Ross Clark

Here is a little paradox. For 30 years during the Troubles you have been taking the Belfast to Stranraer ferry. No one asked you for identification: you just bought your ticket and off you went, even though it is quite possible that among your fellow passengers on one of those journeys was a terrorist smuggling bomb-making equipment into mainland Britain. Eventually, peace is restored to Northern Ireland. And what happens? Suddenly you can’t travel without a passport or ID card, and all your luggage is scanned. Once in Belfast you decide to take a train to Dublin, a journey you have been making unhindered for 30 years.

Surely, I said, the RAF cannot have bombed them all. No, she said: it was the ‘economic miracle’ which had done for them. Wealthy West Germans had spent the 1960s bulldozing fuddy-duddy old houses and building nice modern chalet bungalows in their place. Soon we will be able to give the same answer in response to the question, why is there not a single fireplace or original architrave left in the whole of Chelsea, Kensington or Hampstead? The answer is London’s own economic ‘miracle’. The City is so wealthy now that you cannot show off your wealth simply by buying a nice house and living in it: you have to gut it and fill it with all the latest fashion accessories.

While all eyes were on the crash of Northern Rock last week, something even scarier was happening. Two of Britain’s many house price indices — there were eight competing in a crowded market last time I counted — reminded us that property prices can fall as well as rise. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors reported that a net balance of 1.8 per cent of its members say house prices fell in August. Then Rightmove, the property website, reported that asking prices in England and Wales had fallen by an average of 2.6 per cent. If you have just bought a job lot of buy-to-let apartments in Docklands on the never-never, no doubt this is worrying news. But not half so worrying as the figures I have had my eyes on.

Ross Clark says that our capital has the geographical, economic and social conditions that made the Venetian city-state of the 14th century — but all this is vulnerable When Tony Blair secured the agreement of the Scots and — only just — the Welsh for devolution in the referendums of 1998, it was supposed to herald a great revival of the regions. Britain was to be reborn as a kind of West Germany, whose constitution included a reference to ironing out the economic disparities between Hamburg and Munich, Frankfurt and Hanover. Instead, the opposite seems to have occurred.

Ross Clark says that the anti-globalisation rioters protesting at the G8 summit in Germany and Labour’s deputy leadership contenders are part of a new and dangerous trend towards wealth-bashing One of the little-remarked side effects of 9/11 was the eclipse of the anti-globalisation movement. It is not easy to remember that in the summer of 2001, the year in which protestor Carlo Giuliani died during rioting at the G8 summit in Genoa, the growing venom of anti-capitalism protestors was seen as such a threat to society that, briefly, on the afternoon of 11 September commentators on the live radio and television coverage discussed the possibility that the attacks could have been carried out by enemies of globalisation. After 9/11, however, the movement suffered a precipitous decline.

The regulator of premium-rate telephone services, ICSTIC, is investigating television companies which dangle prizes before viewers’ eyes and then make it extremely difficult to claim them. When it has finished with that, perhaps the watchdog might turn its attention to a similar scam: Gordon Brown’s tax credits. In last month’s Budget, the Chancellor held out the promise that 5.3 million people who will be left worse off by the abolition of the 10 pence starting rate for income tax will be able to offset some of their losses by claiming enhanced tax credits. What he didn’t say was that tax credits are so fiendishly complicated that millions fail to claim the money to which they are entitled.

Corporate success can generally be measured by the size and strength of the campaign to boycott your business. But until very recently there was a remarkable exception to this rule: Tesco. For a supermarket group which now accounts for a remarkable one in every eight pounds taken by retailers in Britain, opposition has been remarkably light. Where are the student demos, the bricks flying through Tesco windows on May Day? Even tapping into www.boycotttesco.com is something of a disappointment; the site was bought up some time ago by a bunch of American libertarians who object to the way loyalty cards are used to spy on our shopping habits — not exactly an issue which excites the British public’s imagination.

I have no idea whether Sion Jenkins — the former Hastings deputy headmaster who was this week acquitted of murdering his foster daughter after juries in two successive trials failed to reach a verdict — committed the foul deed or not. I wasn’t there. Maybe Jenkins suffered one of the fits of rage which his former wife, Lois, now claims are part of his character and slugged poor Billie-Jo over the head because she had spilled paint on the carpet, then stuffed a piece of black bin-liner up her nose in a deliberate attempt to implicate the mysterious ‘Mr B.’, a lowlifer with a plastic fetish who used to frequent the park outside the Jenkinses’ home.

After some consideration I am not sure that I can get excited about the debate as to whether cannabis should be classifed as a Class B drug or whether, as the Home Secretary Charles Clarke decided last week, it should remain Class C. Rather, I am coming round to the conclusion that it should be declassified as a drug altogether — and reclassified as a banned foodstuff. Instead of being handled by a bunch of creepy do-gooders from the drugs’ charities, the battle to keep it off the streets would then be run by the zealots of the Food Standards Agency.

Ross Clark on the workers who milk the rest of us by retiring early as a result of ‘ill health’ The next few months may well see the political death of Tony Blair. But whether he will get buried is another matter. In an echo of the public-sector bolshieness 27 winters ago that eventually brought down the Callaghan government, public-sector unions have renewed their threat to stage a national strike over proposals to raise their normal retirement age from 60 to 65. A month ago Alan Johnson, the trade secretary, appeared to buy off a strike by agreeing with the unions to exempt all existing public-sector employees, even newly recruited 18-year-old postmen, from the need to work until 65.