Ross Clark

Compared with the mobs chanting against sunbathers on Tenerife or the new entry fee just to set foot in Venice, Britain’s own war on tourism may seem mild. Nevertheless, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the UK government is ‘sabotaging’ its own tourism industry. In 2024, it says, international visitors spent 5 per cent less in Britain than they did in 2019. The reason for this, it adds, are deliberate policy choices by the government. The end of VAT-free shopping for international visitors, a rise in air passenger duty and the new requirement for tourists to seek electronic travel authorisation – a mini visa scheme – before they travel to Britain have all contributed to the fall.

I guess I must be one of Ed Miliband’s ‘siren voices’. Writing in the Observer today, the Energy and Climate Secretary complains about people he thinks: ‘Would keep Britain locked in dependence on global markets we don’t control. They will also make up any old nonsense and lies to pursue their ideological agenda, the latest example being their attempt to use the crisis facing the steel industry for their deeply damaging agenda.’ He goes on to assert: ‘UK Steel says that it is the “UK’s reliance on natural gas power generation” that leaves us with higher prices than international allies – not too much clean energy, but too little.’ Steady on, Ed.

Why do so many people rail against the trade barriers erected by Donald Trump and yet have so little to say about similar barriers erected by the EU? Where is the liberal outrage against the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) which from next January will add tariffs to imports of ferrous metals, aluminium, cement and fertiliser, and which in future is intended to be expanded to other goods with significant carbon footprints? While remainer opinion has condemned Keir Starmer and his government for ‘appeasing’ Trump by considering lowering the Digital Services Tax and easing online safety laws in order to please US tech giants, there is a remarkable lack of objection to Keir Starmer’s proposal to bend to the EU by aligning Britain with the CBAM.

The point of a government energy regulator is supposed to be to make sure that the market is working to achieve proper competition. Their other job is surely to keep an eye on the billing practices of energy companies – to make sure, for example, that they are not hoodwinking people into signing up for their services on the basis of incorrect information. But, as has become common with quango arms-length government agencies, Ofgem appears to be trying to broaden its remit. Ofgem has decided to make a foray into the issue of redistributive taxation. The body has proposed that the standing charges imposed on gas and electricity bills should be varied according to means, with high-income households paying higher standing charges and low-income ones being granted a discount.

The threat by the Chinese company Jingye to close down Britain’s last two blast furnaces, in spite of the offer of help from the government, is yet more reminder of the perils of doing business with a potentially hostile state. Whatever the motives for Chinese companies to get involved in the running of critical UK infrastructure, there is a threat that they will wield their power in ways that are not helpful to UK energy and industrial security – to put it mildly. Yet none of this seems to have deterred Ed Miliband last month when he visited Beijing and – it now emerges – signed a ‘clean energy partnership’ with the Chinese government.

For Reform’s supporters drawn from the right of the Conservative party, Nigel Farage’s call to nationalise British Steel never made much sense. Why return Britain to the days of pre-Thatcherite Britain, when loss-making industries were propped up by the taxpayer as they gradually became less and less competitive globally? Yet the political value of Farage’s policy has now become plain. With the government recalling parliament to pass emergency legislation to take control of the ailing British Steel – said by its Chinese owners, Jingye, to be losing £700,000 a day – Farage can now be seen to be leading Labour party policy.

As a piece of financial punditry, it could hardly be bettered. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY”, screamed a post on the platform Truth Social on Wednesday morning. Hours later, the S&P 500 surged by 9 percent – its biggest percentage rise since 2008. The only trouble is that the tipster handing out this invaluable advice was the same man whose announcement caused the surge in the stock market: Donald J. Trump. Unsurprisingly, it has raised questions about who knew that Trump was about to do an about-turn and delay tariffs for 90 days – and whether any of them used the information to their personal advantage. Insider trading has long been treated as a serious issue among corporations.

Well, that’s one way to reduce NHS waiting lists: to kick off a load of patients whom you have decided don’t need to be on them. New NHS chief executive John Mackey has ordered that everyone on a waiting list must be ‘validated’ – with the aim of removing 300,000 of the 7.43 million names on them. Examples given are people who have already been seen privately and have no further need for NHS treatment, people who have instead sought help in A&E, people who no longer have symptoms or those who could be seen ‘in the community’ instead (i.e. at GP surgeries or clinics). Many of the names which have been removed will have been a symptom of failure I don’t doubt that there are people on NHS waiting lists who don’t need to be there.

So were Donald Trump’s tariffs a negotiating tactic all along – never intended to come into force but rather as a shock tactic to bring other governments to the negotiating table? That was a popular theory before ‘Liberation Day’, but one rather snuffed out by the severity of the tariffs announced and the realisation that Trump might actually be deadly serious about wanting to price foreign goods out of US markets. Lord Hague, for example, wrote earlier this week that people had fooled themselves into thinking that Trump didn’t always mean what he said; we were naïve to think that he should not be taken literally.