Ross Clark

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.

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.