Ross Clark

The idea of private schools as bastions of academic achievement has taken me some getting used to. When I left school 30 years ago, private schools were places of cold showers, beautiful but crumbling buildings and expansive playing fields. But good exam results? We never knew, of course, because exam results were not published, but there was always a suspicion — at least among grammar-school pupils like me — that private schools had more than their fair share of duffers who gained a leg up in life through friendships made on the rugger field rather than hard study. Yet since the Department for Education started to publish school exam results two decades ago, the results have been there for all to see.

The liberal-left is very rapid to react when a terror suspect faces deportation or an extremist preacher is put under house-arrest. So why isn’t it on the streets chanting the name of Honey Rose? Ms Rose is an optometrist who appeared in court on Tuesday charged with manslaughter by gross negligence after allegedly failing to spot a condition known as papilloedema while examining an eight-year-old boy during a shift at Boots. Sadly, the boy later died. I always used to associate manslaughter with husbands who bashed their wives over the head and whom it couldn’t quite be proven that they had intended to kill them, or with muggers who assailed their victims solely with the intent of grabbing their wallet, not knowing that they had a heart condition.

Why doesn’t the Office of National Statistics want us to know that Mohammed is the most popular boys' name in England and Wales?  Yesterday, it put out its annual survey of the top 10 baby’s names.  In 2014, it reported, the most popular boys’ names were Oliver, Jack and Harry. This contrasts somewhat with a similar survey by the website BabyCentre last December which claimed that the most popular boys' name was now Mohammed. When that survey was reported in the Daily Mail it was jumped upon by various left-wing ‘fact-checker’ websites who denounced the survey as an abuse of statistics.

The right to free movement of people and goods across the EU is, as we keep being told when the government proposes to trim benefits for Romanians, a fundamental and inalienable principle of the Treaty of Rome. Why then does the European Court of Justice show no interest in the French ferry workers whose strike has led to 30 miles of tailbacks either side of the Channel? There could scarcely be a more brazen example of free movement being thwarted, and yet there seems to be no sign of ferry workers, their union or the French government being taken to court, ordered to let the lorries through or subjected to any other kind of sanction whatsoever. The right to free movement is not really inalienable at all. It is trumped by workers’ rights.

If you were deliberately trying to obtain a record high temperature reading an international airport would be a good place to take your thermometer. With huge concrete aprons and planes spewing out large quantities of hot air, airports have a microclimate of their own. That is one reason not to get excited by today's record July temperature of 98 degrees Fahrenheit (36.7 Celsius) measured at Heathrow. But there is another very good reason why the familiar clattering of broken weather records does little to reinforce the narrative of climate change. There are four countries in the UK, 12 months of the year and 4 main records to beat: hottest, coldest, wettest and driest.

So Sepp Blatter has substituted himself hardly 30 seconds into the second half, or rather the fifth half. But his rhinoceros skin still doesn’t seem to have been breached. His parting shot contained a bewildering statement: 'We need a limitation on mandates and terms of office. I have fought for these changes but my efforts have been counteracted.' If so, then why didn’t he take a lead by the simple expedient of not standing for a fifth term as Fifa president last week? It is a bit rich insisting on standing for an office and then claiming that you had spent your previous term fighting to abolish your right to stand.

How pleasing that the sleazebags at Fifa are finally getting their comeuppance. We have all known what has been going on for years: dodgy deals in hotels, backhanders to secure votes. Who could disagree with the judgement of Greg Dyke, chairman of the FA when he suggested: 'There is no way of rebuilding trust in Fifa while Sepp Blatter is still there.' If we won’t go, let’s boycott the World Cup until Fifa is governed like, er, our own upstanding football establishment. That’s the problem. Yes, of course Fifa is a fetid pit of corruption, but we can’t exactly claim the moral high ground, not with our own history of bungs, match-fixing scandals and player-rapists.

Why is it that whenever anyone proposes a tax on the wealthy all hell breaks loose, but when someone proposes a tax on the poor there is no more than a faint whimper of protest? Yesterday, life sciences minister George Freeman, speaking at the Hay Festival, floated the idea of a sugar tax. In contrast to Labour’s mansion tax or the removal of tax privileges for non-doms, my email inbox was not immediately jammed with statements from upmarket estate agents, accountants and others representing the interests of the rich warning of how it would ruin the economy. It is fairly obvious who will pay the sugar tax: it would be paid for hugely disproportionately by the poor.

The cost of living, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported on Tuesday, has fallen by 0.1 per cent over the past year. Or at least it has if you rent your home and have no intention ever of owning your own. If you do aspire to buy a home, on the other hand, you might conclude that the government’s preferred inflation index – the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) -- is a fraud on the public which ignores the single biggest cost you are likely to face in life: buying a property. It includes no element of house prices whatsoever. It includes rents, but in such a way that social housing rents are over-represented. It is only thanks to the exclusion of house prices that CPI is falling when, on the same day, the ONS reported that house prices have risen over the past year by 9.

'Bank of England says that migrants are holding down wages' the headlines screamed this morning. Yet Mark Carney, when interviewed on the Today programme this morning, spun a slightly different story. Migrants bear some responsibility for downwards pressure on wages, he said, but not so much as another group of people: British workers in the 50s and 60s who are returning from retirement, or who never retired in the first place. Over the past two years, net migration is up by 50,000, but that number is dwarfed by 300,000 people whom the Bank of England would normally have expected to have retired by now, but who have carried on in the workplace. In addition, workers are wanting to work extra hours – equivalent to having an extra 200,000 to 300,000 people in the workforce.

How foolish of Ed Miliband to try to pervert the free market in housing with his rent controls. There is a slight problem with this analysis, which we have heard ad nauseam from the Conservatives and from the right in general over the past 24 hours. We don’t have a free market in housing and we haven’t had for at least 65 years, when the planning system came into being. Yes, rent controls would come with the risk of reducing the supply of rental property, pushing up rents and creating a black market in properties sublet at lower than the officially-approved price. But the effect of Miliband’s reforms (which in any case stop short of rent control) would be extremely modest compared with the effect of the market-distortions caused by the planning system.