Ross Clark

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 to the latest population estimates from the Office of National Statistics – which cover the year to the middle of 2023 – is that the number of people living in the United Kingdom swelled by what is a record for modern times. The population grew by 1 per cent, adding an extra 662,400 people – more than the population of Manchester. You have to dig deeper into the figures to realise that all of this growth is down to migration.

Should we trust a new study that claims that the level of irregular migration in the UK has essentially not changed in the past 16 years? That is the assertion being made in the reporting of a project called Measuring Irregular Migration, or MIrreM – a collaboration between Oxford University and 17 other universities across Europe and North America. ‘Irregular Migration to the UK and other large European countries is same as 2008, research shows,’ states a headline in the Guardian. This, needless to say, flies in the face of reports over the weekend that nearly 1,000 migrants arrived in small boats in a single day.

Independent schools are an asset to the education system and they have been singled out by Labour for a tax rise which has as much to do with pressing the right buttons for the party faithful as it does with raising revenue. But really, those schools could do with better PR. Whoever thought it a good idea to suggest to the i newspaper that private schools will be putting plans for new swimming pools, astroturf pitches on hold, and doing away with frills like personalised ring binders, in reaction to the imposition of VAT on their fees? They have succeeded only in feeding education secretary Bridget Phillipson with an attack line. ‘Our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery,’ she tweeted on Saturday.

Will Labour actually gain some revenue for slapping VAT on school fees, or is it heading for fiscal embarrassment as so many private school pupils are decanted into the state sector that the taxpayer will suffer a net loss? The question has been batted around for months as everyone ponders a great unknowable: how many parents would throw in the towel when faced with a higher bill for educating Barnabus and Fenella, and send them to the local comp instead? An early indication has been provided on Friday by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which claims that the number of pupils enrolled in independent schools (or at least those affiliated to the ISC) has fallen by 10,000 – or 1.7 per cent – in a year.

The idea that the government had somehow managed to draw a line under the rail strikes by offering drivers and other staff a fat pay rise with no conditions attached even managed to fool the former Tory rail minister Huw Merriman, who declared in August: ‘I can understand why the new government have decided to cut a deal to end the uncertainty and move on with goodwill.’ There are more than 60 metro systems around the world that run without drivers Goodwill? That didn’t even last a day as Aslef celebrated the award of a pay rise for drivers by announcing a further round of strikes on LNER, this time over rostering. Those were cancelled after the government expressed outrage, but that hasn’t stopped Mick Lynch’s Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union coming back for more.

What an ordeal. If there is one thing more trying than watching a leader’s speech at a party conference, it is watching four of them in a row – four doses of platitudes, jokes that miss the mark, personal anecdotes about their childhood and parents which are supposed to build up a sense of character but instead make you groan because you have heard them a dozen times before. She speaks with words, not phrases Tom Tugendhat came across as a middle manager on a public speaking course. Never mind where he wanted to take the country – he didn’t seem sure how and in which direction he was supposed to leave the stage after his low-energy presentation.

For the past five years, I have been in something of a conflict: was Boris Johnson an unconventional but essentially wise prime minister whose ability to see the big picture was more important than his weakness on detail, and whose gift for spreading optimism outweighed his disorganisation? Or was he, as his many detractors have argued, simply not up to the job of leading the country? Fortunately, Johnson has now answered the question himself. Yes, he was stark-ravingly unsuited to being prime minister.

There will be little surprise that Baroness Warsi has resigned the Conservative whip; the greater wonder is that she didn’t do so years ago. In her leaving, she complains 'how far right my party has moved', but then she has been making complaints about the Tories for years. Warsi has never been slow to accuse the Conservatives of Islamophobia. In June 2020, for example, following the murder of three men in Reading by an Islamist extremist – an asylum-seeker from Libya – it was the then Conservative government which caught her ire. Describing the murders as a ‘lone wolf’ attack, she said: 'How can the government seek the support of a community that it needs to deal with these challenges when it simply refuses to work with that community?'.

Is it really true that obesity rates in England have stabilised or fallen, as has been reported today – and that, according to the Obesity Health Alliance, this may be down to things like junk food being removed from supermarket checkouts and calories being provided on menus?  While obesity rates have ballooned, smoking rates have collapsed On the face of it there is one remarkable statistic in the latest figures provided by NHS England for 2022: 13 per cent of 2-15 year old boys were recorded as obese, down from a fifth in 2019 and the lowest figure since 1998. There were no figures produced for 2020 and 2021 owing to the pandemic.

I am sure that the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds picked up many useful skills in his previous job in local government, but does he really know more about how to run a business than the people who run one of the world’s most successful companies?    Apparently, yes. Asked on LBC where his comments about encouraging remote working fitted in with Amazon’s decision to order its staff back to work five days a week in the office he said:  If I was talking to a business like that I would say that every piece of evidence that has ever been collated suggests that flexibility, when agreed between employer and employee, is good for productivity and is good for staff resilience. You get to retain your staff for longer, you get more out of them.