Ross Clark

So much for ‘dry' and ‘no buy' January. The UK public seems to have thoroughly rebelled against efforts to persuade them to work off the excesses of the festive season. In particular, we seem to have stuffed our faces somewhat. The retail sales figures put out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the volume of sales in food stores rose by 5.6 per cent in January relative to December. That helped overall retail sales volumes to rise by 1.7 per cent, compared with a 0.6 per cent fall in December. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has good reason to feel relieved. Until a week ago it seemed as if Britain was heading for a recession.

Is it any wonder that the economy is struggling in spite of an apparently booming jobs market, with employers finding it difficult to hire recruits and average earnings rising by 5.9 per cent in the past year? Here is a shocking statistic which goes a long way to explaining the apparent paradox: there are now 3.1 million people claiming Universal Credit with no requirement to seek work – a number which has doubled in just three years. We have to be careful with the absolute numbers, because as benefit claimants are gradually moved onto Universal Credit the figures are bound to grow.

Several weeks ago, just in advance of Donald Trump’s second presidency, there was a mass withdrawal of US financial institutions from Mark Carney’s Net Zero Banking Alliance – which committed members to adopt policies of reducing lending to fossil fuel companies and to take other measures aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Are UK banks now preparing the ground to do the same? The senior executives of Barclays and NatWest have decided that they would rather that their annual bonuses were not based on climate targets. Both have removed sustainability metrics from the formulas used to determine the size of their bonuses.

The government says it wants to stop the ‘blockers’ which are holding back Britain’s economy. It also says it wants to boost the nation’s energy security. How convenient, then, that along comes a project which could achieve both at the same time. The only trouble is that it is something which will drive Ed Miliband nuts. Over the next few weeks, it is reported, a little-known oil and gas company, Egdon Resources, will announce that it has discovered 480 billion cubic metres worth of shale gas reserves in a large trough extending westwards of the Lincolnshire town of Gainsborough. Onshore oil and gas is Egdon’s business – it already operates small wells in the Midlands and Dorset. Its discovery in the Gainsborough trough, however, dwarfs all that.

At last, some news of an industry in Britain that is flourishing. Unfortunately, it is one that is helping to suppress growth in every other sector of the economy. I am sure that the lawyers who have brought a case involving 60,000 female workers at Asda think they have won a famous victory after an employment tribunal ruled that most of them were victims of sex discrimination for being paid up to £3.74 per hour less than the company’s warehouse staff. But all they have really achieved, other than lining their own pockets and those of their backers, is to impose vast bills on hard-pressed retailers which, in some cases, could lead to their extinction, destroying jobs along the way. The cost to Asda of the ruling has been put at £1.

Could Liz Kendall turn out to be the most significant figure of Keir Starmer’s government, and a Chancellor in the making? When I wrote on the Work and Pensions Secretary’s proposed reforms here in November, I was sceptical that Labour really had much intention of pushing through benefits cuts, not least because the party had spent the past 14 years shouting ‘austerity’ every time the Tories so much as proposed to cut a bean from the benefits bill. Starmer himself has accused the previous government of “turning on the poorest in our society” when it proposed to end the temporary £20 weekly bonus added to benefits during Covid.

Yesterday it was a court ruling to invalidate licences for oil and gas extraction in the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields. This morning comes another perverse consequence of Britain’s legally-binding net zero target. Environment Secretary Steve Reed is to announce that he intends 9 per cent of farmland in England to be taken out of production in order to help achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This continues a rewilding programme set up by the last government. From the point of view of achieving the net zero target it makes perfect sense; in fact it would make even more sense to take 100 per cent of farmland out of production and turn it over to woodland, fenland or whatever it naturally wants to be.

Ed Miliband seems to have gone missing since Rachel Reeves announced her ambition for a third runway at Heathrow yesterday. Just before he disappeared, he mumbled that 'of course' he wouldn’t be resigning over the issue – in spite of threatening to do just that when he was climate secretary in Gordon Brown’s government. But then who needs Ed Miliband to thwart government growth plans when we have the courts to do it for him? This morning, Lord Ericht in the Scottish Court of Session hammered another great brass nail into the coffin of the North Sea.