Ross Clark

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.

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.