Ross Clark

Remember ‘localism’ – when David Cameron was going to return powers to local people when it came to things like planning? If that is how the Conservatives’ 14 years in power began, they seem to be ending with the opposite: with Michael Gove threatening to seize the planning reins from Sadiq Khan and get more houses built. ‘If you cannot do what is need to deliver the homes that London needs, I will,’ he wrote in a sniffy letter to London mayor Sadiq Khan ahead of his speech on planning this morning. He has set up an investigation to see whether Khan’s London Plan is holding up housebuilding.

Donald Trump may be offensive in many ways. He may have defiled his office during his previous stint as president by claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him. But at some point over the next ten and a half months before polling day in 2024 even his detractors are going to have to start asking themselves: might a second Trump presidency actually be in Britain’s self-interest? Had Trump remained in office it is very likely that Britain would by now have a fully-working trade deal with the US – which is after all the largest single country which we export to. It would have required some compromise – dropping, for example, the UK government’s illogical ban on chicken which has been chlorine-washed.

‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scotland.’ So read the words carved into a stone outside Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh unveiled by Alex Salmond while he was first minister. But as the SNP’s education policy begins to unravel and the budgetary pressures build at Holyrood, how much longer before the Scottish government starts to revisit its practice of subsidising students, even middle-class ones who can well afford to pay tuition fees? From the vantage point of a Scottish sixth former, the system north of the border looks great. Unlike their English cousins, Scots attending Scottish universities pay no tuition fees.

That shutting people away in their homes for weeks on end was going to have a bad effect on mental health was clear from the start of the pandemic, even if the Covid Inquiry doesn’t seem to think it a proper subject to cover the negative consequences of lockdowns. But a poll published this week by the organisation More in Common reveals just how debilitating an effect the pandemic continues to have on a remarkably large section of the population. More in Common asked the following question: ‘Thinking of the current health situation in the UK would you support or oppose the government reintroducing each of the following Covid-19 restrictions at the current time?’ It then listed a series of interventions which were used during the pandemic. The results are astounding.

Boris Johnson will be led into the Covid inquiry this morning like a condemned man. We have all seen enough of this inquiry to know the line of questioning he will receive: one that will try to portray him as a bumbling fool who rejected scientific advice to lock down, killing many thousands of people in the process. He will also be presented as a callous individual who allegedly said it didn’t matter if elderly people died because they had had their time. Johnson’s enemies will just regret that Brexit can’t be added to the list of charges against him. With expectations so low, it is only natural that he will over-deliver, reminding people of the great communicator he is and why he once enjoyed mass popularity.

The rebellion of 26 Conservative MPs against the government’s zero electric vehicle (ZEV) mandate couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Prime Minister. The ZEV will compel manufacturers to ensure that, from 1 January,  at least 22 per cent of their car sales are pure electric. Yet simultaneously comes news of a collapse in sales of electric cars.   There is little other interpretation to put on the figures for new car sales in November put out by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) today. Electric cars have had an appalling month, with sales down 17.1 per cent on November last year. This, in a month when overall cars sales were 9.5 per cent higher than a year earlier. Motorists seems to be abandoning pure electric cars, although they are buying hybrids.

There is a word that we are going to hear once COP28 gets underway in Dubai later this week: ‘reparations’. While US climate envoy John Kerry has tried to rule out any US agreement to pay reparations to countries affected by what he himself might claim were ‘climate-related disasters’, many developing countries are determined to put compensation top of the agenda, and push it far further than the agreement last year at COP27 to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund whereby developed nations hand out money to poor ones deemed to be affected by climate change.     The demands for reparations will be helped along the way by western academics and pressure groups.

There was little competition for the oddest and most obscure bill to be announced in the King’s Speech: the proposal to licence London’s pedicabs. On the list of the most pressing issues facing the nation, it doesn’t tend to feature very highly. There must be many people in Britain who have never seen a pedicab, let alone ridden in one or come into conflict with these vehicles, which tend to ply a tiny zone of tourist London around Piccadilly Circus. But could the move to regulate pedicabs evolve into something a little more substantial? During a debate on the pedicab bill in the Lords this week, Lord Hogan-Howe, formerly chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, made the suggestion that the legislation be expanded to cover cyclists in general.

‘We know it is painful, especially with inflation at what it is. But there really is no option other than to ask you low-paid workers to contribute a little more in tax so that Rishi Sunak and his wife, when the time comes, can pass on a bit more of their £730 million wealth to their daughters.’   That is, to put it bluntly what Jeremy Hunt will be telling the nation if he does what he is reported to be about to do in the Autumn Statement and cut inheritance tax (IHT). One of the suggestions is that he may halve the rate to 20 per cent.