Ross Clark

Ross Clark

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?

Tuesday

Ross Clark

A beginner’s guide to (legally!) avoiding tax

You have to feel a little sorry for Rishi Sunak. When you have a wife as rich as Akshata Murty, just how do you keep tabs on all her investments, making sure that each one of them is properly declared as an interest in the House of Commons Register? The Prime Minister has suffered the embarrassment of being investigated by parliamentary authorities over an apparent failure to declare his wife’s holdings in a childcare firm Koru Kids, which potentially stands to benefit from changes in the Budget. Sunak previously nearly had his political career derailed thanks to revelations that his wife, who is an Indian citizen, was living in Britain as a non-dom – a status she later gave up.

Monday

Ross Clark

Net zero will make flying more expensive

Are we going to have to give up flying to save the planet? Many climate campaigners have been saying so for years, but now Sustainable Aviation – a trade body which represents the UK aviation industry – seems to agree, at least in the case of less well-off passengers. It is rather significant that the UK aviation industry seems to have nodded along with the idea that some passengers are going to be priced out of the air  Today, it has published a ‘road map’ showing how the industry intends to decarbonise, in order to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 – in line with the government’s self-imposed, legally-binding target. It proposes that 14 per cent of emissions cuts will come from ‘demand reduction’ – i.e.

Friday

Ross Clark

What’s the truth about long Covid?

How big a deal is long Covid and can it be treated? Opinions range from it being a serious impediment to the health of millions of those who suffered from Covid-19 to a figment in the imagination of the workshy. A study by the University of Oxford of a drug developed by US Pharmaceutical company Axcella Therapeutics may just help to shed some light. The drug, AXA1125, is designed to boost the performance of mitochondria, which generate energy for our cells and control the amount of inflammation in the body. It is believed that long Covid causes fatigue – among other symptoms – by inhibiting the mitochondria.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Gove’s war on buy-to-lets will kill the holiday economy

The term ‘hostile environment’ was dreamt up by the Home Office to describe a policy of making migrants lives’ so difficult that they would be minded to pack up and leave the country. But it could equally well have been coined to apply to the government’s policies towards buy-to-let investors. For years, governments of all colours sat back and did nothing as rampant house price inflation priced many young people out of the market. Then something clicked and George Osborne, together with his successors at No. 11, decided that it was not a good idea to have investors and speculators scoop up properties by the armful, outbidding aspirant owner-occupiers.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Interest rates can’t go back to being as low as they were

Good news – at least for those who hold faith in economic forecasts. The IMF has just eradicated half the recession it forecast, in January, for Britain. At that point, it expected the UK economy to shrink by 0.6 per cent over 2023 – which would have meant Britain uniquely suffering a recession among advanced nations. Today, in its latest World Economic Outlook, the IMF has revised that down to a fall of 0.3 per cent. Moreover, while the outlook for Britain has improved, for a number of other countries it has worsened, most notable for Germany and Japan. Germany is now also forecast to share our recession, with output falling by 0.1 per cent over 2023.    But then who cares, when economic forecasts have proved so wide of the mark in the past?

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Nigel Lawson’s legacy is one of British transformation

The path from the editor’s chair at The Spectator to 11 Downing Street was not untrodden when Mrs Thatcher asked Nigel Lawson to replace Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor of the Exchequer after the 1983 general election. Iain Macleod had made the same journey in 1970. But whereas Macleod died 13 days into the job, Lawson went on to become Britain’s most significant post-war chancellor, and the architect of high Thatcherism. You have to be at least 50 now to remember the stupor in which the British economy lay when Lawson took office. The statist economy of the 1970s, with its wretched labour disputes and under-performing nationalised industries had still not been fully dismantled.

Monday

Ross Clark

By reducing oil production, Opec is only helping Russia

Just when we thought inflationary forces were softening, the price of crude oil has shot up sharply today in response to an announcement by Opec that it will try to reduce production. A barrel of Brent crude, which touched $120 last summer before falling back to $75 last month, reached $85 at one point today. Some analysts expect it to hit $100. Given that the benign forecasts for inflation which shaped Jeremy Hunt’s budget were predicated on a falling oil price, has the case for economic recovery now collapsed? Unfortunately, in spite of the US’s drive towards energy independence in recent years, the world remains depressingly reliant on Opec for oil On the positive side, last year’s inflationary surge in Europe was more about gas than oil.

