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?
Have markets and governments around the world horribly under-estimated the fallout from the war in Iran? That is the claim made by the president of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, who says the effect of the closure of the Straits of Hormuz is the equivalent of the 1973 oil crisis and the 2022 gas
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This is the way that Brexit ends: not with a bang but with a whimpering submission to EU standards on everything, billions in contributions to the EU purse – but with the pretence that we are not really rejoining the single market or customs union, honest. That was the position laid out by the Chancellor
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Like Harold Wilson and his ‘white heat of technology’, Rachel Reeves is presumably hoping that blathering on about AI and quantum computing in her Mais lecture today is going to make her sound modern and positive. Yes, of course artificial intelligence is the ‘defining technology of our era’ – we don’t need the Chancellor of
I am sorry to hear of the death of Stanford University Professor of Biology Paul R. Ehrlich at the age of 93, but to read his writings you wonder whether it is an event he might actually want us to celebrate. It does, after all, mean one less mouth to feed. Just another 6.5 billion
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Could there be any greater vindication for the government’s policy of pushing us to buy electric vehicles than the crisis in Iran, which has sent prices of petrol and diesel soaring? That is what the government itself would like us to think, but it is not how the UK car industry sees it. Never mind
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Well, who would have guessed? Emboldened by Mauritius’s success in persuading Keir Starmer to surrender the Chagos Islands – which were never even part of Mauritius in the first place – the African Union is reported to be planning to take Britain to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to demand reparations for slavery and
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How many times has Ed Miliband told us that his renewable energy policies were helping to free us from ‘fossil fuel dictators’? Wind and solar energy, he assures us, are saving us money and making us more energy-secure. Then we wake up to find that actually, Britain has only two days’ worth of gas left in storage.
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Who cares about vacuous influencers whose ghastly apartments in Dubai are being struck by Iranian missiles, wiping the smile off their botoxed lips? Not many of us, to judge by social media, and a few newspaper columns too, over the past few days. Retaliatory strikes by Iran have unleashed a tide of gloating. To give
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In the end it wasn’t even close. The Greens won the Manchester Gorton and Denton by-election with some to spare, winning 40.7 per cent of the vote. Reform UK, who looked the main challengers at the beginning of the campaign came second on 28.7 per cent, and Labour, as had looked likely, were pushed into third
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Living longer but spending more of our lives in ill health. That is the rather shocking picture presented by the figures for ‘healthy life expectancy’ published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday. They show that while life expectancy continues to rise modestly, the proportion of our lives lived in ‘good’ health is falling
There is no member of the Trump administration with greater clarity of thought than Energy Secretary Chris Wright. While opponents rage at Trump’s climate policy, Wright gave a speech to the International Energy Agency this week in which he explained the rationale behind America’s sharp deviation from Europe. In the minds of many people, the
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It is finally dawning on the government and the banking industry that it is not such a good idea to put the entire economy at the mercy of a couple of large overseas corporations. Today, a consortium of banks are meeting to hammer out a plan to create a homegrown alternative to Visa and Mastercard,
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Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is
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Imagine if spectators at the London Olympics had to gingerly make their way past loose pit bull terriers and XL bullies, some of them rabid. No civilised country would tolerate several million stray dogs on the streets, and indeed we don’t. If a stray dog is found on the streets of London it will be
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What a pair Ed Miliband and California governor Gavin Newsom make. Both seem to suffer from the delusion that they are national leaders, meeting up in London on Monday to sign a deal in which they aim to share green technology and finance. Both are committed to what they like to call a ‘global race
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No wonder government ministers in recent weeks have started nodding along with fears that AI will take our jobs, with investment minister Lord Stockwood even suggesting that the government has discussed the idea of a universal basic income to provide for people thrown out of work by the technology. God forbid that voters should start
Irresponsible Trump, responsible China; that is the message BBC climate editor Justin Rowlatt seemed to be sending us by juxtaposing the news that the US president had repealed Barack Obama’s ‘endangerment finding’ and that China’s carbon emissions fell slightly last year. Trump’s critics like to portray him as a rogue figure in a world which is
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Jim Ratcliffe is not a polished media performer, and neither does he have an accurate set of UK demographic statistics in his head. But how typical that the Prime Minister and his Labour colleagues, as well as the Guardian and many others, have chosen to latch onto a loose remark the billionaire Manchester United co-owner made
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It looks as if £300 will end up being to Ed Miliband what 45 minutes was to Tony Blair: the number which will forever hang around his neck, dragging him down whatever else he tries to do in politics. Of late, Miliband seems to have stopped repeating his promise to cut £300 from our electricity
As a general rule, once a city erects turnstiles to tourist attractions which were once free to visit, it is time to go elsewhere. Never more so than in the case of Rome. Last week the Italian capital introduced a €2 charge to visit the Trevi Fountain. Tight-fisted tourists like me will still be able to
