Ross Clark

Is this the development that is finally going to make us shake off our aversion to electric vehicles (EVs)? Local authorities are reported this morning to have granted planning permission for £692 million worth of public chargers, potentially leading to the installation of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of EV charging points. A lack of public charging points is regularly cited as a reason for the slow uptake of EVs and the failure of car manufacturers to reach the target set for them in 2024: to ensure that 22 per cent of the vehicles they sold were pure electric. In the event, they managed only 19.6 per cent – and that was only achieved thanks to hefty discounting and the refusal to deliver new petrol and diesel cars until the new year, so that they would show up in 2025 figures.

Britain, as we know, is a country where sex offences are on the rise because toxic males are having their minds poisoned by internet porn, and are picking up bad attitudes towards women from the likes of Andrew Tate. We know this because liberal-minded folk keep telling us so. What the liberals don’t like to tell us is that sex offences are, to some extent, an imported problem. We have learned today that foreign nationals living in Britain are three times more likely to be arrested for sex offences relative to UK citizens – but only because the Centre for Migration Control has spent months teasing out the information via Freedom of Information requests.

Elon Musk’s Twitter attack on Jess Phillips is certainly offensive. It may even deserve to be called a ‘disgraceful smear’, as Wes Streeting put it on the Laura Kuenssberg Show this morning. But the trouble is that every time government ministers bring up Musk’s spat with Phillips, the more they remind people of just how close Labour was to the scandal of rape gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford and other places.

Keir Starmer’s government won’t be the first to engage in gerrymandering when it seeks to lower the voting age from 18 to 16, inviting into the polling booths a group which most people suspect will be more inclined to vote Labour. But could Labour’s elections Bill end up being more radical than that? The Labour-linked think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has just published a report arguing for more extensive reforms, including removing the requirement for photo ID at polling booths, automatic voter registration and giving the vote to foreign nationals who are long-term residents of Britain.

If you are going to give gongs for public service, I guess a three-times elected London mayor ought to be a candidate. True, it is hard to see what particular achievements have earned Sadiq Khan his knighthood. Violent crime has risen inexorably on his watch, while his efforts to clean up London’s air have been clumsy at best, making life next-to-impossible for low-wage shift workers in outer London who really don’t have any option but to commute to work in their 20 year-old cars. Cars, in should be noted, which are not a lot less clean than the newer Chelsea Tractors which wealthy Londoners – Khan included – use to get around. But that rather misses the point: Khan has been elected three times, so some people must think he is doing a good job.

No wonder the left hates X so much. Elon Musk is using it to carve himself a role as Britain’s unofficial opposition – a role at which he is proving rather more effective than the official opposition. His latest interjection into UK politics is deadly. Responding to Scottish politicians who would like him to set up a Tesla factory in Scotland he replied simply: ‘very few companies will be willing to invest in the UK with the current administration.’ Ouch! It is so damaging to the Keir Starmer and his ministers because Musk is exactly the person whom they should want to be investing in Britain. He makes all the stuff which this government, and its predecessor, have tried but failed to get Britain making. Electric cars?

If you wanted some ideas for how to boost economic growth, would you ask the people who run businesses or the quangos which regulate them? No prizes for guessing which of them Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Jonathan Reynolds have plumped for. Yes, they really do seem to think that government regulators have some useful ideas for how to boost growth. They have written a jointly-signed letter to the heads of Ofwat, the Environment Agency, the Financial Conduct Authority and healthcare regulators asking them for advice as to how the government might lighten regulation and so make the country richer. You might as well ask a bunch of turkeys what should be done about Christmas. You might as well ask a bunch of turkeys what should be done about Christmas.

Kemi Badenoch believes she has caught out Nigel Farage with a bit of digital sleuthing. No sooner had Farage announced that the official membership of Reform has surpassed the 132,000 declared membership of the Conservative Party than Badenoch declared it is all a con. All Badenoch has really achieved is to emphasise how shrunken the Conservative party has become “Manipulating your own followers at Xmas, eh Nigel?” she tweeted on Boxing Day. The counter that Reform has been showing us is a fake, she declared. “It is designed to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days, and can also see that they have just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out. Farage doesn’t understand the digital age.

When Vauxhall announced the closure of its Luton plant a few weeks ago it seemed that the government had finally woken up to how the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate was killing off Britain’s car industry. We were promised a consultation on the rules – which demand that manufacturers ensure 22 per cent of cars they sell this year are pure electric, with fines of £15,000 for every petrol or diesel car sold over the limit. This morning we got it. Does it promise salvation for our remaining car factories? Sadly not. Where are all the booming car factories?

If Keir Starmer does succeed in his aim of stimulating a house-building boom, it may be that landowners will have little to celebrate. The government has launched a consultation into proposals to extend the powers of compulsory purchase to help councils assemble land for new housing developments. No public body can simply seize land; that would be in breach of the Human Rights Act. But the price that landowners should be paid when their land is required for public projects is a matter of much argument.

Labour is right not to pay compensation to the Waspi women – those who feel aggrieved that the state pension age for women was raised from 60 to 66 without, so they claim, them being given adequate information about the change. We are being invited to believe that tens of thousands of women drew up detailed plans for their retirement – all now undermined – without actually bothering to find out at what age they would retire. You can’t claim poverty one moment while writing open-ended cheques for favoured groups the next To swan off into state-funded retirement at 60 when life expectancy for women is now well into the 80s would be absurd. We can’t have a working age population supporting a retired population that consists of around a third of all adults.

You can’t expect anything reasonable when Hollywood gets on its high horse, but really, are our pension contributions truly helping to strip the Amazon of its rainforests? That is the claim made in a short film featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, in which the actor appears in a sauna as 'Benedict Lumberjack', the CEO of a logging company. 'The business of deforestation is on fire right now and it is all thanks to you,' he says. 'The money from your pension has helped scorch, slash and burn entire rainforests… some bits of the world are literally burning but it’s just the bits that no one cares about.' Let’s sketch over the assertion that logging companies are setting fire to rainforests – emphasised in a shot of tall trees being consumed by fire.

Political office does odd things to parties which were in opposition. Angela Rayner and Steve Reed have written in the Sunday Times this morning complaining that environmental rules are threatening the government’s house-building targets. We’re in a situation, they say, ‘where bats and newts are getting in the way of people who desperately need housing.’ They are not wrong. One of the reasons why there are 1.2 million would-be homes which have been granted planning permission over the past decade but which have yet to be built is that pettifogging green rules are standing in their way. Three of those ghost homes are in my village.

Why does the government keep setting itself up for failure? It did it with the target for decarbonising electricity by 2030 – which virtually no one outside Ed Miliband’s department and its attached agency, the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO), thinks is possible and which has already been watered down to a 95 per cent reduction in emissions. And it has done it again with its target of building 1.5 million homes across the lifetime of this Parliament. Angela Rayner seems to think it is just a case of trampling over Nimbys and the houses will magically appear. But today the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) has scotched that notion, saying that Britain simply doesn’t have the skilled workforce necessary for such an acceleration.