Ross Clark

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.

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.