idea whether Sion Jenkins — the former Hastings deputy headmaster who was this week acquitted of murdering his foster daughter after juries in two successive trials failed to reach a verdict — committed the foul deed or not. I wasn’t there. Maybe Jenkins suffered one of the fits of rage which his
After some consideration I am not sure that I can get excited about the debate as to whether cannabis should be classifed as a Class B drug or whether, as the Home Secretary Charles Clarke decided last week, it should remain Class C. Rather, I am coming round to the conclusion that it should be
While David Cameron was at a Basildon comprehensive on Monday announcing that the Conservative party no longer believes in selective education, my ten-year-old son was sitting the 11-plus at a private school in Suffolk. There are no grammar schools left in Suffolk, as it happens, nor in Cambridgeshire, nor in Norfolk: my son’s 11-plus papers
31 December 2055 The deaths of the Earl of Sedgefield, aged 102, and Mr Gordon Brown, 104, brings to a sad conclusion the most remarkable and prolonged feud in British political history. It would, of course, be improper to speculate on the precise circumstances before the inquest, but police have confirmed that at around 2.30
Ross Clark on the workers who milk the rest of us by retiring early as a result of ‘ill health’ The next few months may well see the political death of Tony Blair. But whether he will get buried is another matter. In an echo of the public-sector bolshieness 27 winters ago that eventually brought
There was a surreal touch to last Sunday’s newspapers. The inside sections, which tend to be prepared a little in advance, brimmed, as usual, with pieces about the delights of living in France. The news pages, by contrast, carried pictures of French youths lobbing Molotov cocktails and overturning cars in the great orgy of rage
Over the next few weekends, the gardens of 23 stately homes will be opened up to several thousand sponsored fun-runners who, demonstrating the typically huge generosity shown towards cancer charities by the British public, will raise £2.5 million for oncology research. Elsewhere, the stalls at village shows will heave with home-baked cakes, thousands will empty
Ross Clark shows that Tony Blair’s new theory of justice is both sinister and historically illiterate I don’t know whether Maria Otone de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot by police at Stockwell underground station on 22 July, has hired the services of a PR firm, but even Max
The local people who turned out to see Princess Helen Louise open the new wing of St Leonard’s Hospital in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1938 would not have recognised the term ‘stakeholder’, but they would seem to have fitted perfectly Tony Blair’s vision of a breed of socially responsible citizens helping to run the country’s public
Who believes that bird flu may cause as many as 50 million deaths? Ross Clark doesn’t, and here’s why I don’t personally know anyone suffering from malaria or tuberculosis, but I imagine that if they have been following the Western media they must have found the past week somewhat surreal. Half a billion people are
In these pages recently Elisabeth Anderson wrote about, but declined to give the name of, a website that gives the price of any property sold in England and Wales during the past five years. Actually, it’s called www.nethouseprices.com, and a quick nose around the site reveals that flats up Liz’s way, Marylebone, are selling for
I have some native sympathy with the lackeys struggling to handle the Inland Revenue’s computers which, like a berserk one-arm bandit, have just spewed out an excess £1.9 billion in tax credits. I am not sure I am the best-qualified person to expound on the inadequacy of government IT systems. My own computer bears the