Ross Clark

A trade deal with the US has long been a holy grail for Brexiteers, not least because it is something that the EU has failed to achieve. Barack Obama told us we would have to go to the back of the queue, then Donald Trump told us we were at the front of the queue. Unfortunately, though, Trump wasn’t minded to serve anyone before being replaced by Joe Biden, who has shown a similar lack of interest in trade deals. Indeed, Biden has returned the US to an age of protectionism through his bizarrely-named Inflation Reduction Act, which offers grants and subsidies to green industries – so long as they are based in the US.

The green lobby has found another way of attacking the government for giving the go-ahead for new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. They are claiming that Britain doesn’t have enough refinery capacity to turn the crude oil into finished products.  The climate pressure group Global Witness claims that most of the new oil which will come out of the North Sea will be ‘heavy’ – while Britain’s refineries are geared up to handle lighter crude oils. Therefore, the group contends, it is pointless drilling for new oil in the North Sea because it can’t help provide for our own needs in terms of finished products such as petrol, diesel etc. The green lobby is looking ever more desperate in its campaign against new oil and gas licences It is a fallacious argument.

At times, the Covid public inquiry has had the appearance of a show trial – one that starts with the premise that lockdown was essential to saving lives and should have been imposed earlier in the spring of 2020, and that is seeking to find the guilty parties who prevented this happening. As Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, writes in The Spectator this week, the inquiry is failing to provide much illumination on the question that matters rather more: did lockdowns actually work, and did they do more good than they did harm?

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 to close most ticket offices on the network. Any other – genuinely private – industry would be deeply engaged in cost-cutting It may be the right decision. We certainly don’t need as many booking clerks as we did in the day before ticket machines or online ticket sales. It is good that passengers have the option of buying electronic tickets if they find that more convenient.

'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 – which Gove had described as a ‘feudal’ system of tenure. They remain a money-spinner for the freehold owners of blocks of flats, many of whom are offshore-registered companies.

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 give its views.    Isn’t the real problem that the OBR fails to make any allowance for political events? But how much use would a judgement by the OBR have been in any case? Let no one say that the organisation has no insight into its own failures.

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 he inspired by meeting his lover, leading to his resignation from Sage.      For the duration of Ferguson’s evidence, which spanned several hours, the number of people watching the live feed rarely reached more than 600. But for those who did take the trouble to listen, what did they learn? Ferguson, it turns out, was initially a bit of a lockdown sceptic.

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 take the latter view. Gates was reported to have taken 59 flights in 2017 and admits to have flown to the 2015 Paris climate conference by private jet. Moreover, he claims to have invested $1 billion (£818 million) of his own money in green technologies, so he is not exactly neutral on the subject – he is as much a vested interest as is ExxonMobil.

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 in private rented accommodation (but not social housing) can speed up the ageing process. This feels like a peer-reviewed study which appears to confirm prejudices – in this case, social housing good, privately-rented housing bad. You can see it is going to be trotted out by Guardian journalists for years to come as ‘scientific evidence’ that private renting is killing people and that we need massive investment in social housing. But does it really tell us that?