Ross Clark

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get through just a week of political debate on the EU, or indeed any other subject, without old Adolf being dragged into it. It won’t be this week, obviously, not now that Boris has likened the expansive fervour of the EU to the Third Reich.   Last week Hitler was on the other side, of course, with David Cameron claiming it was only the EU which stood between us and a repeat of the Second World War. Shame we can’t ask Adolf himself for his views on the EU referendum. Or maybe we can. Perhaps someone in the backwoods of Brazil could go and doorstep him and ask him how he’d be voting on 23 June.

Of all the things wrong with the BBC, it would be hard to argue that a shortage of gay people making and presenting programmes is one of them. As Andrew Marr observed a decade ago: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.' Why, then, is the government intent on making the BBC even more gay? In one of the less-reported sections of this week’s white paper on the future of the corporation, John Whittingdale lays down a target that 10 per cent of senior leadership roles at the BBC be filled by LGBT staff by 2020.

As Isabel Hardman wrote yesterday, many interpret Labour’s failure to fail on a bigger scale in yesterday’s election results as the worst possible result for the party.  Sadiq Khan, who had nominated Corbyn for the leadership, won comfortably in London.  Predicted to lose 150 or more council seats, by midday Labour was down a net 26 seats.    This neither puts them in an encouraging position from which to build towards the 2020 election nor signifies a disaster which might provoke Jeremy’s Corbyn’s defenestration and replacement with a more electable leader. But the Conservatives would be very unwise to take comfort from the results.

Trailing in the polls with three days to go until the London mayoral elections, Zac Goldsmith continues to attack his rival Sadiq Khan by accusing him of having links with extremists.   It is a pretty desperate strategy, reduced to making the charge that Khan has ‘shared a platform’ with extremists.   It is also somewhat undermined by the revelation that Goldsmith himself has been photographed smiling alongside Suliman Gani, the Tooting Iman who is subject of many of the claims.  Gani also appears to have shared platforms with Conservative MP for Battersea, Jane Ellison, on a number of occasions. But one thing puzzles me.

Frumpy, out of date and not much fun – Gordon Brown and BHS go together in more ways than one.   A word needs to be put in about the role of the former Chancellor and Prime Minister in the collapse of the chain store this week. Dominic Chappell – who must win this year’s business brass-neck award by attempting to buy back BHS days after it collapsed into administration with him at the helm -- was perhaps not the kind of entrepreneur that Gordon Brown had in mind in 2001 when he published a white paper, Enterprise for All, which led to the 2002 Enterprise Act.  But intentionally or not, he was one who benefitted from Brown’s attempts to de-stigmatise bankruptcy.

If there was one piece of advice the Foreign Office was going to give to British citizens travelling to the USA you might think it would be to wary of lunatics armed to the hilt with semi-automatics.   But no, our civil servants do not regard the possibility of having your ass shot off as you innocently backpack around the backwoods of North Carolina to be worthy of a warning. There is one piece of advice the Foreign Office has put on its website, though.  It states:  'LGBT travellers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi.

'We cannot have a situation where the banks are able to privatise their profits and nationalise their losses,' declared Vince Cable in 2008 in the midst of the banking collapse. But steel companies?  That is a different matter. Cable has demanded that the government take on the pension liabilities of Tata’s British employers in a last gasp attempt to attract a buyer and save the plants. On the subject of nationalising pension liabilities, Cable has form – as business secretary he forced the taxpayer to take on the responsibility for paying postmen’s pensions so that he could sell off the Royal Mail – which he did, at a giveaway price. The taxpayer might have preferred it had the government clung onto the Royal Mail’s huge estate.

It is good that Matthew Parris has taken on Boris. The Mayor has had too easy a press in many quarters. There is a good reason for this: he is one of us. There is a bit of the Bullingdon in Fleet Street: we are often too disinclined to attack our own. Matthew Parris acknowledges this, and the vitriolic nature of his Times column on Saturday is an attempt to redress the balance. But for me, my objection is not that Matthew has gone over the top in his attack on Boris – it is that his line of attack is fundamentally wrong. The same is true of Nick Cohen’s blast yesterday on the same subject. Let’s brush over Matthew’s complaint that a man who once supported Clause 28 has no right to boast on an LGBT ‘out and proud’ video.

Our leaders, of course, love democracy – until it comes up with an answer different to the one they were expecting. Last week, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) announced an online poll for the public to vote for the name of a new Arctic and Antarctic-going vessel to replace my ageing near-namesake the RRS James Clark Ross. The outcome will tell us volumes about what public bodies really think of public opinion.

Later today, barring last minute developments, Labour and SNP MPs will temporarily unite with the Conservatives’ religious right to defeat the government’s plans to liberalise Sunday trading laws -- echoing the defeat which Mrs Thatcher suffered on the same subject 30 years ago. The Left will chirrup, but why is it apparently in favour of keeping Sunday special when logic dictates that it ought to be against? The Reverend Giles Fraser aside, the Left nowadays is generally quite anti-God –-- or it is certainly against the promotion of Christianity as an established religion. In the diverse, multi-cultural society of its dreams, no religion is superior than any other and none of them should be trying to impose their beliefs on others.

So, FTSE 100 company bosses have come out in favour of staying in the EU – even if, as Ed West notes, the 198 signatories in a letter to the Times represent only 36 companies. I wonder if anyone dropped out at the last moment to reduce the tally below the figure of 200. Of course big business supports the EU. It always has and always will. But who cares? What matters is what smaller, wealth-creating and job-creating businesses think. And they are much more Eurosceptic. A YouGov poll published in January revealed the huge divide between big business and the rest of the private sector on the issue. Out of 501 leaders of small and medium enterprises polled only 47 per cent favoured continued membership, with 42 per cent favouring withdrawal.