Ross Clark

Whatever happened to Singapore on Thames? Weren’t we, after leaving the EU, supposed to be forging a future as a deregulated, low-tax, business-friendly enclave situated 20 miles off Calais? It isn’t quite looking that way at the moment. We are reinventing ourselves as Brussels on Thames – only more so. Do our bureaucrats really need to come down so heavily on big players in the realm of cloud computing games? Our corporation taxes are rising at a time others are static or falling, we keep inventing new regulations which far outdo EU regulations – such as that allowing new employees to demand flexible working. We are ploughing ahead with green measures such as the ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2030 while the EU has allowed some flexibility.

It is widely expected that Justin Welby, having now screwed the crown on Charles III’s head, will shortly retire as Archbishop of Canterbury and put himself out to grass. If so, he is not going quietly. This afternoon, in the House of Lords, he launched a wholesale attack on the government’s Illegal Migration Bill, which includes measures to offshore the processing of asylum-seekers in Rwanda, describing it as ‘isolationist, morally unacceptable and politically impractical’ to leave developing countries to handle the world’s refugees.    But one comment in particular stands out in the Archbishop’s speech.

You might have thought that a heavy defeat for the Conservatives in the local elections would silence those claiming that the government was out to disenfranchise left-wing voters by introducing compulsory photo ID for voters at polling stations. But not a bit of it.   Paul Mason was up bright and early bleating about ‘serious vote suppression’; the Mirror is reporting voters were leaving polling stations ‘in tears’ after turning up without their ID. And a professor of accounting practice at Sheffield university, who also described himself as an ‘economic justice campaigner’, tweeted that this was ‘the first reversal of the right to vote since 1832’.

There is nothing more boring than potholes. I remember that from my own days as a parish councillor. It saps the spirit every time the subject comes up, makes you wish you could be anywhere other than this damned meeting.  How much more exciting it must have felt to have been the councillors in Cambridge who in 2020 gave Britain its first Dutch-style roundabout – a £2.3 million remodelling of an existing city roundabout with three concentric colour-coded circles. On the inside there is the road, outside of which stands a reddish cycle path, flanked by a footway with dashes of pink. It is an object of municipal beauty, if you like that sort of thing: a ground-breaking experiment in how to manage and merge three very different types of traffic.

We have spent a year talking about energy security, but with inflation in food prices running at 19 per cent, how much longer before the debate turns to food security? Ideally, we would have policies which prioritise energy security as well as food security, but sadly the latter seems to have been forgotten. National self-sufficiency in food (the percentage produced relative to the percentage consumed) has been allowed to fall from 74 per cent to 61 per cent since the mid-1980s. Worse, energy and climate policy is damaging food security. There is no better example of how the latter is being sacrificed in favour of the former than Project Fortress, Britain’s largest solar farm.

At 3 p.m. this afternoon, our phones will awaken with a screech announcing impending doom. It won’t be for real (unless a terror group decides it is an opportune moment to launch an attack) but an exercise in testing a new civil defence warning system – an updated version of the network of sirens used to warn of air raids during world war two and maintained until the 1990s.    We should be worried about the long-term implications of the government seizing control of our mobile phones in order to spread emergency messages. True, were Vladimir Putin ever minded to fire one of his nuclear missiles at us it might be useful to be able to warn people about it (at least those who are at least two miles away from where it lands, there being little point otherwise).

Has the BBC been invaded by a cabal of Extinction Rebellion protesters who have tied up the Director General in his swivel chair? I ask because of a remarkable interview on Newsnight which marks a new low in the objectivity of the BBC’s climate coverage.  The flagship BBC Two news programme last night covered the threatened disruption of the London Marathon by Just Stop Oil protesters. Given that activists from another organisation did indeed carry out leaked plans to disrupt the Grand National – which delayed the start of the race – it is a threat to be taken very seriously.

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary never has exactly been the master of tact, but will his latest outburst make his customers finally ask themselves: do they really want to travel in his planes? Speaking at a Bloomberg event he asserted that Britain will one day rejoin the single market because 'in the next five to ten years, quite a number of the Brexiteers will die, as the average age of them is about over 70'.  What O’Leary forgets is that people’s attitudes tend to change with age Let’s leave aside, for a moment, whether it is wise to talk about your customers in this way; O'Leary’s remarks are wrong-headed. It is right that the proportion of people voting Brexit in 2016 rose with age. And, of course, humans being mortal, these voters will inevitably thin out.