Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. He writes on Substack, at Ross on Why?
Is there any word more laughably misapplied than ‘tsar’? We have already had an ‘antisemitism tsar’ and now we are going to have a ‘value for money’ tsar. Had you suggested to a Russian peasant that their monarch was value for money I suspect you might have ended up floating on the Neva River alongside Rasputin.
It wasn’t an aggrieved business leader, facing a sharply increased wage bill thanks to the Budget, that led the 8 a.m. news bulletin on Radio 4 this morning, but the reassuring verdict of the IMF. ‘We support the envisaged reduction in the deficit over the medium term, including by sustainably raising revenue,’ the body declared.
It has been a good day for investors in the Alternative Investment Market (Aim), with the index of the top 100 Aim shares up 4.3 per cent. But that merely serves to undermine the damage that Rachel Reeves had done to the market by previously suggesting that she might remove the exemption whereby Aim shares
It is tempting to think of this Budget as a triumph in expectation management. Rachel Reeves’s minions have briefed us on so many potential tax rises that surely the actual speech, when finally delivered, can’t be as bad as feared. Having been conditioned to expect the worst, we will all end up feeling pathetically grateful
Could Rachel Reeves’s ‘black hole’ be filled not through tax rises or even spending cuts but rather through getting an extra two million people into work? That is the claim this morning made by the Jobs Foundation, a think tank set up by Matthew Elliott, now Lord Elliott, who formerly ran the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Raising
Remember Gordon Brown’s ‘golden rule’ – that over the course of the economic cycle the only net borrowing he would allow was to fund investment? As for current spending, he told us, he would pay down debt in the good times so that he could borrow in the bad. It sounded reassuring, until Brown started
It would be a shame if Britain were forced to leave the Commonwealth, given the great work it has done over the decades – especially under the guardianship of the late Queen. But our departure is swiftly going to emerge as an option if grasping Caribbean governments continue with their threat to ambush Keir Starmer
Could Rachel Reeves really be so brazen as to lumber private sector employers with having to pay national insurance contributions (NICs) on their employees’ pension contributions – but to spare public sector employers the same burden? That is what is being reported this morning. It has been suggested that, in next week’s Budget, the Chancellor
There is a big danger in today’s government borrowing figures for September being a little less bad than was expected by many observers. It will lead to claims that the Chancellor has enjoyed a ‘windfall’ prior to next week’s Budget, therefore lessening the need for spending cuts. No, there is no windfall. Until recent years,
Who could possibly object to Wes Streeting’s plan to turn the NHS ‘from hospital to neighbourhood’ and from ‘sickness to prevention’? Of course, it is much better to prevent an illness than to wait until you develop it and then have it treated. But I feel a sense of alarm at the Health Secretary’s plans
If the public is worried about what lies in store in Rachel Reeves’ first Budget, there are few signs of it yet in their shopping habits. The latest retail sales figures, released by the Office for National Statistics this morning, show that sales volumes were up by 0.3 per cent in September. Over the three months
The tragedy of the coming Budget is that it could have been a great reforming Budget. Instead, it now looks like being an extremely messy one, with the Chancellor buffeted by political winds into coming up with tax changes which are bizarre, punitive and which end up pleasing no-one. The latest symptom of this is
You probably know the frustration: you are sitting there trying to stuff a charging cable into your phone before realising that no, it’s the wrong one: it is left over from your last phone, or belongs to some other device. Just how many kinds of near-identical cables and sockets is it possible to produce? It
Has anyone ever come up with a better put-down for Nick Robinson? It is even better that it came from his own boss. Interviewed on the Today programme yesterday morning, BBC director-general Tim Davie said ‘we often refer to people like yourself as ‘talent’, but I’ve kind of banned that.’ From now on, he intimated,
So, is it really time in invest in Britain, as the heads of fourteen banks and other financial institutions have declared in a letter to the Times today, ahead of Keir Starmer’s investment summit? Sorry, but the more that I read the letter, signed by Amanda Blanc of Aviva and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs
Labour’s Employment Rights Bill promises workers flexible working, is supposed to protect them from unfair dismissal from day one of their new job, and make it easier for them to go on strike. In particular, according to Louise Haigh this week, it will stop companies doing what ferry operator P&O did two years ago and
Hurricane Milton has left more than two million homes and businesses in Florida without power and threatens to be a mortal threat for those in its path. But for some, the hurricane also appears to a very large stick with which to beat Florida governor Ron DeSantis for scrapping the state’s climate change goals. DeSantis’ detractors
‘Astronomical’; the ‘strongest storm in a century’; ‘nearing the mathematical limit for a storm’ – the increasingly fraught descriptions of Hurricane Milton are coming through thick and fast even before it has struck Florida. But how strong is Milton really? The hurricane has been recorded as a category five hurricane – the highest classification –
The economy shrinks quarter by quarter; whole streets of houses in northern towns are abandoned, schools start closing for want of pupils – but there is no shortage of jobs for those who want to work, and traffic on the M25 seems a bit easier. That is a vision of Britain without migration. The headline
Water companies have sweated the assets they were handed upon privatisation in the late 1980s. They have failed to invest properly, and have regarded fines for sewage spills as a business cost, to be balanced against the price of investment, rather than as a deterrent. They have, as Ofwat chief executive David Black told the Today
