Ross Clark

Cameron’s inclinations are to help the rich and the ‘romantic’ poor and do little for those who’ve bettered themselves, says Ross Clark. But can he rely on the middle-class vote? There may be no big idea but there is an important concept lurking on the back page of the Conservatives’ draft manifesto on health. And if party strategists want to get through the election campaign without offending a large sector of its core vote, they had better make sure it stays there. The idea is worded thus: ‘we will weight public health funding so that extra resources go to the poorest areas with the worst health outcomes through a new health premium’.

Ross Clark says it’s not so much the Prince of Wales who has put the mockers on this controversial Qatari-backed development, but the grim economics of the credit crunch Gordon Brown is well known for his bad timing in selling off half the nation’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market in 1999. But with the sale of the Chelsea Barracks site in 2007 the government could not have timed it better, picking up nearly £1 billion at the peak of the property boom, just before the credit crunch and before the intervention of the Prince of Wales sent the scheme into a tailspin of litigation and anti-royal fury.

Power cuts and uncollected rubbish form most people’s memories of the economic debacle that was the 1970s. But for me, a quite different story sums up the lack of business sense that distinguished the British at the time. My mother had gone into a village shop in Kent to buy some bacon, which the affable shoplady found some pretext to give to her for free. While she was there another customer came in and tried to buy a tin-opener. ‘Oh, you don’t want one of them, they’re rubbish,’ said the shoplady, scathingly. ‘Why don’t you borrow mine? If you go upstairs it’s in my kitchen drawer. But do please shut the kitchen door when you go out.’ I do wonder whether she ever took a penny. Of course, Britain is not like that any more.

Ross Clark says that we mustn’t underestimate Boris’s greatest achievement: to have frozen the GLA precept without affecting services is a triumph It is hard to remember the horrors of the London inherited by new Mayor Boris Johnson a year ago. It was a city gridlocked with traffic, with unaffordable housing, and where you couldn’t get a table in a decent restaurant without booking six months in advance. Now, the roads run freely, property is much cheaper and a seat for this evening at London’s finest restaurants is only a phone call away. Admittedly, these improvements are less the work of the Mayor than a consolation for the deepest recession in living memory. What a time it was to take control of the world’s unofficial financial capital!

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling rail against bankers’ bonuses. But, says Ross Clark, the really appetising salaries, perks, expense packages and pensions are to be found in the public sector. A terrible reckoning lies ahead for the last fat cats Imagine for a moment that you are a banker in one of the bailed-out banks. You have seen a few of your colleagues disappear into the lift with a bin bag and every time you wander past a pub you have had to endure the thought that there may be drinkers inside demanding you be sentenced to cruel and more unusual punishments. Yet, for all the angst of the past year, you may be just beginning to wonder: will life in the public sector really be so bad after all?

The Insolvency Service has sent me a questionnaire seeking my views on bankruptcy. At first, I was enthused by this chance to say what I think about Gordon Brown’s reforms which have led to an explosion in personal bankruptcies — a record 200 of them per day in the last quarter of 2008 — and the growth of a culture in which the feckless walk away from their debts. Unfortunately, the more I worked my way through the multiple-choice questions, the more I realised it was not going to allow me to state what I really think. In fact, it was clearly designed to help the government work out how it might get away with making bankruptcy even easier. So instead of completing the questionnaire, I am sending this letter: Dear Insolvency Service, Thank you for your questionnaire.

The government recently proposed that schoolchildren be given lessons in personal finance. Can I ask that, alongside the Lower Fourth, room be made in the classes for the AA spokesman who recently said this: ‘People wanting to get high-aspiration vehicles at an affordable price will have been hit by the crash in [the cars’] value.’ Yes, this remark really is as stupid as it seems, but first a little context. He was talking about a form of hire purchase called ‘Personal Contract Purchase’, whereby a motorist pays a deposit, followed by two years of monthly payments. At the end of this period, the buyer has two options: he can either pay a lump sum to purchase the car outright, or he can return it to the finance company which organised the deal.

