Ross Clark

Sir Edmund Hillary has demanded that the Nepalese government closes Mount Everest for a few years to 'give it a rest' and thereafter opens it only to serious climbers. Tourists who pay £40,000 to be led up Everest by experienced guides are not real mountaineers, he says, and they have no right to be there. It is entirely logical that Sir Edmund should be happier at the idea of Everest being put out of bounds. Was his ascent of Everest really such a big deal, he perhaps fears people will ask, when pot-bellied American tourists and beer-swilling students are doing it every day? But why Nepal should be expected to decline to make use of its principal asset and deprive sherpas of valuable income is another matter.

Stephen Byers has an apology to make. Not, sadly, for telling porkies or mismanaging the railways. He wants to apologise for going to the World Trade Organisation's conference in Seattle in 1999 and doing his bit for free trade. He now says he was misguided. Now that he has been 'meeting farmers and communities at the sharp end', he has concluded that free trade isn't such a good idea after all. 'The way forward,' he writes in the Guardian, 'is through a regime of managed trade in which markets are slowly opened up and trade policy levers like subsidies and tariffs are used to help achieve development goals.' It isn't just his days as secretary of state for trade on which Mr Byers is turning his back.

Investors stung by the endowment-policy and pension-plan mis-selling scandals, and in possession of poorly managed unit trusts that have failed miserably to outperform the FT-SE index, can hardly be blamed for coming to the conclusion that they might just as well make their own investment decisions rather than rely on the men in grey suits. Sadly, however, the European Commission believes that we cannot be trusted to make such decisions by ourselves. Its new Investment Services Directive contains a stinging clause that would oblige execution-only stockbrokers to assess their customers' competence before allowing them to use the service. Such obligations, the stockbrokers warn, will mean a sharp increase in the cost of trading for millions of small investors.

Unesco's recent Education for All week was outwardly a campaign to boost the educational opportunities for children in the Third World. On closer inspection, however, the campaigning materials betray a political motive involving one issue alone: 'gender parity'. 'Educating girls yields the highest return in economic terms,' asserts Unesco. 'Countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have not sent enough girls to school over the past 30 years now have GNPs 25 per cent lower than if they had given them a better chance.' This dubious statistic fails to acknowledge that in several African countries – notably Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia – more girls attend school than boys; and they are hardly economic hothouses either.

Although much overshadowed by the war in Iraq, environmentalists, businessmen and charity workers met at the World Water Forum in Kyoto last week to discuss why 1.2 billion people still have no access to clean water. The United Nations has set a target of reducing this by half by 2015. But Michel Camdessus, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warns that the target will not be met because only $80 billion a year is being invested annually in the global water supply against the required $180 billion. Returns are too low thanks to corruption and mismanagement in the Third World. Part of the problem is that Western anti-globalisation lobbyists, who themselves enjoy clean water, have been preaching a message that water and profit do not mix.

In a speech in Ontario a fortnight ago, Leo W. Gerard made an eloquent appeal for the formation of a new 'worldwide movement for social justice to cure the ills of globalisation'.

The London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have taken fright in the face of the terrorist threat. It is not all bad news in the property world, however. Real-estate agents in Finland and New Zealand could not be happier. American ex-pats, more used to life in the cosmopolitan districts of London and Paris, have discovered a taste for living in the world's backwaters. Pick up a copy of the Offshore Real Estate Quarterly, the bible of the chronically worried American, and you are transported to a world where survivalist freakery meets the swish language of property marketing.

James Tooley recently wrote in these pages of the success of private schools in Africa and India, which in the past few years have exploded in number, offering an education for as little as £3 a term - which even the poor of Somalia can afford. In contrast, he recounted how pupils of government schools in Ghana are left waiting on the doorstep while their teachers play truant, and how pupils of government schools in Hyderabad are forbidden to learn English and are forced instead to do the domestic chores of the teachers. Having made a convincing case for private education, Mr Tooley ended his piece with the question, 'What on earth is government doing in education at all?

