Ross Clark

So now we know how Labour intends to try to head-off the threat from Reform UK. It is going to fight them on the tram lines. Rachel Reeves will announce this morning £15 billion worth of new tram lines in the Midlands and the North as part of a £113 billion package of public investment. There will be £2.4 billion for trams in the West Midlands, £2.1 billion for a new tram system in Leeds, an extension of the Manchester tram system to Stockport and an embryonic tram system between Derby and Nottingham. The idea of a ‘north-south divide’ is 25 years out of date.

It is beginning to feel a bit like 1998 all over again. That was the year of the first countryside march when it – supposedly – rose up in anger at the Blair government over its plan to abolish hunting, introduce the right to roam and build some houses for people to live in. Landowning interests, already reeling from Rachel Reeves’ decision to partially remove the inheritance tax exemption on agricultural land, are now gearing up to bleat about a proposal to slash the £2.5 billion a year budget for Environmental Land Management (ELM) – the scheme which replaced the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) after Brexit.  It is reported that the scheme will be designed to be less generous, with payments being retained only for small farms.

Who would have guessed that caving into union militancy and paying a whacking above-inflation pay rise, with no strings attached, would lead to even bigger pay demands? In one of its first acts after coming to power last July the Starmer government awarded junior doctors a 22 per cent pay rise, which they accepted and ended their run of strikes. Is anyone really surprised the BMA has come back this year demanding 30 per cent, threatening yet more strikes? It is not hard to guess what would happen were the government to cave in again: next year’s demand would come in at 50 per cent. Who would have guessed that caving into union militancy and paying a whacking above-inflation pay rise, with no strings attached, would lead to even bigger pay demands?

How much longer are Reform’s critics going to be able to get away with calling it a right-wing party? It is an odd kind of right-wing party that proposes to reinstate welfare benefits that even Labour has decided are too expensive; that pledges to nationalise the steel industry and 50 per cent of utilities; and whose manifesto for the last election budgeted for £141 billion of spending increases over five years, including an extra £17 billion for the NHS. Nigel Farage’s party is only ‘right-wing’ if you define your political spectrum entirely in terms of attitudes to national borders and on ‘woke’ issues such as critical race theory and trans rights, or if you see climate change and net zero as a left–right issue.

The answer, according to Ed Miliband in an infamously toe-curling rendition of the Bob Dylan song, is blowing in the wind. But no longer, it seems, if you are on the board of SSE. The energy company, which was one of the first UK electricity companies to commit in a big way to renewable energy, has just pulled £3 billion worth of investment in renewables, citing the 'changing macroeconomic environment' and delays in the planning system. For that read that the projects it had intended to build have become economically unviable now that we no longer have near-zero interest rates, and that the national grid is struggling to absorb so much intermittent green energy.    To put that figure into context, SSE is still planning to invest £17.

One of Keir Starmer’s first mistakes in office was to remove the winter fuel allowance from all pensioners other than those in receipt of pension credit. His latest big error is performing a U-turn and telling us that the government is, after all, looking at loosening the eligibility criteria, so that many more pensioners will qualify for the money next winter. Starmer’s explanation for his U-turn during Prime Minister’s Questions was bizarre How can both these things be true? Because the former was a political error, the latter an economic one. The optics of removing the winter fuel allowance at a time when millions of public sector workers were receiving large pay rises was terrible.

The Environmental and Rural Affairs select committee is surely right that the government imposed the inheritance tax changes on farmland without proper consultation – and ignored the likelihood that they will cause serious hardship for family farms. Never mind the threshold which Rachel Reeves claims will mean most farms can still be passed on IHT-free – something questioned by the NFU and other critics – the new rules will inevitably drive many larger farms out of business when the current generation passes on. But is there really any point in what the committee is proposing: that the changes are simply delayed for a year?