Ross Clark

We might not have much of a coherent energy policy, but we do at least have the honour of breaking the record for the most expensive object ever built. According to Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, speaking at the Spectator Energy Forum, the cost of Hinkley C nuclear power station, Britain’s first nuclear power plant in 30 years, to be built in Somerset by French power giant EDF, is now up to £24 billion. ‘I’ve looked online to see if there was a more expensive object ever built but I couldn’t find one’ says Atherton. ‘The most expensive bridge was something like £6 billion and the most expensive building something like £5 billion.

Two headlines on successive days speak volumes about the scaremongering which is endemic in the way in which learned bodies disseminate information on climate science. Yesterday, the Royal Society published a report, Resilience to Extreme Weather, predicting that by 2090 four billion people around the world each year will be subjected to heatwave events, with dire consequences for the health of older people. This morning, the Office of National Statistics published its latest figures on ‘excess winter deaths’. They show that last winter there were 18,200 more deaths between December and February than would be expected during the three summer months. Dramatic though this sounds, it is the lowest recorded in 65 years.

Have a read of the following list and see if you can guess its significance: lubricants, iron ore, steel, oil, pharmaceuticals, ships, telecoms, food packaging, oil, property. With the exception of telecoms and property, and perhaps pharmaceuticals, are they just boring, old, dirty industries which are part of Britain’s industrial heritage but play a declining part in our dynamic, 21st-century service-based economy? In fact they are, in order, the principal business interests of the British residents who occupied the top ten places in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List. It is little surprise that there is only one representative from the aristrocacy: the Duke of Westminster, at number ten.

Want your sprog to be toughened up on the playing fields of Eton but can’t afford the fees? From September there is an intriguing alternative. You can send him instead to Holyport College, a free school which is opening in the shell of an old special school six miles away. Though the chairman of governors, Simon Dudley, insists his new school is not ‘Eton Lite’, the website offers more than a hint that here is an opportunity to obtain an Eton-standard education for a third of the price, if your child boards, or nothing at all if he doesn’t. ‘Eton College is our sole educational sponsor,’ reads the blurb, ‘and therefore brings its educational and pastoral expertise to Holyport College.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_31_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="Ross Clark and Lara Prendergast discuss the demise of individualism"] Listen [/audioplayer]Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. As for the absolute pit, the eighth circle or however else you describe the geography of Beelzebub’s kingdom, that is being left alone without a 3G mobile phone signal. Of all changes in British life over the past generation, nothing has been quite so as stark as the strange death of individualism.

Will the military ever see any wrong in the execution of 306 soldiers for cowardice and desertion in World War One? I ask only because I have tried and failed to stage a new musical drama on the subject in a military museum. The Imperial War Museum said straight away that it had organised its own programme of events, but the events directors at the National Army Museum and the Royal Artillery Museum in Woolwich initially showed enthusiasm. They invited in the director and I to see what spaces were available. We discussed whether we would pay a hire charge or enter a revenue-sharing agreement where we paid the museum so much for every ticket.

I used to feel smug when plumbers, bricklayers and the like used to complain of Eastern European migrants coming over here and taking their work. They might be able to replace a ballcock and lay a line of bricks but the one thing these Poles won’t be able to do, unless they happen to be Joseph Conrad, is write good English. My job would be safe. But there was a great big hole in my thinking: I hadn’t reckoned on artificial intelligence. What happens – as it will do any day now – when the editor of the Spectator receives a salesman, or even a sales robot, peddling a device which cuts his contributors’ bill down to next to nothing?

I have just decided that my work is of equal value to that of the feminist supermodel Cameron Russell. Neither of us, admittedly, is quite as useful as a plumber, and I can’t claim to be of much use promoting swimwear. But otherwise I reckon we are a pretty close match. We both tart ourselves around and while my work doesn’t involve a lot of physical input, I would like to think that it requires a slightly higher contribution from the brain department. There then arises the question: should I not be paid as much as she is? Ludicrous? Perhaps, but no more so, I think, than what is going on in Birmingham, where council taxpayers are facing a £1 billion bill for a mass equal pay claim on the part of 11,000 female staff.

As Chris Turney and his colleagues make their way home from their failed adventure, the next question is: who is going to be paying for their folly?  It certainly isn’t the general public. The efforts by Turney and his co-leader Chris Fogwill to crowd-fund money have been an embarrassing failure. They were seeking to raise $49,000 in this way – a small fraction of the $1.5 million overall costs – but they managed to raise a mere $1,000 from 22 people. Not even the promise of a signed copy of Turney’s book, 1912: the year the World Discovered Antarctica was enough to tempt donors into action: not a single one chose to receive the book. British taxpayers, needless to say, have dipped in their toes.

My favourite quote of the season comes from Tracy Rogers, a marine ecologist who sometime today will be winched from the research vessel the Akademik Shokalskiy and rescued by helicopter.  ‘I love it when the ice wins and we don’t,’ she says. ‘It reminds you that as humans we don’t control everything and that the natural world is the winner here.’ The unintended irony is delicious. If the winner of the fiasco which has been developing in the Antarctic over the past two weeks is the natural world there is little disguising who the losers are, even if, as I suspect, Tracy Rogers can’t quite see it.