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Ross Clark

Ross Clark

The Spectator

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Britain is right to stand up to the WHO’s vaccine power grab

The World Health Organisation (WHO) hardly distinguished itself during the Covid 19 pandemic. It was slow to declare an emergency, then tried to make...

09.05.2024 20

The Spectator

Ross Clark

London / Khan may have won, but he should still reverse on Ulez

So what was that all about? Rumours that Susan Hall was close to toppling Sadiq Khan have proved to be wide of the mark. In the event, Hall is failing...

04.05.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

The local elections have not left the Tories in crisis – yet

The Conservatives have, as predicted, had a pretty awful night, but is there any comfort they can draw from the local election results? True, the next...

03.05.2024 30

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Wes Streeting has demeaned himself

Over the past few years Wes Streeting has established himself as one of the more open-minded and reasonable members of the shadow cabinet. Rather than...

02.05.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Failed promise / Falling migration might not be something for the Tories to celebrate

The good news for the Conservatives is that immigration is down. It looks as if the net migration figures will not be returning to the 745,000...

01.05.2024 30

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Volcanic rock / Hate people? Visit Iceland

No-one seems to like tourists any more. This week Venice introduced its €5 entry charge – which merely buys you the right to go into the city and...

01.05.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Brexit has not made food unaffordable

Imagine that for the past 30 years all food entering Britain from EU countries had been subject to stringent sanitary checks and that today, for the...

30.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Why didn’t the Tories nationalise the railways?

The Conservatives can crow all they like about the benefits of privatisation – and make whatever claims they like about tickets being more...

25.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Who will pay the price for the boost in defence spending?

Rishi Sunak’s announcement that the government will increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP has been warmly welcomed, but how much is it...

24.04.2024 30

The Spectator

Ross Clark

What happened to the Tory promise to balance the budget?

There is one big reason why a summer general election is unlikely, however tempted the Prime Minister might be to try to take advantage of the first...

23.04.2024 30

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Desperate manufacturers are struggling to shift electric cars

By 2024, UBS confidently predicted in a October 2020 report, the cost of manufacturing an electric car would have fallen so sharply that it would be...

22.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Welsh Labour’s speeding U-turn shows devolution is beginning to grate

The tragedy of Wales’ 20 mph speed limit, which is now to be relaxed, was that it took a good idea and ruined it by taking it to extremes. There are...

20.04.2024 8

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Labour should think twice before taxing pensioners

Labour, according to Rachel Reeves, is now the party of low taxes. She has said she won’t raise income tax, National Insurance, capital gains tax...

18.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

The truth about ‘boardroom diversity’

We all know that increasing the diversity of your boardroom increases the success of your company because politicians, business leaders and academics...

17.04.2024 7

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Energy bills / Smart meters could soon cost you a whole lot more

What remarkable power climate change has to turn the usual rules of fairness on their head. The poor pay the taxes and the wealthy get subsidised. It...

17.04.2024 8

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Money / Inflation is down again – but don’t expect interest rates to follow suit

Interest rate cuts are beginning to look like a mirage: the closer we seem to get to them the more they seem to recede into the distance. Bank of...

17.04.2024 40

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Inflation is down again – but don’t expect interest rates to follow suit

Interest rate cuts are beginning to look like a mirage: the closer we seem to get to them the more they seem to recede into the distance. Bank of...

17.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Energy bills / Smart meters could soon cost you a whole lot more

What remarkable power climate change has to turn the usual rules of fairness on their head. The poor pay the taxes and the wealthy get subsidised. It...

17.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Why one-man plays are all the rage

Well, it’s nice to feel on trend. The Today programme this morning carried an item on the popularity of one-man and one-woman theatre shows,...

15.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Are we really reaching ‘farmaggedon’?

I happened to be walking in the Cambridgeshire fens this morning while listening to the latest instalment of ‘farmageddon’ – the narrative that...

12.04.2024 7

The Spectator

Ross Clark

The irresponsibility of ‘two years to save the planet’

Hurrah, we can all relax. We have been granted an extra two years to save the planet. So suggested Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United...

