Ross Clark

The good news for the Conservatives is that immigration is down. It looks as if the net migration figures will not be returning to the 745,000 measured in 2022 in the immediate future. Now the bad news: this decline isn’t so much thanks to a drop in small boat arrivals – although they did fall from 45,774 in 2022 to 29,437 in 2023. It is more to do with a sharp decline in the arrival of skilled workers, especially in the healthcare sector. In the first three months of 2024, the number of visas granted to skilled workers, health and social care workers and students fell to 139,100, from 184,000 in the same period of 2023. The drop in health and social care workers coming to Britain has been especially precipitous, down from 14,300 in March 2023 to 2400 in March 2024.

The Conservatives can crow all they like about the benefits of privatisation – and make whatever claims they like about tickets being more expensive, and services worse, were the railways to be brought back under public ownership. But there is little getting away from the fact that Labour’s policy of progressive renationalisation of train services by taking over franchises as they expire is hugely popular with voters. If the Conservatives were really that wedded to capitalism they wouldn’t have bunged the rail industry £12 billion in subsidies last year YouGov has been asking the public whether they support this policy in a monthly poll going back several years.

The tragedy of Wales' 20 mph speed limit, which is now to be relaxed, was that it took a good idea and ruined it by taking it to extremes. There are plenty of roads which do deserve a 20mph speed limit, but the Welsh government didn't want to stop there: it had to impose the same limit on main roads with wide carriageways on which it feels absurd to be driving at 20mph.      When highways authorities impose an artificially low speed limit on through roads not only do they unnecessarily delay commercial traffic, they create a perverse incentive for traffic to divert onto minor roads, creating rat runs.

Well, it’s nice to feel on trend. The Today programme this morning carried an item on the popularity of one-man and one-woman theatre shows, following on from the success of two such shows in the Olivier Awards: Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Andrew Scott in Vanya. Only in passing did they mention a rather important factor in all this: money. If you’re trying not to haemorrhage cash in a post-Covid world, it helps if you can cut your wage bill. I should know. Straightened times call for inventiveness – which is one of the reasons why my latest venture into musical theatre, A Lark, about the Ralph Vaughan-Williams’ affair with a woman 40 years his junior (while he was still married to his first wife) takes the form of a one-woman show.

I happened to be walking in the Cambridgeshire fens this morning while listening to the latest instalment of ‘farmageddon’ – the narrative that Britain is facing food shortages due to biblical levels of rain over the winter. There was something of a conflict between the sight before my eyes with what Rachel Hallos, vice president of the National Farmers Union, was telling the Today programme as she begged the government for emergency money. These are some of the lowest-lying fields in England, with large parts lying four or five feet below sea level. They are formed largely of peat, which easily becomes waterlogged. Yet it was a pretty normal spring sight. A tractor was purring as it prepared ground for more crops.

Hurrah, we can all relax. We have been granted an extra two years to save the planet. So suggested Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in a speech at Chatham House yesterday. Some people might say that calling a speech ‘two years to save the planet’ might be a bit melodramatic, he added. But not at all. It is nice to have the luxury of all that extra time, given that I thought we were supposed to have had it already. That, at any rate, was the logic behind warnings such as that by the WWF in 2007 that we then had five years to save the planet.

Labour, unsurprisingly, is crowing about a paper published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies claiming that Tony Blair’s Sure Start centres improved the GCSE results of children from low-income families a decade after attending the centres. Children who lived within 2.5 km of a Sure Start Centre before 5, it finds, went on to score an extra 0.8 in their grades at GCSEs compared with children who lived further away. At their peak in 2010-11 there were 3,500 Sure Start centres, intended as ‘one-stop shops’ where parents could access healthcare, parenting support, early learning, childcare, as well as research employment opportunities for themselves.

There is one thing that seems to have gone missing from the campaign by the National Education Union (NEU) to abolish Ofsted: children. They hardly get a mention. What we do learn, from the press release announcing the NEU’s latest motion to get rid of the government’s schools’ inspection regime, is that the teaching profession 'can be trusted to do their jobs effectively without a punitive, high-stakes system to keep them in line'. Further, Ofsted’s regime causes 'teachers and other school staff sleepless nights, anxiety, and an urge to leave the profession'. The teaching profession, we're told, 'can be trusted to do their jobs effectively' In other words, NEU members don’t like being inspected.

Could a promise of more housebuilding win an election, or does the Nimby vote still rule the shires? Labour, it seems, has decided the former. The Times reports this morning that it has settled on a strategy of unashamedly promising more house-building, including on the green belt, after research by an outside organisation revealed that people on the party’s list of most winnable seats are strongly in favour of greater housebuilding. It is a long way from the Labour party of Tony Blair and John Prescott, which seemed to vie with William Hague’s Conservatives as to who could build the fewest homes.