Ross Clark

Scotland is making education strikes in England worse

If anyone thought that the public sector strikes were fading out, this week marks a resurgence, with Passport Office staff striking for five weeks – apparently on behalf of other civil servants whose absence might be less noticed – along with the National Education Union (NEU). The education union voted by a margin of 98 to 2 per cent for two days’ strikes on 27 April and 2 May. Pleas to save children further disruption to their education following months of school closures during Covid-19 appear to have fallen on deaf ears. The NEU vote shows one thing which has been little commented upon during this round of strikes: the true cost of the Barnett formula.

Friday

Ross Clark

The CPTPP trade deal shatters the ‘little Englander’ Brexit myth

Britain’s acceptance into the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) will be presented by the government as a triumph, a statement that Britain really does, finally, have something substantive to show for Brexit.   It is a deal which could not have been done so long as Britain remained a member of the EU, as the only trade deals we were allowed to enter into were those negotiated by the EU on our behalf. Cynics might counter that there is limited point in joining a trade bloc when you already have bilateral trade deals with seven of its 11 members and have negotiated deals with two others which have yet to begin.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Rishi Sunak now sees a future for fossil fuels in Britain

The location of Rishi Sunak and Grant Shapps’s net zero relaunch today shows there has been a change of emphasis since the PM set up the Department for Energy Security and Climate Change last autumn. One suspects a bit of ideology creeping in: fossil fuels have become a great bogeyman, and nothing will make them acceptable Whereas Boris Johnson might have sought to make such an announcement at a wind farm or solar farm, today’s relaunch took place at Culham in Oxfordshire, the site of Britain’s nuclear fusion research facility. Fusion is the holy grail of carbon-free energy which even enthusiasts admit is decades away from being commercialised, if it can be at all. But it is a hint that the government is no longer going to try to power Britain with wind and solar energy alone.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

What David Attenborough’s ‘Wild Isles’ doesn’t tell you

It is not just Gary Lineker, apparently, who has fallen victim to sinister right-wing forces at the BBC. A follow-up programme to David Attenborough’s BBC1 series Wild Isles, focusing on the decline of UK wildlife, will not be shown on terrestrial television but only made available on iPlayer. ‘The decision has angered the programme-makers and some insiders at the BBC,’ reports the Guardian, ‘who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.’ The BBC has claimed that the extra programme – which, like the whole of the Wild Isles series, is co-produced by the WWF and the RSPB – was never intended to be shown on BBC1.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

It will take a lot for the dollar to die

The end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency has been predicted so many times that it is tempting to nod along with Jay Powell, Federal Reserve chairman, who pronounced last week that there is no immediate threat. But with high inflation in the US and China cuddling up with Russia, is it something the world should be taking seriously?      If the dollar was dumped then it would have serious consequences for the global economy. The status of the dollar allows the US to borrow much more cheaply than other countries, allowing it to sustain public debt of more than 100 per cent of GDP for the past decade. If that were to unwind, it would push up the cost of servicing US debt. Recent developments have made some analysts uneasy.

Sunday

Ross Clark

Scotland is better off without the Greens in government

Just who do the Scottish Greens think they are? They provide a mere seven seats to the SNP’s 64 and they won 1.3 per cent of the vote in the constituency section of the Holyrood elections in 2021 (they had 8.1 per cent in the regional section). In return for that meagre offering they think they have the right to end economic growth in Scotland. No wonder at all then that Kate Forbes and Ash Regan are unbothered by the prospect of the Greens leaving government – maybe even pushing them out should they win the SNP leadership – and only Humza Yousaf has signed up to their ‘non-negotiable’ demands for ‘climate justice’ and trans rights. It ought to be pretty obvious to anyone in the SNP that the Greens are more trouble than they are worth.

