Ross Clark

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.

When is a backlog in asylum applications not a backlog? When it is made up of ‘complex cases’ and of new applications which hadn’t been made at the time ministers promised to clear the backlog. Today, the Home Office has been chirping about its success in tackling illegal migration by announcing ‘the legacy asylum backlog target has been met with more than 112,000 asylum cases cleared in 2023 and small boat crossing arrivals down by 36 per cent’. The government’s efforts in 2023, in other words, did ‘not just clear the original 92,000 legacy asylum backlog, but exceed it.’ It has achieved this, it says, by hiring extra staff. On the face of it, that looks a great feather in Rishi Sunak’s cap, given that he promised to clear the backlog in December 2022.

This should have been the year when we could finally put Covid behind us and return to normal. But as far as public transport is concerned it has instead turned out to herald the realisation that paralysis has become the normal condition, not a product of the pandemic. Any Eurostar passengers who thought they had escaped the wildcat strike that brought pre-Christmas services to a premature halt on Saturday 23rd December by travelling a week later have found themselves at the receiving end of one of the cross-Channel service’s worst days in its near 30-year history.

I am guessing that Tory MP James Daly has given up trying to defend his majority of 105 in Bury North, has accepted that he will need to find a new job in the next 12 months and has decided to go out in style. I can’t think why else he would say, in an interview with the i newspaper, 'When you think about the family, it’s about stability. Most of the kids who struggle in Bury are the products of crap parents and so what do we do to try to address that issue?

You can say one thing about Jim Callaghan’s Labour government of the 1970s. It certainly kept migration under control. Over the course of his government, Britain saw net migration of around minus 65,000. That had quite a lot to do with a top tax rate of 83 per cent. Whether Scotland’s new tax rates will actually raise any revenue is another matter But if Keir Starmer says he won’t return to punitive tax rates, the SNP is certainly giving Callaghan’s Chancellor Denis Healey a run for his money. The Scottish government has just announced a new rate of 45 per cent for earnings between £75,000 and £125,140. But in some circumstances, the marginal rate can rise to Healey-esque levels.