Ross Clark

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.

The NHS is about to start doling out ‘the King Kong of weight loss drugs’ to obese patients – the scandal, needless to say, is that not enough people will qualify. The drug, Mounjaro, will be limited to people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 35 and who have at least one medical condition resulting from their excess weight. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has recommended that 220,000 people be given the drug in the next three years – a small fraction of the 25 per cent of the adult population which is obese.     How dare the NHS be so tight-fisted. It is, of course, a human right to be given drugs to save us from having to eat less.

Hold your hats, but Britain is doing rather well in something – or at least England is. Our children are achieving more at maths than in any country outside South or East Asia. According to the latest Trends in International Maths and Science Study, conducted by the Dutch-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), English 13 to 14-year-olds come out with an average score of 525, sixth behind Singapore (605), Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) (602), Korea (596), Japan (595) and Hong Kong (575).