The world of environmental science begins to resemble the Catholic Church before the Reformation. Anyone who challenges its grim orthodoxies can expect the latter-day equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. Two years ago, the former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he comprehensively deconstructed the doctrines to which he had previously been attracted. It is not true, he argued, that the world is heading for environmental armageddon: the dangers to mankind from pollution and overconsumption of resources have been hugely overstated in order to promote the interests of environmental scientists.

Seldom does the European Union miss an opportunity to pursue its protectionist agenda. No sooner had the first slugs of crude oil from the sunken Estonian oil tanker, the Prestige, arrived on the Spanish coast than France, Spain, Portugal and Italy moved to banish single-hulled oil-tankers of more than 15 years' vintage from European waters: which means within 200 miles of European coasts. An oil slick, of course, is an ecological disaster, but would a double hull really have prevented the sinking of the Prestige? 'A double-hulled ship has more built-in redundancy,' says Robert Saunders, technical information officer for the Royal Institution of Naval Architects. 'It is possible that a crack in an outer hull won't spread to an inner hull.

Christmas shoppers are being urged to boycott the clothes store Gap on the basis that it exploits workers in the Third World. A report in the Guardian quotes a Bangladeshi who says she has her ears pulled when she makes mistakes, and a wretch from Lesotho who complains that his factory is so dusty that when he blows his nose his snot comes out the same shade of blue as the T-shirts he is making. What the report doesn't say is that the organisation demanding the boycott, Unite, is a trade union which represents American textile workers, not their brethren in the Third World. For years Unite has campaigned against US companies which have transferred their production overseas, thereby costing the jobs of Americans.

Ordinary life must go on, the government persuaded us while administering its warning two weeks ago of a possible terrorist attack: if we allow the threat of bombings to disrupt our normal activities, then we give the terrorists what they want. Fine words, indeed, except that they seem to apply only on British soil. If you are thinking of taking a holiday abroad, on the other hand, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is ready to bombard you with a thousand reasons not to go. Those who remember the lengths to which the government used to go to promote Britain to foreign travellers during the IRA's mainland bombing campaign could be excused a little puzzlement over the FCO's advice following the Bali bomb: 'We advise against all travel to Bali and elsewhere in Indonesia.

One of my wife's ancestors was consumed by cannibals in the South Seas in the mid-18th century. I don't think the government of Tonga, or wherever the meal took place, would be terribly impressed if a lawsuit arrived on its desk demanding reparations. If you are descended from a black American slave, on the other hand, it may well be worth your while dropping a line to the city authorities in Chicago where a law has just been passed demanding that any company seeking a contract from the city will have to declare any profits that they may have made from owning, insuring or trading in slaves. They now face having to pay levies to the survivors of slaves - no matter that the recipients themselves will never have known forced labour.

The survivors from the Melnikova Street Theatre are unlikely to be in a fit state to read the International Chemical Weapons Convention. But they may well be wondering exactly where Russia's poisoning of more than 100 innocent citizens fits within this much-vaunted treaty, which came into force four years ago. In fact, the treaty couldn't be clearer: while it prohibits the manufacture, storage and use of any weapon designed to bring about temporary or permanent incapacitation by chemical means, it applies only to equipment intended to be used in the course of war. It does nothing to prevent states gassing their own people for the purposes of 'law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes'.

So, the United Nations weapons inspectors are ready to go in, and this time they are not going to be put off their scent by feeble excuses. They will not be satisfied until every single weapon has been destroyed. Every slipper, every cane, every outstretched bare hand must go: the UN committee on the rights of the child has ruled Mr Blair's government to be an international pariah because it has failed to ban the smacking of children. 'We are talking about alternative forms of disciplining children because we are not saying children should not be disciplined,' the committee chairman, Jacob Doek, told reporters last week. 'But is it necessary to hit them over the head or kick them in the butt?