11.04.2024 8

The Spectator

Ross Clark

The truth about ‘boardroom diversity’

We all know that increasing the diversity of your boardroom increases the success of your company because politicians, business leaders and academics...

11.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Sadiq Khan has failed to cut London traffic

What was that about Sadiq Khan’s expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) supposedly helping to reduce our dependence on cars and...

10.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

What’s the truth about Sure Start?

Labour, unsurprisingly, is crowing about a paper published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies claiming that Tony Blair’s Sure Start centres...

09.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

The problem with Rachel Reeves’ non-dom tax plan

By abolishing non-dom status, Jeremy Hunt was supposed to have clipped the wings of the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. Given that she had already...

09.04.2024 6

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Why do teachers think they can ban Ofsted?

There is one thing that seems to have gone missing from the campaign by the National Education Union (NEU) to abolish Ofsted: children. They hardly...

04.04.2024 20

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Don’t trust Labour to build houses

Could a promise of more housebuilding win an election, or does the Nimby vote still rule the shires? Labour, it seems, has decided the former. The...

03.04.2024 8

The Spectator

Ross Clark

House prices aren’t falling any time soon

The thing about having three prominent house prices indices, all of which publish monthly figures, is that they are forever telling conflicting...

02.04.2024 9

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Why the council tax rise on second homes helps no one

What a surprise. Given the choice of whether or not to double council tax for second home owners from next April, 153 English councils have already...

01.04.2024 6

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Martin Lewis is wrong about the ‘energy poll tax’

Given that a fair proportion of the UK public seem to want Martin Lewis to be prime minister, the government might well hesitate to dismiss the Money...

01.04.2024 6

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Thames Water proves privatisation has failed

Why do the Conservatives find it so difficult to admit that the privatisation of public utilities has in many cases been a disaster? It was supposed...

28.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Low energy / You’re not being paranoid: smart meters are out to get you

If anyone was still in doubt as to why the government is keen to press ‘smart’ meters onto us, those doubts will surely now be dispelled by the...

26.03.2024 50

The Spectator

Ross Clark

The pension triple lock is a drain on the taxpayer

Jeremy Hunt’s promise that the Conservative manifesto will protect the ‘triple lock’ on the state pension is a desperate measure to appeal to...

25.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Britain’s high street is still stuck in recession

So, is the recession over? The Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) retail sales figures show that sales volumes were flat in February, when many...

22.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Gove’s ‘war on landlords’ is not going to plan

Levelling up the housing market, it is fair to say, is not quite going according to plan. Rents in the year to February, the Office for National...

21.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Jeremy Hunt should listen to James Dyson

All Sir James Dyson wanted was to do what hundreds of business people and lobbyists have done before him: spend a little time with the Chancellor of...

20.03.2024 5

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Ed Miliband’s dangerous net zero fantasy

Ed Miliband set Labour back a decade when he not only failed to win the 2015 general election but went backwards, losing a net 26 seats and helping to...

19.03.2024 30

The Spectator

Ross Clark

The middle classes let Banksy get away with vandalism

This is a tale of two murals: one painted on the side of a building in Greenwich by an artist commissioned by the owner, the other scrawled on a...

18.03.2024 3

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Vaughan Gething’s Covid failures

A man who has the honour of being his country’s first leader from an ethnic background but who comes to office with the baggage of a questionable...

16.03.2024 5

The Spectator

Ross Clark

How WFH engineers caused an air traffic control meltdown

How lovely that engineers working for National Air Traffic Services (Nats) can work from home rather than having to slog it in to the company’s...

14.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Who is going to pay for Rishi’s new gas power stations?

The problem with intermittency of wind and solar energy is so obvious that you wonder why is has taken the Prime Minister this long to work out that...

12.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

‘Levelling up’ is finished

Just what has the government done to try to retain the Red Wall vote? It seemed when they won a majority of 80 in 2019, thanks largely to a big...

05.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

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