Ross Clark

I am not having an election because I am going to stick to the 2024 manifesto on which Labour was elected. That’s Andy Burnham’s position, but could he be about to undermine it by levying a new form of income tax? It is being reported this morning that the Prime Minister is considering a new 1.8 per cent levy on income in order to meet the estimated £18 billion annual cost of his National Care Service. This is being considered as an alternative to the 10 per cent levy on estates that has already been floated. It would run alongside income tax but apparently wouldn’t count as income tax because it would have a name like ‘social care levy’, or somesuch.   No, I’m not going to be fooled by it either.

Does anyone really believe that Andy Burnham will succeed in cutting welfare benefits for 16–24-year-olds, as is being reported? Good luck to him if he really does have a go, because it is absolutely needed. The percentage of 16–24-year-olds claiming out of work benefits on the basis of long-term sickness climbed from a low of 5.2 per cent in 2018 to reach 9.3 per cent in 2024. Have we really bred a generation of sickly youths, or are some, just possibly, taking the mickey and claiming to be too unwell to work when they very much could?

Keen to keep up the momentum on his big (or not so big) ideas, Andy Burnham will apparently announce on Friday that in future some revenue from income tax will be distributed directly to local government so that they, rather than Whitehall, can choose how to spend the money. Will he really want to give up power and money to Reform-led councils who might be minded to do all they can to thwart Labour party policies? Or spend their money hanging the St George Cross from every lamp post? In Britain, only around 5 per cent of total government revenue is collected by local government, which is markedly lower than many other countries.

We keep hearing that Andy Burnham’s government will be the most left-wing since the 1970s, when the namesake of the new chancellor promised to squeeze the rich (Denis Healey actually said ‘property speculators’) ‘until the pips squeak’. But Burnham is about to give the better-off end of the middle classes a huge handout. Rumours abound that the new prime minister is mulling the idea of a National Care Service which, like the NHS, would provide old age care which is free at the point of delivery. How will we afford the £19 billion annual cost? Burnham is reported to be considering abolishing inheritance tax and replacing it with a 10 per cent ‘social care levy’, applied to all estates. There would be some very significant winners and losers from this policy.

Why not blame Herbert Asquith or Lord Aberdeen? Andy Burnham’s line about reversing ‘40 years of neo-liberalism’ – i.e. since the Thatcher government’s reforms – is beginning to grate somewhat. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,’ he told us, while accepting the Labour leadership. We ‘surrendered control’ of water and electricity, while ‘large parts of Britain were deindustrialised’. It might have been an appropriate line for Labour when fighting the 1997 general election. For Burnham to deliver it today is a little ridiculous, given that Labour has been in power for 15 of those past 40 years. Indeed, Burnham himself was in the cabinet for three of those years.

No-one has spent more time opposing Britain's net zero target than me. I wrote a whole book on it as well as dozens of columns. I have addressed many audiences, on radio, TV and in the flesh. Net zero is a disastrous policy, the most consequential law of modern times, and yet it was nodded through the Commons after a mere 90 minutes of praise – I won't call it a debate – as a departing Theresa May fought to achieve some kind of legacy. The MPs who failed to debate it had no sense of how it could be achieved nor what it would cost, relying on fantasy figures from the Climate Change Committee, which did not take into account the fact that many of the technologies which would be required to achieve it have yet to be invented.

It is a mark of Nigel Farage’s position on the nation’s consciousness that he has succeeded in pushing the judgement in the Prince Harry vs Associated Newspaper’s legal case – an absolute cataclysm for Harry which on any other day would dominate the airwaves and has huge implications for the future of royalty – into second place on the news. Did he deliberately choose to go head to head with Mr Justice Nicklin in order to test his power and influence over national life? If he did, he has won hands-down. Farage has taken a huge risk in resigning his Clacton seat and fighting to regain it in a by-election on an ‘us vs the establishment’ ticket. Yet there will be an enormous prize if he wins.

Is Thomas Tuchel a secret agent sent by Friedrich Merz’s government to ruin the UK economy and education system so as to make life easier for German exporters? I know the answer to that is probably no, but I ask only because of the England manager's extraordinary call on parents to allow their children to play truant after staying up to watch his plodding footballers muff their chances against Mexico early on Monday morning. “Write an excuse and let them watch football,” he said. “There’s so much school to go to, but the World Cup is every four years.” The last thing workshy Britain needs is an outsider egging us on to do less work The last thing workshy Britain needs is an outsider egging us on to do even less work.

Is the Right ready to take advantage of a fractious Left in the increasingly unlikely scenario that Andy Burnham will call a general election if he becomes Prime Minister? It is hard to see it is, given the showing of Kemi Badenoch at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London today. Where is the enthusiasm for the Tory leader? Where is the enthusiasm for the Tory leader? If there ever was a friendly audience for a Conservative leader, ARC ought to be it. The conference – which was co-founded by Sir Paul Marshall, proprietor of The Spectator – is nothing if not a staunch platform for social conservatism, and has attracted large audiences for the likes of Jordan Peterson.

Government bonds haven’t had a great few days, but there is one asset which has plummeted far quicker in value this morning: all the Wes Streeting-themed web domain names which had been registered in the hope that the former health secretary would run for the top job. Just try putting up ‘wesforleader.com’ or ‘wes4pm.org’ for sale now that Streeting has abandoned his own leadership ambitions and put his weight behind Andy Burnham. In a party of fiscal fantasists, Streeting held the one flickering beacon of reality True, he probably didn’t have a lot of choice given the number of Labour MPs who seemed prepared to sign Burnham’s nomination papers. But how utterly depressing at the same time.