Ross Clark

In a speech in Ontario a fortnight ago, Leo W. Gerard made an eloquent appeal for the formation of a new ‘worldwide movement for social justice to cure the ills of globalisation’. ‘Two decades of so-called

The London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have taken fright in the face of the terrorist threat. It is not all

James Tooley recently wrote in these pages of the success of private schools in Africa and India, which in the past few years have exploded in number, offering an education for as little as £3 a term – which even the poor of Somalia can afford. In contrast, he recounted how pupils of government schools

The world of environmental science begins to resemble the Catholic Church before the Reformation. Anyone who challenges its grim orthodoxies can expect the latter-day equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. Two years ago, the former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he comprehensively deconstructed the doctrines to which he had

Seldom does the European Union miss an opportunity to pursue its protectionist agenda. No sooner had the first slugs of crude oil from the sunken Estonian oil tanker, the Prestige, arrived on the Spanish coast than France, Spain, Portugal and Italy moved to banish single-hulled oil-tankers of more than 15 years’ vintage from European waters:

Christmas shoppers are being urged to boycott the clothes store Gap on the basis that it exploits workers in the Third World. A report in the Guardian quotes a Bangladeshi who says she has her ears pulled when she makes mistakes, and a wretch from Lesotho who complains that his factory is so dusty that

Ordinary life must go on, the government persuaded us while administering its warning two weeks ago of a possible terrorist attack: if we allow the threat of bombings to disrupt our normal activities, then we give the terrorists what they want. Fine words, indeed, except that they seem to apply only on British soil. If

One of my wife’s ancestors was consumed by cannibals in the South Seas in the mid-18th century. I don’t think the government of Tonga, or wherever the meal took place, would be terribly impressed if a lawsuit arrived on its desk demanding reparations. If you are descended from a black American slave, on the other

The survivors from the Melnikova Street Theatre are unlikely to be in a fit state to read the International Chemical Weapons Convention. But they may well be wondering exactly where Russia’s poisoning of more than 100 innocent citizens fits within this much-vaunted treaty, which came into force four years ago. In fact, the treaty couldn’t

So, the United Nations weapons inspectors are ready to go in, and this time they are not going to be put off their scent by feeble excuses. They will not be satisfied until every single weapon has been destroyed. Every slipper, every cane, every outstretched bare hand must go: the UN committee on the rights

One might have thought that the case of Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed – recently awarded £200,000 each in libel damages against the authors of a local government report which made fantastic claims of child abuse – would sound a warning to the government to avoid joining the general hysteria about paedophilia. But not a

‘Fair trade’ coffee has become as much a staple of the middle-class kitchen as organic carrots and free-range eggs. But, for the fair-trade lobby, voluntary gestures are not enough. They are lobbying the US government, with some signs of success, to establish a ‘coffee purity act’. Under these provisions, all raw or ‘green’ coffee imported