Ross Clark

Ross Clark

Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. He writes on Substack, at Ross on Why?

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Is the NHS losing its appeal for Britain’s youth?

The NHS has survived many Conservative governments which, according to their opponents, were out to privatise it. But can it survive a growing disenchantment on the part of young professionals who are turned off by the idea of having to queue for healthcare? According to the Independent Healthcare Provider Network (IHPN) – admittedly not an entirely disinterested party – the largest growth in the private health sector is among young professionals in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who want rapid scans and other diagnostic tests without the wait.

Monday

Ross Clark

Good riddance to Cambridge’s May balls

I’m not usually one to hold back from damning the woke and progressive forces which lie within my alma mater, the University of Cambridge. An initiative by the geography department to decolonise the study of icebergs in the Canadian north was the final straw. But there is one conservative cause that I won’t be putting my name to: saving the May Ball. Several colleges are reported to have cancelled their balls this year in reaction to poor ticket sales and students complaining that the events are 'extortionate, overpriced and exclusive'. Trinity college, one of the few whose balls survive, is charging £280 for a ticket.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Farage is leading Labour’s policy

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.

Friday

Ross Clark

Who knew about Trump’s flip-flop?

From our US edition

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.

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Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves has managed to grow the economy

Just when everyone seems to be revising down expectations of growth, real world data starts pointing in the opposite direction. The Office for National Statistics estimates this morning that GDP grew by 0.5 per cent in February. It also revised January’s figures upwards to give growth for the last quarter of 0.6 per cent, and annual growth of 1.4 per cent. That is almost looking healthy – although less so when you consider the growth in the population is thanks to high migration. What’s more, growth was reasonably balanced, with the production sector growing by 1.5 per cent in February and construction by 0.3 per cent. Even car manufacturing had a positive month. These are areas of the economy which have shrunk in recent times even when services have grown.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Don’t expect much from Wes Streeting’s waiting list purge

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.

Ross Clark

Eco warriors are driving themselves to extinction

It wasn’t that long ago when the fashionable gathering place for young couples was a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust. I remember, in the early months of 1995, sitting in our instructor’s front room as she passed around a plastic model of a female pelvis while she asked us: ‘So how do you think the baby gets out?’ Fast-forward three decades and there is a new way for middle-class would-be mothers to spend their evenings: attending sessions of a project entitled ‘Motherhood in a Climate Crisis’ put on by the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute. There is no better way to describe it than to quote the academics’ blurb.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Did Trump really mean to slap tariffs on the world?

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.

Ross Clark

Could China collapse the US economy?

Anyone who thought that government bonds would provide a safe haven from the turmoil on global stock markets has just had a rude awakening. While bond yields initially fell after Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation day’, yesterday they rebounded, with the yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds hitting 4.5 per cent – higher than they were before the crisis began. To put it another way, anyone with holdings in US government debt would initially have seen the value of their bonds rise, but now they, like most equity investors, are sitting on a paper loss. The movements in US Treasury bonds have led some to wonder: could the rest of the world bring the US government to its knees by dumping its debt, and indeed, is that what is happening in retaliation for Trump’s tariff wars?

Ross Clark

What caused Birmingham’s bin strikes?

Yes, as Wes Streeting says, it is ‘unacceptable’ for rubbish to be left piling up on the streets of Birmingham as the binmen go on strike. But neither he nor all the other government figures complaining about the strike should forget its cause. It is the fallout of Birmingham City Council going bust as a result of an equal pay claim brought by cleaners who complained they were not paid as much as binmen. It was a case based on the principle of ‘work of equal value’.

Monday

Ross Clark

Why are sports cars being exempted from net zero rules?

You can carry on burning petrol and diesel in your car so long as it is a pricey, niche sports car. If you are a pleb who can only afford a family hatchback, on the other hand, you will have to convert to electric – and the government will pretend that it is saving you money. That just about sum up the government’s new policy on electric vehicles. The Zero Emission Vehicle mandate will be relaxed, but mostly for car manufacturers who produce fewer than 2,500 cars a year, who will be given a free pass. Given that these manufacturers – like Aston Martin – tend to be at the upper, more polluting end of the market, it is rather as if the government had just come up with a tax on airline travel which exempted private jets. Perhaps I shouldn’t give them ideas.

