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
Douglas Alexander tells UK music industry: Government pledges continuing help to reach US and China.This year 20 music events are being organised (up six on last year) and UK Trade & Investment will allocate nearly half a million pounds to promote the industry overseas in key markets like the US and China…. Douglas Alexander, minister
From this week, we will be picking out some gems from the Panglossian world of government press releases, a world in which our hard-working ministers and civil servants make valiant efforts to better the lives of a grateful public. The title of this column, Everyone Benefits, is a frequent phrase which crops up in New
Ross Clark says that the existing law allows us to defend ourselves robustly against burglars. We don’t need a licence to murder them This week sees an event about as common as a total eclipse of the moon: an alignment of views between the House of Commons tearoom and the taproom down at the Dog
The national ‘giveathon’ provoked by Boxing Day’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean is an admirable response to an emergency. Rather less can be said of the thousands who fell for this year’s fashionable Christmas present: sending a goat to the Third World. Oxfam, one of several charities to run a ‘give a goat’ scheme, says
Gordon Brown does not usually receive support from this column but he deserves some congratulation on one initiative. He has written to the European Commission to request that it lifts the threshold above which duty becomes payable on goods brought into the EU for personal use. For the past 10 years it has been frozen
A loftily named environmental pressure group called the Food Commission has been upset by the sale of bottled water from Fiji in Waitrose supermarkets. The water, it complains, has clocked up 10,000 ‘food miles’ before it reaches Western consumers. ‘Transporting water halfway across the world is surely the most ludicrous use of fossil fuels when
When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there
Jonathan Dimbleby has been frightening late-night audiences on ITV with a documentary called the New World War. Using interviews with Ethiopean coffee-producers and reels of library footage of hurricanes, Dimbleby explains his thesis: ‘Global terrorism, global poverty and global warming form a toxic trio that promise a catastrophe that will make the horrors of 9/11
The Conservative leader Michael Howard says he owes everything to Britain for saving his family from persecution by the Nazis. It is just a good job for him that his own manifesto on asylum and immigration was not in force in Britain in the 1930s. Sandwiched between the personal passages in his conference speech Mr
If there was one reason above any other for the British electorate’s flight to socialism in 1945, it was surely the means test. In some ways the national government’s grudging state charity of the Depression years was worse than nothing. For his ha’p’orth of black pudding, the 1930s welfare claimant had first to surrender his
Don’t you just love those socio-economic league tables which put Britain a miserable 25th, virtually down among the developing nations, while Scandinavian nations emerge on top? The first time I went to Denmark I wasn’t quite prepared for the frumpiness, so often had I seen its social democratic model depicted by left-leaning academics as a
With the Athens games out of way, the Boycott Beijing campaign is now in full swing, arguing that China’s lousy human rights record should disqualify it from holding the 2008 Olympics and imploring the West to repeat the snub which marred the Moscow games of 1980. Admittedly China isn’t the sort of country you would
Ross Clark says that if the government were to mount a real fight, we could defeat the animal rights terrorists — and prevent unnecessary suffering in the laboratories Besides the hefty clunk of The Spectator on your doormat this week, you will shortly be receiving HMG’s advice on how citizens should cope with a terrorist
The UK Independence Party, according to the manifesto which won it 12 seats in the recent European Parliament elections, ‘is the only party to support free and fair trade for a free country’. The document goes on to assert that the EU is preventing us trading with the rest of the world and that the
Much as I sympathise with those caught up in petty local government bureaucracy, every so often there emerges a sob story which somehow fails to tug the heartstrings. Last week in the Daily Mail, cancer fundraiser Ipek Williamson was moaning that Cotswold District Council had wiped out the profit from a garden party she had
The government wants to find ways of helping us to lose weight. It could start by ceasing to shower farmers with subsidies to grow sugar. Remarkably, given the public money that is spent on telling us not to eat fattening foods, the EU gave European sugar producers 819 million euros worth of subsidy last year,
At last: France is making a commitment to free trade. Unfortunately, it involves selling arms to China. President Chirac has ordered a review of the ban on arm sales to China imposed after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. This would enable France to grab a share of the £2 billion-a-year market for military equipment
According to the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow, the failure of the world to confront global warming is going to result in the royal family being freeze-dried at the breakfast table at Balmoral and our cities drowned in raging tornadoes. Never mind that this scenario — based on the global-warming lobby’s latest hobby-horse, the
The forthcoming referendum on the proposed EU constitution has led some to suggest that Britain gives up EU membership and returns to the European Free Trade Association (Efta), of which it was a member between 1960 and 1972 and which is still maintained by Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Get out of nannying, protectionist Europe,
The European Union’s social chapter has been so successful in suppressing economic growth in Europe that it is no surprise to find the US presidential candidate John Kerry seeking to emulate it. Not that he intends to saddle American businesses with more red tape, mind: he wants to try to strangle the booming Chinese economy