Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves may have helped run up a £151 billion deficit in the past 12 months (with a little help from Jeremy Hunt), but for some people it is not nearly enough. A snapshot into Reeves’s world is provided by the Resolution Foundation today, which has claimed that Reeves’s plan for £100 billion of additional capital spending over the course of this parliament will not nearly be enough, and that most of it will simply be swallowed up reversing ‘Tory cuts’. In a report entitled Capital Gains, it says that Reeves won’t really have an extra £100 billion to spend in her spending review; when cuts to budgets are taken into account it will mean only an extra £20 billion of money available.

Never was there more truth in the old adage about every organisation that is not specifically right-wing eventually becoming left-wing. The pay review bodies which are supposed to provide independent advice to the government on public sector pay have become a menace. They have become advocates for trade unions and care not a jot about the taxpayer. Teaching and nursing unions are threatening strikes if the government does not accept the recommendations of pay review bodies. The one concerned with teachers’ pay has suggested a 4 per cent rise and the one regarding nurses’ pay is suggesting over 3 per cent. They may seem modest rises, except that inflation is down to 2.6 per cent and productivity in the public sector has gone into reverse. Moreover, the government borrowed £16.

It’s official: subjecting oil and gas companies to a 78 pence tax rate (which is corporation tax plus the government’s windfall tax) doesn’t increase energy prices in the UK. That is what Ed Miliband told us on Sky News this morning, so it must be true. He will no doubt be hoping that we don’t look at the figures published by his own department which show that gas consumers in Britain pay an average of 10.17 pence per kilowatt-hour while US consumers – where the oil and gas industry is encouraged rather than taxed to near-extinction – pay the equivalent of 4.04 pence. Sky's @WilfredFrost questions the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband on whether UK gas prices would decrease if the tax rate of 78% on energy companies was lowered by the government. https://t.

So, Ed Miliband has relented, and decided that after all it is not a good idea to build his green energy revolution on the back of slave labour in the Uighur region of China. Miliband had refused to back a Lords amendment to the Great British Energy Bill, first reported by Steerpike, which would have forced the putative government-owned green energy company to address the use of slave labour in its supply chains – Labour MPs were ordered to vote against it. Now the Energy and Climate Change Secretary has produced his own amendment to much the same effect.

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.