Ross Clark

A man who has the honour of being his country’s first leader from an ethnic background but who comes to office with the baggage of a questionable performance running the health service during the pandemic. It could be Humza Yousaf, but equally it could now be Vaughan Gething, who was elected as Labour leader in Wales this morning and will become First Minister when Mark Drakeford steps down this week.    It is fair to say that his elevation will not be welcomed by everyone, not least by the relatives of those who died in Welsh care homes after patients were discharged there in March 2020 without being tested for Covid. The Welsh government, on Gething’s watch, was even slower to introduce the tests than Matt Hancock was – two weeks later, indeed.

How lovely that engineers working for National Air Traffic Services (Nats) can work from home rather than having to slog it in to the company’s headquarters at Swanwick, Hampshire. Lovely, that is, for the engineers rather than for air passengers. A report by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has revealed the reason behind the meltdown in air traffic control which led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights last August Bank Holiday, inconveniencing millions of passengers. The system need to be reset by a ‘level 2’ engineer, but none were actually working in the office that day, so one had to be called in – which took 90 minutes.

The problem with intermittency of wind and solar energy is so obvious that you wonder why is has taken the Prime Minister this long to work out that we are going to carry on needing gas-fired power stations to fill in the gaps. In the case of solar energy this is, of course, every evening. Rishi Sunak is quite right that Labour’s plan to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 (and apparently save us oodles of money off our bills in the process) is a ‘fantasy approach’. The trouble is, the government’s own approach isn’t a whole lot better.  If we are going to have a grid based on wind and solar, gas is pretty much essential In spite of today’s announcement about new gas-fired power stations, the target of decarbonising the grid by 2035 (i.e.

Just what has the government done to try to retain the Red Wall vote? It seemed when they won a majority of 80 in 2019, thanks largely to a big switch of working class votes in peripheral areas of the Midlands and North, away from the main cities – that Boris Johnson and his ministers got it. There was a very large constituency of former Labour voters which was is fed up of that party's fixation of the sorts of issues which appeal to metropolitan liberals and they were looking for a new political home. It was a constituency which likes state intervention, but was socially conservative.  Johnson's government at first seemed to oblige: the furlough scheme heralded a move towards bigger government. There was also a big step up in funding for the NHS.

What is wrong with UK shares? While the US, European and Japanese stock markets reach new highs, UK markets are stuck in a deep rut. The FTSE 1000 is just 10 per cent higher than it was on the last day of last century. As for the FTSE 250, small cap and AIM markets – which seemed to be doing okay until 2021 – they are still deep in bear market territory. The AIM 100 – the largest hundred shares on the Alternative Investment Market, which peaked at over 6000 in August 2021 is currently down below 3600. That is the sort of crash that happened to the wider stock market after the dotcom boom and the 2008/09 financial crisis, but has gone unnoticed because it is not reflected in global markets.

Why is housing still so expensive in Britain? Conservative MP and former levelling-up minister Neil O'Brien has produced a set of statistics which draws attention to the role of migration in the high cost of housing. Across England as a whole he says, 7.4 per cent of the population is made up of people who have arrived in the country since 2011. Over the same period, the housing stock has risen by 8.5 per cent. In London, 16.6 per cent of people have arrived since 2011, yet the housing stock has increased by only 10.7 per cent. No wonder, he points out, that 38 per cent of households in Britain are having to shell out more than 40 per cent of their disposable income on housing (mortgage or rent).      There is a flaw in O’Brien’s analysis.

With Keir Starmer having rid the Labour party of its Corbynite doctrines, Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent would not be expected to feature much in the coming general election campaign. But will that change after the failed test firing of a Trident missile, for the second time in a row? The missile, which was launched from HMS Vanguard off the east coast of the United States in January, was intended to travel to the edge of space before landing in the middle of the Atlantic. Instead, it plopped straight into the sea. We should know a bit more about the incident today when defence secretary Grant Shapps – who was on board the submarine when the failed test firing was made – makes a statement to the Commons.

Just why did Michael Gove campaign for Brexit? I thought he was selling us a future with a more entrepreneurial attitude and less meddlesome regulations. This week we are going to find out just how committed he is to lighter regulations when he announces legislation to force owners of holiday lets to obtain planning permission and to enter their properties on a local register. In other words, he has given in to the Nimbys who don’t like having holidaymakers staying in their street and the hoteliers who find self-catering accommodation inconvenient competition to their own business model. Why trash the tourist industry, one of the few burgeoning export industries we have?

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.