Zero interest rates, record borrowing, printing money; the government has indicated that it is prepared to consider anything to slay the spectre of deflation. But if deflation is really such a bad thing — and I’m not convinced that, in a mild form, it is — then perhaps ministers should look at reining in a culprit whose role in promoting deflation has scarcely been mentioned: the internet. We are forever reminded about the deflationary pressures which have arisen from the huge shift of manufacturing to Asia. But what about the influence of the vast discount store that is the worldwide web? Any author hoping for a Christmas royalties bonus will already have had a foretaste of the debilitating effects of deflation.

I ought to be a natural Warren Buffett. I’ve never had any difficulty doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. If there ever was anyone capable of being ‘fearful when everyone else is greedy and greedy when everyone else is fearful’, it’s me. Why, then, is Warren Buffett worth tens of billions and I’m scratching to break even after years of investing? It isn’t that I haven’t been on the lookout for what Buffett calls ‘moments of maximum pessimism’. I have. I’ve been buying into them strongly. It’s just that there have been so many moments of maximum pessimism that I’ve used up all the cash I put aside for investing this year.

Ross Clark says speculators and fraudsters saw easy money in buying city-centre flats with borrowed money — but investors and lenders now face huge losses as prices crash I have developed a rather ghoulish pastime. It involves thumbing through auction results for repossessed apartments in city centres, then checking what those same properties sold for when new, a year or two ago. My record so far is a two-bedroom flat in a development called Beauchamp Place, Coventry, which was auctioned in September for £85,000 — less than 40 per cent of the £214,000 for which it was sold new in June 2006. That flat has, however, performed better as an investment than the shares of the company that led the buy-to-let boom.

Ross Clark takes a look at the TaxPayers’ Alliance Seldom has tax featured in the media over the past decade without the lanky figure of Robert Chote of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, or his predecessor Andrew Dilnot, popping up to discuss it. Yet recently the IFS’s monopoly has come under increasingly serious challenge. Whether it be the Daily Telegraph or the Money Programme, there is now a good chance that it will not be Mr Chote giving his hap’orth, but the bespectacled figure of Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

I’m going to start with a declaration of interest. I own a four-bedroom house in Cambridgeshire, in which I have been living for the past nine years. I own no other property, either in Britain or abroad. I feel obliged to say this because increasingly when I read headlines such as ‘Doom and gloom as house prices fall further’, I wonder: has the author got a portfolio of bedsits in Stoke-on-Trent or has he just bought a house in Tooting and is desperately trying to flog his flat in Streatham? The received wisdom that falling house prices are a bad thing is certainly not shared by the public at large. Last week a BBC poll revealed that 28 per cent of Britons can’t wait for house prices to fall — compared with only 22 per cent who want them to rise.

For the vociferous band of Tesco-haters, waiting for the supermarket giant to slip up on one of its own homogenised banana skins has been a long and frustrating business. OK, you can clutch on to the failure of Tesco to achieve the 4 per cent year-on-year increase in sales during the Christmas period which analysts had predicted (it only managed 3.1 per cent). You can point out that its shares have plunged by 20 per cent since December — but which retailer’s shares haven’t? You can crow that a remarkable number of its executives over the past year have been scattering to jobs in rival businesses (one of them, dammit, to Sainsbury). But it is all pretty desperate stuff. Tesco still takes £1 in every £8 spent in shops by British consumers.

Next month I will break the habit of a lifetime and wait until the red reminder before paying my telephone bill. I will do so because BT has decided to charge me £33 a year for the audacity of paying my bill by cheque. BT is penalising people who pay by cheque because it wants us all to pay by direct debit. As it happens, I’m happy enough to pay by direct debit for some things: namely bills which are for a fixed amount of money every month. I would be perfectly happy to pay my telephone bill online, too, so long as I was in control of the transaction. What I refuse to do is to open my bank account to BT and say: ‘Here, take what you like.