Ross Clark

Reducing the number of overseas students able to come to Britain would be a needless attack on one of our most successful export industries. But should we really believe David Cameron’s warnings to Rishi Sunak that universities are in danger of going bust if the graduate visa scheme is removed, or reformed (graduate visas give graduates the chance to stay on and work in Britain for up to two years)? The government would be foolish to choke off foreign students Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) does not appear to show any desperate crisis in university finances. On the contrary, their income has shown a steady and healthy, above inflation rise over the past decade.

There is nothing new about battles between the unions and a Labour government. But could a Starmer government be upset by a growing union rebellion from an unexpected quarter? In a move which has been remarkably underreported in England, the union Unite has launched a campaign against Labour’s policy of refusing licences for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. The campaign, called ‘No ban without a plan’, demands that Labour suspends the policy. If successful, it means a future Labour government would continue, like the Conservatives, to grant new licences, until it has come up with a plan to create at least 35,000 new ‘energy transition jobs’ in Scotland – equivalent to the current roles held by oil workers.

Is Tony Blair, like Margaret Thatcher before him, about to become the voice from beyond the political grave that makes life difficult for his party? Labour’s climate secretary in waiting – Ed Miliband – won’t find a lot of comfort in a paper put out today by the Tony Blair Foundation, Reimagining the UK’s Net Zero Target. The conclusion of the paper, whose authorship is attributed to ‘multiple experts’, is not that Britain should drop its overall target to achieve net zero but that its strategy has become too dogmatic, and revolves around unrealistic targets which, by threatening to make people poorer, are in danger of hurting public support for net zero and setting a damaging precedent for international efforts to tackle climate change.

It is hard to deny the assertion made by Jeremy Hunt and the Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride that there are plenty of opportunities for people who want to work, or at least for a good number of them. If you want the long-term unemployed to take up jobs, you don’t offer them a little gentle encouragement: you send them on compulsory work placements According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 898,000 unfilled vacancies across the UK economy between February and April – meaning there were 1.6 unemployed people for every vacancy. Not all these jobs will be suitable for everyone, of course: they may not be in the right places, or they may require qualifications which not all unemployed people have.

Oh, the embarrassment. The government commissioned its own Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to investigate whether graduate visas (which grant overseas students the right to stay in Britain for two years after graduation) are being exploited and should be abolished. This was seemingly in the hope of gaining some ammunition to do away with a measure which it only introduced three years ago. Trouble is, the MAC has now come back and said that the visas are not being abused and should remain. Rather than reform the Human Rights Act to stop outrages, the government clamps down on the soft targets The government now has a choice.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) hardly distinguished itself during the Covid 19 pandemic. It was slow to declare an emergency, then tried to make up for the delay by trying to persuade governments to lock down and introduce all kinds of illiberal measures. Worst of all it heaped praise on China's handling of the epidemic, failing properly to investigate the possibility that the pandemic had originated from a laboratory leak. When it did finally send a team to investigate this, it allowed itself to be pushed around by the Chinese and laughably ruled out the lab leak theory. None of this, however, has stopped the WHO from trying to get its member states to sign up to a legally -binding agreement as to what should happen in a future pandemic.

So what was that all about? Rumours that Susan Hall was close to toppling Sadiq Khan have proved to be wide of the mark. In the event, Hall is failing to match Shaun Bailey’s performance in 2021. There is a swing against the Conservatives in London, and Hall is failing to win in places which Bailey won three years ago. None of this should really be a surprise. There has been a strong swing against the Tories everywhere, Tees Valley included. It would be truly extraordinary if Khan failed to win. But the rumours that Hall was doing a lot better than expected have served to aid Labour with expectation management. They have helped to conceal the fact that the mayoral election has been no landslide on the scale of Blackpool South or other recent by elections.

The Conservatives have, as predicted, had a pretty awful night, but is there any comfort they can draw from the local election results? True, the next general election now seems to be lost – the public has simply made up its mind that the Tories have been in power for too long and that it is time for a change. But if you are a Conservative strategist peering through a pair of rose-tinted spectacles this is what you might see. Firstly, the Tory party has clung onto Harlow council – a town which was so much in Labour’s crosshairs that it was one of Keir Starmer’s final points of call in the campaign. When Tony Blair won his first landslide in 1997 it was the new towns around London which saw some of the biggest swings.

Over the past few years Wes Streeting has established himself as one of the more open-minded and reasonable members of the shadow cabinet. Rather than nodding along with his party’s traditional worship of the NHS, and utilising the usual, false campaigning tool of trying to claim that the Tories have some secret plan to privatise the health service, he has been frank about its weaknesses. A tweet put out by Streeting yesterday afternoon, however, points in a rather different direction: blatant opportunism. He wrote: ‘A win for Susan Hall and the Conservatives is a win for racists, white supremacists and Islamophobes the world over. Susan Hall’s campaign has been fought from the gutter with dangerous and divisive politics.