Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. He writes on Substack, at Ross on Why?
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So it seems that rail ticket offices will be reprieved. After a vociferous campaign – not least on behalf of elderly travellers who might find it difficult to use mobile phone technology, let alone the network of often-dysfunctional ticket machines – the government has undertaken a U-turn and told rail companies to withdraw their proposals
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‘We’ve had 30 years of vested interests standing in the way of change,’ Rishi Sunak declared in his conference speech in Manchester. Now he has chance to prove that he intends to do something about it. Back in May, it was reported that Sunak himself had squashed Michael Gove’s proposals for banning new leasehold properties
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The Autumn Statement could propose offering discounts in stamp duty for homebuyers who take improvement to raise the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of their home during their first two years of ownership. Could this be the beginning of a new divergence between the Conservatives and Labour, where the Tories provide incentives and Labour pursue punitive
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It was the weather wot did it, wot stopped us spending in the shops. Yet again, the favourite old excuse has been trotted out by retailers trying to explain where their sales have vanished. Retail sales volumes in September, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports this morning, plunged by 0.9 per cent in September,
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A year ago Liz Truss’ brief government collapsed when markets lost confidence in Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. A large part of the problem, it was explained at the time, was that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) – founded by George Osborne specifically to provide some independent backing for Budget measures – had not been invited to
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Not for the first time, a widely-predicted – and for many frustrated buyers, hoped-for – house price crash has failed to materialise. The Office for National Statistics’ House Price Index (ONS HPI) shows average prices up 0.3 per cent in the month of August and up 0.2 per cent since August 2022. This is at odds with
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Is the Covid inquiry running out of steam? Today, it saw one of Covid’s biggest stars take the ‘witness stand’: Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College, whose paper in March 2020 was instrumental in persuading Boris Johnson to call a lockdown. Ferguson, of course, went on to achieve notoriety by breaking the very lockdown rules
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Matt Hancock, don’t retire just yet – we may need you back. There’s a new terror spreading across Britain – and even better for the tabloids, this one seems to have come from France. It is all a big and rather silly panic The great bedbug scare bubbled up a few weeks ago as an
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For the past 18 months, the UK economy has been stuck in the purgatory of an eternally predicted but non-arriving recession. The Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR), Bank of England, and the IMF have been among those to have predicted recessions that have not – yet – happened. But now, for what it is worth
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Is Bill Gates a sage figure who can help save the world from climate change? Or is he a dreadful old hypocrite who likes to lecture us on climate while flying around the world by private jet, and who pushes certain technologies because he has personally invested in them? There are plenty of people who
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So, the doomsters have been proved wrong again – not least the Bank of England, which a year ago forecast recession throughout 2023. GDP figures released by the Office of National Statistics this morning show that the economy grew by 0.2 per cent in August, partially reversing a sharp contraction of 0.6 per cent in
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Great news. Living in a damp home can help you live longer. Admittedly, I am not all that convinced, but it is no less valid a conclusion to draw from a paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health than the line that has been reported in the Guardian and elsewhere today: that living
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The biggest hinderance for the Conservatives is that they have nothing to offer young voters. The Labour party, however, just might. It seems that Keir Starmer will announce in his conference speech a plan to return to the idea of post-war new town corporations, which were able to compulsory-purchase land at agricultural value. It could – just
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To no-one’s surprise, house prices fell again last month. Average prices were down by 0.4 per cent in September, according to Halifax, with the typical property now worth £278,600 compared with the peak of £293,500 in June 2022. Much of this, inevitably, has to do with high interest rates. For three decades until last year the
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At last, the Pope is being taken seriously when he warns of moral degeneracy – well, sort of. When Popes have tried to preach to us about abortion, promiscuity, materialism, drugs and selfish lifestyles, they have widely been treated as old fools or bigoted moralists who want to stop us having fun and being who we
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Jeremy Hunt wants to make work pay. Few Conservatives will argue with that, nor with the idea of introducing sanctions for benefit claimants who refuse to look for work. Truth is he could and should go far further than threatening to cut the benefits of hardcore work-avoiders who refuse even to attend job interviews. A
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For much of the past few years, car production has been compromised by a global shortage of microchips. Why no manufacturer has seized the opportunity to market a microchip-free car (i.e. like all cars manufactured before the 1980s) I don’t know. I would certainly swap my too-clever-for-its-own-good Volvo V60 for such a model. I haven’t met anyone
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In the year 2007 Gordon Brown became prime minister, Northern Rock went bust and the iPhone was introduced. But something silently and invisibly calamitous must also have happened in Britain, because it was the year that productivity growth in Britain all but ceased. Tempting though it may be to blame some or all of the
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You can almost sense the agonising among hardcore remainers, the howls of anguish. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revised the UK’s economic growth figures since Covid upwards. Instead of still struggling to reach its pre-pandemic high it seems that the UK economy in fact surpassed 2019 levels two years ago. Previously, the ONS
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When the Commons nodded through Britain’s legally-binding net zero target in 2019 all MPs had to go on was the Climate Change Committee’s estimate that the whole process would cost £1 trillion. MPs failed to probe this figure and the government didn’t even try to calculate one. Indeed, when the Treasury attempted to come up with