Friday

Ross Clark

Don’t get too excited about the return of high street shopping

Until the turn of the year it was taken for granted that Britain would descend into recession in the coming months. The Bank of England saw a long downturn lasting into 2024; the IMF thought we would do worse than even Russia. Now, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) thinks we might avoid recession altogether, and today comes more evidence to back that up: retail sales volumes rose by 1.2 per cent in February, month on month. The Office of National Statistics also revised its estimate for retail sales volumes in January, from 0.5 per cent (which itself was received as a pleasant surprise) to 0.9 per cent.    No-one should get too excited. The same figures show a year on year fall in sales volumes of 3.5 per cent in February.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Why is Sadiq Khan giving the police Ulez camera footage?

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was quick out of the blocks to join the condemnation of the Metropolitan Police following the publication of Louise Casey’s report. He even slapped down Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley for daring to question Casey’s assertion that the Met was ‘institutionally misogynistic, racist and homophobic’.      So does that mean that Khan will now revisit his decision to share with the Met data from hundreds of cameras set up to police his Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez)? Alas, it seems not. If we are going to use mass surveillance in this way, ought it not to be part of the public debate?

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The Fed’s rate rise shows it is confident about the banks

So, things really are different this time. The US Federal Reserve has decided to raise its Federal Funds Rate (its main interest rate) by a quarter-point, to 4.75 per cent – 5 per cent, in spite of a banking crisis that has seen two large banks fail in the past fortnight. For the past two decades, this sort of thing didn’t happen. Under the unwritten laws of the ‘Greenspan put’, the Fed could be relied upon to provide some form of stimulus at the first sign of financial trouble. It began with the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, when the Fed put together a $3.6 billion bailout funded by a consortium of banks, and it carried on long after former Fed chair Alan Greenspan himself had departed the scene.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The UN’s global net zero target isn’t realistic

Does UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres really have any hope of persuading rich countries to commit to achieving net zero by 2040? This was a target he declared was vital as he launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Sixth Assessment Report yesterday. He will have his work cut out. The trouble is that while a handful of mostly European countries have enthusiastically set legally-binding targets to eliminate carbon emissions, mostly by 2050, the list is not really growing very fast at all. According to the ‘net zero tracker’ published by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, there are currently 17 countries which have bound themselves by legal net zero commitments.

Monday

Ross Clark

Credit Suisse’s takeover delivers a shock to bond investors

If the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS was supposed to calm markets, it is not looking that way this morning. Markets are sharply down in Asia, and the FTSE fell by 1.5 per cent on opening this morning. Banks were the biggest fallers, losing up to 7 per cent of their value. There is a nasty realisation that the contagion from the banking crisis of the past week could have a lot further to spread. This is a nasty shock to investors who thought that bond funds offered much greater security The centre of this morning’s panic are things known as Additional Tier – or AT1 – bonds, about which we are going to hear a lot more in coming days and weeks.

Sunday

Ross Clark

Credit Suisse has been bought out – but at what cost?

Another Sunday, another banking takeover swiftly arranged before markets open on Monday morning. This time Credit Suisse has agreed to be bought by fellow Swiss bank UBS for 0.5 Swiss Francs a share – less than a third of its closing price on Friday and less than a tenth of what the bank was worth a year ago. A banking collapse which was beginning to look inevitable in spite of a 50 billion Swiss Franc bailout by the Swiss central bank on Friday has been averted, market turmoil has been avoided, or postponed, jobs have been saved (although many are expected to be lost in London as Credit Suisse’s investment banking operations are shrunk). Shareholders have not been left empty-handed. But at what cost?

Saturday

Ross Clark

A morally simplistic kids’ film: Extrapolations reviewed

We are all, of course, pretty well doomed. We know that because Al Gore told us so in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But just in case we didn’t get the message, the producer of that film, Scott Z Burns, has come up with a series of dystopian mini-dramas, Extrapolations, which are supposed to give us a window into the future. The series, the first three episodes of which have just dropped on Apple TV, is the latest in a genre which has given us The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up. The good news is that we have at least 47 years left, because 2070 is the date of the last of the dramas reaches (we will have to wait until 21 April for that one). Given that that episode is entitled Ecocide, however, that may be just about our lot.