Ross Clark

Britain’s unemployment statistics are unreliable, and the Office of National Statistics is experimenting with a new method of counting the number of people out of work. Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, said as much this afternoon while giving evidence to the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs. Until the 1990s the unemployment figure was a simple count of the number of people who were claiming unemployment benefit. Since then, however, the figures have been collected via the Labour Force Survey, which is a questionnaire put to a sample of households. As Bailey says, the size of this sample was already shrinking before the pandemic, making the figures more volatile. Then, the Labour Force Survey moved from face-to-face to telephone interviews.

‘Appalling and unhinged’ was Joe Biden’s (or at least the White House’s) verdict on Donald Trump’s remarks that he might actually encourage Vladimir Putin to invade Nato member states who fail to meet the organisation’s requirement that they spend at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence.    It is hard to disagree with that verdict, but then someone has to shock Nato’s laggards into keeping their side of the bargain. Trump has tried this tactic before, at the 2018 Nato summit in Brussels, when he described Germany as a ‘captive of Russia’ owing to its decision to spend billions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to import Russian gas, while spending only 1.23 per cent of GDP on defence.

The BBC just can’t seem to stop itself trying to frighten people over climate change. On Tuesday morning it was the turn of Radio 4’s Food for Life by King’s College London professor Tim Spector. The show began with an extraordinary claim: ‘Most predictions concur that if we don’t change our habits fast, by 2050 the Earth will have lost most of its trees and habitable areas.’ Really? I contacted Spector over where he sourced this claim and was told that the claims were ‘in the IPCC reports’. But are we really on course to lose most of our trees in just 26 years’ time?

So is that the end of the property ‘crash’? Nationwide reported this week that its house price index was up by 0.7 per cent in January, already going some way to erasing the fall of 1.8 per cent it measured last year. The very similar Halifax index never even recorded a fall last year – it claims that prices rose by 1.8 per cent over the course of 2023, and by 1.1 per cent in December. No one should take the Halifax and Nationwide indices too much to heart. They are based on data from a limited number of mortgage approvals – those handled by the lenders themselves – in contrast to the ONS house price index which uses data from almost every sale. As you can see from their divergence last year, Halifax and Nationwide often disagree with each other.

Why is no one only slightly wrong any more? We don’t say or do things that are foolish or ill-thought out – rather we are immediately guilty of fascism, genocide or child abuse. We don’t deserve to be merely argued against – we deserve to put before an inquisition, in a cage. I guess that academics at Winchester University have deliberately chosen to use the words ‘child abuse’ in a paper in the Journal of the British Philosophy Association, arguing that schoolchildren shouldn’t be forced to play rugby in order to gain attention. If so, they have succeeded, because it is doubtful that the story would have made it into the newspapers, and I wouldn’t be writing about it now had they stuck to dry academic language. But I doubt that it will help them to make their case.

So, what was the point of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act? What is happening today and for the rest of this week was exactly what it was supposed to prevent: whole rail networks closing down on strike days.  The law is in place and rail companies have the power to issue ‘work orders’ to staff demanding that enough employees turn up to work to run 40 percent of the normal service. They also have the powers to dismiss workers if they defy them. Yet not one of the 18 companies which are affected by this week’s rail strikes have used those powers. The one company which did indicate that it would invoke the act – LNER, which runs services between London, Leeds and Edinburgh – backed down when Aslef called a further five days’ of strikes.

The collapse of talks to renew a trade deal between Britain and Canada is a reminder that there is nothing automatic about Brexit. If we want to benefit from it we will have to make an effort, and approach matters like trade from a very different angle to the EU. At the moment, there is scant sign of that. Rather, Britain seems to be merely reinventing itself as a mini-EU: a European-style social democracy which is high on regulation and protectionist by instinct. If we want to enjoy the full, wealth-creating forces of free trade then we are going to have to be prepared to make concessions Following Brexit, Britain’s trading arrangements with Canada remained, temporarily, as they were under the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement signed between the EU and Canada in 2016.

The Scottish leg of the Covid-19 inquiry has, like the hearings in London, become bogged down in matters such as the deletion of WhatsApp messages on ministerial phones. But, with a slightly less attention-seeking counsel for the inquiry, it also seems to be getting to some of the nuts and bolts which should have been discussed in London. A few of the most revealing pieces of evidence so far have been presented by Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh and adviser to the Scottish government during the pandemic. Here are some of the highlights of his oral and written evidence. Woolhouse was deeply critical of Holyrood’s declaration 'there is no such thing as a level of acceptable' loss.

Hurrah! The UK is just about to reduce its carbon emissions by a further 1.5 per cent. As for Wales, it is going to get even close to the holy grail of reaching net zero, with 15 per cent of its carbon emissions wiped off its slate in one go. True, there will be 2,800 job losses, and it won’t actually reduce global emissions – in fact, it will probably increase them. But who cares about such trifles when you have a legally-binding target of net zero to reach by 2050? That pretty well sums up today’s announcement that Tata Steel is to close its two blast furnaces in Port Talbot, in preparation of building a new ‘green’ electric arc furnace that will open in a few years’ time. An electric arc furnace won’t really decarbonise steelmaking because it only does half the job.

There must be a slight flaw in the IMF’s crystal ball, causing the future prospects for the German economy to be refracted onto Britain. Remember a year ago when the IMF confidently predicted that the UK economy would suffer the worst performance of any major industrial nation and contract by 0.6 per cent in 2023, worse even than Russia? The Remain lobby had a field day, presenting it as ‘evidence’ that our departure from the EU had put us in the international slow lane. It wouldn’t have been such a bad forecast, it turns out, had it been for Germany. The German economy, it has been announced today, shrank by 0.3 per cent last year – worse, it looks like, than any other large country.