Friday

Ross Clark

In defence of the Norfolk mega pig farm

The ‘blockers’ who have so offended Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have, for the moment, scored another success in thwarting a wealth-creating development – but it is a success which I don’t yet hear the Prime Minister and Chancellor rushing to condemn. Nor, to be politically neutral, did our pro-growth former Prime Minister Liz Truss exactly rush to support the development when it was first proposed for her constituency – although she expressed a more balanced view than many of her constituents. The project in question, which has just been given the heave-ho by the Borough of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk, is a ‘US-style mega farm’ which would house 14,000 pigs and 870,000 chickens in sheds near the villages of Methwold and Feltwell.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Starmer is teaching Europe a lesson on tariffs

The reactions to Donald Trump’s tariffs between London and Brussels could not be more different. Where Keir Starmer was conciliatory, stressing that his government still hoped to negotiate with the US, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was quickly out of the blocks with threats of retaliation, saying that a package of measures was being finalised. It has since emerged that the EU plans to wait four weeks before imposing any retaliatory measures. Nevertheless it does rather expose the difference between the EU and post-Brexit Britain. The EU sees itself as a match for the US, and views Trump’s declaration of trade war as a power game. Britain, on the other hand, can afford to be more pragmatic, working out how it can play the situation best to its advantage.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Trump’s tariffs are a real Brexit win

So, Britain has got its trade deal with the US – of sorts. Donald Trump has awarded Britain no exemption from his tariffs. Even so, he has left Britain off lightly, by imposing tariffs of 10 per cent on imports from Britain to the US – the lowest he imposed on any country, along with Brazil. The EU, by contrast, has been imposed with a tariff of 20 per cent. Finally, then, we have a tangible benefit of Brexit that no one can ignore. Were we still members of the EU, our exporters would be hit much harder than they are being. Given that the US is our single biggest trade partner, that is not an outcome to be sniffed at.

Ross Clark

Labour’s welfare crackdown is a sham

You can already sense Rachel Reeves’s spin machine whirring into action. It was Donald Trump wot ruined my careful book-keeping, the Chancellor will tell us as once again her fiscal headroom disappears and she ends up banging her scalp painfully on the ceiling. But could it be unrealistic expectations for her welfare reforms which prove her undoing? Tucked away in the government’s own figures is the revelation that Labour’s welfare shake-up could result in 400,000 more people signed off unfit for any work. Britain’s workshy culture has received another boost The contents of the impact assessment on her Spring Statement, published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) last week, are still being digested.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

There’ll be no liberty on Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’

Beware the words ‘liberty’ and ‘liberation.’ There are no end of evils committed in their names. Wednesday, according to Donald Trump, will be America’s Liberation Day, as citizens are freed from the yoke of free-ish trade. That is the day that importers who have been showering US consumers with cheap goods will be slapped with punitive tariffs. So far, the only thing that US consumers appear to have been liberated from is their money. Stock markets in the US and around the world have suffered a slide as markets digest the implications. They do not like what they foresee, which is the prospect of the golden years of globalisation going into reverse.

Monday

Ross Clark

The electric car honeymoon is over

Sooner or later, it is going to dawn on the owners of electric cars that they have been enjoying one of the longest introductory free offers in history. The moment of realisation may even come tomorrow. That is when, for the first time, electric cars (EVs) are going to become liable to pay road tax. It won’t necessarily be too onerous. Drive an EV out of a showroom tomorrow and you will pay just £10 in car tax for the first year, rising to £195 for your second year of ownership and beyond. Owners of vehicles registered between 1 April 2017 and today will pay £195 a year. Those registered between 2001 and 2017 will be liable for £20 a year road tax. Driving an electric car is about to get a lot more expensive But the nasty sting will come in a year’s time.

Friday

Ross Clark

What happened to the post-Covid roaring twenties?

It has become customary for Budgets to unravel within 48 hours of being delivered. Rachel Reeves didn’t have much in the way of fiscal announcements to deliver on Wednesday, but even what she did have to say seems to be falling apart. It has since transpired that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) did not take into account any risks from a transatlantic trade war when downgrading its growth forecast for 2025 from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. This is an additional risk which is almost certain to erode her newly-clear fiscal headroom and lead to more tax rises in the autumn Budget.

Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves should leave ISAs alone

Voters won’t want to thank Rachel Reeves if the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) turns out to be right in its forecast for zero real growth in earnings in 2026 and 2027. But static earnings could turn out to be the least of problems for households. They will take an even dimmer view of the Chancellor if they wake up to find half their savings have evaporated. But that is what may well happen if, as Treasury documents suggest, Individual Savings Accounts – or ISAs – are reformed in the next Budget to discourage people from holding cash and encourage them to stuff their savings into the stock market instead.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Trump has Britain in a bind over car tariffs

The government has less than a week to decide how to respond to Donald Trump’s announcement of 25 per cent tariffs on car imports to the US. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves still seem to think that Trump might exempt Britain, but there is little sign of that coming out of Washington. Unless Peter Mandelson turns out to possess rather more diplomatic skills than most people will credit him with, the Prime Minister will be faced with an uncomfortable choice: does Britain retaliate, thus risking an escalation of the transatlantic trade war, or does it suck it up and watch as Britain’s beleaguered car industry suffers even more than it is already under the government’s net zero policies?