Ross Clark

So much for the theory that Covid would change working practices for good: that we would divide our time between the office and our sofas – or work remotely all the time. The writing was on the wall when Zoom – the very business which profited most from remote working during the pandemic – ordered its staff back into the office in 2023. Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Twitter and many others followed. It seems the public sector will no longer be a sanctuary, either, now that Donald Trump is using flexible working as a device to shrink the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management has issued an ultimatum – alongside a generous redundancy offer – telling federal workers either to return to the office full-time or to resign.

It is easy enough to trace the point at which local authorities embarked on the sad, downwards journey which has led to several going bankrupt. It was when they renamed their town clerks ‘chief executives’. In doing so they started posing as private businesses, with salaries and bonuses to match. But their pretensions were not matched by business acumen. Twenty of them are now weighed down with a combined £30 billion of debt. Several councils have got into trouble by entering the commercial property business at a time other investors were starting to flee. Woking is in difficulty after turning property developer, trying to build a posh high-rise hotel in its town centre. Others bought up shopping centres just as retail business was draining away to the internet.

Is Rachel Reeves really correct that her new-found enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow would be consistent with the government’s net zero targets and other environmental policies? Over the weekend she argued that a third runway would be good for air quality over London because it would mean fewer planes circling over the capital. She also asserted that 'sustainable aviation fuel is changing carbon emissions from flying', and that 'there’s huge investment going on in electric planes'. It isn’t clear where Reeves sourced her evidence that a third runway could actually improve air quality, but that certainly wasn’t the conclusion of a 2017 study by consultants WSP commissioned by the Department of Transport.

The CIA report concluding that Covid most likely originated from a laboratory leak of a man-made, or man-enhanced, virus raises an awkward and glaring question: why on Earth isn’t Britain’s own Covid inquiry even considering the possibility of a laboratory leak? The inquiry, which still grinds on even if most people have lost interest in it, has examined the inner workings of Downing Street in great detail, listened to evidence on lockdowns, the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme and so on, yet continues to ignore the single most important matter: where the virus came from. When Michael Gove – now editor of The Spectator – did try to raise the matter before the inquiry in November 2023, he was quickly closed down by the KC interrogating him.

Is anyone else getting a bit fed up of reading weepy newspaper stories about how the skiing industry is being killed off by climate change? Apparently, 80 ski resorts in the Alps have already closed for good due to a lack of snow, and according to the OECD only 400 of the 666 ski areas in the Alps will remain viable if global temperatures rise by 2º above what they were in the mid 19th century. If we lose 250 ski resorts that would be a gain for the mountains, as far as I am concerned. I suspect many people who visit the Alps in the summer will agree with me. There is no fairly tale charm then, just a mess of pylons and wires. Want to know what those manicured pistes look like when the snow is gone?

Remember how the first incarnation of a Trump presidency was supposed to be pretty well curtains for Planet Earth? Well, don’t worry: we are all going to be just fine this time around. Why? Because Al Gore assures us so. ‘The global sustainability revolution is unstoppable,’ he declared in a statement following Trump’s speech. ‘Now is the time for governors, mayors, business leaders and investors, and activists, to put their heads down and do the work that will advance the climate solutions that our nation and the world so urgently need.’ In other words, don’t worry about Trump. The US president is going to be an irrelevance because all the nice people in the world have decided that they are going to go green.

Dear, oh dear. Will David Lammy never get it right? This morning he told the Today programme that Donald Trump is ‘funny, friendly and warm’, that he has ‘incredible grace’ and that he is full of generosity – the last remark apparently based on Trump offering him a second helping of chicken when they met for dinner last September. This is the same Donald Trump, presumably, whom Lammy previously described as a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’ who was ‘deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic’ and ‘no friend of Britain’. Lammy must really, really have wanted that extra helping of chicken. It isn’t hard to guess what Trump himself thinks about Lammy’s backflip.

There was some relief for Rachel Reeves earlier this week when inflation fell slightly to 2.5 per cent and the economy just about managed to grow, by 0.1 per cent (although many were expecting it to be a little higher than that).  There is no joy to be had, however, in this morning’s retail sales figures, which show that volumes fell by 0.3 per cent in December. It suggests that a modest recovery in retail over the past 12 months has run out of steam. Sales volumes were still up 1.9 per cent on December 2023, but this does little to offset the bigger picture: that retail sales have never recovered from the pandemic, and that the rise over the past 12 months does little to offset falls of 4.1 per cent and 2.9 per cent in 2022 and 2023 respectively.