Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better
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So, the stamp duty holiday has finally come to an end, as the tapered reduction in discounts expires. Now it’s just a case of catching the flight home, getting the dog back from the kennels and watching as the tan fades. And, as with a fortnight in concrete hotel in Benidorm, it is time to
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Pharmaceutical companies might think it a bit rich being asked to waive the patents on their Covid vaccines by Harry and Meghan, a couple who have rejected the concept of public service in an attempt to monetise their royal status. But let’s overlook the charge of hypocrisy and ask whether there really is any substance
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All current ills in the world, of course, can be blamed on two things: climate change and Brexit. So far, there are few people blaming the rationing of petrol and diesel on extreme weather-related to climate change (although give it time), but the usual suspects have certainly been quick out of the blocks to blame
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Has the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee quietly excused itself from its duty of keeping inflation down: namely, keeping the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) close to a 2 per cent target? I ask because the minutes of its September meeting, released today, show little inclination to raise rates from their historic low of 0.1 percent, even
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Will it turn out to be Boris Johnson’s Jim Callaghan moment? Briefing reporters on his plane to the US on Sunday, the current PM tried to play down the energy crisis, saying: ‘It’s like everybody going back to put the kettle on at the end of a TV programme, you’re seeing huge stresses on the
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Would you touch a ‘green gilt’ issued by the government, with an interest rate of just 0.87 per cent? Some people, apparently, would. The Treasury announced yesterday that it had shifted the first £10 billion tranche of ‘green gilts’ to raise finance for projects such as zero-carbon buses, wind farms and other green things. Indeed,
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Why has Britain suddenly been plunged into an energy crisis, with day ahead auction prices for electricity rising to over £400 per MWh, ten times what they were this time last year? The spike in global gas prices caused by economic recovery from Covid has been commented on often enough, as has the failure of
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So, is the post-Covid inflation panic over? That is how it looked last month, when the government’s preferred inflation index, CPIH, fell to 2.1 per cent from 2.4 per cent a month earlier. We will have the latest news on Wednesday morning, but for the moment it appears that consumer prices inflation hasn’t taken off like we
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Should we be vaccinating children against Covid-19? While some countries have been enthusiastically administering vaccines to under-18s — greatly contributing to their overall vaccination rate — the idea has greeted more coolly in Britain. The government and the NHS were relatively slow in making Covid vaccines available to 16 to 18-year-olds — although it was
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Are we heading for a 1970s-style inflationary spiral? Not according to Catherine Mann, former chief economist at Citigroup, who argues that we are now less exposed to fluctuations in oil prices than we were then. She also makes the case that businesses are more reluctant to put up prices and that the link between inflation
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It’s climate change, innit? No sooner had Hurricane Ida smashed into the coast of Louisiana with winds of around 150 mph than the usual claims began to be made, the ones we get every time a hurricane makes landfall in the US: that it has been caused in part by man-made climate change. Climate models have
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A lot of people won’t want to take much notice of Mary Bousted, joint-general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), who warns today that schools face significant disruption by the end of September as Covid-prevention measures have to be reintroduced. It was the NEU, after all, which not only opposed the return of schools
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One of the great lessons from the early stages of the pandemic was the need to shorten supply chains and make them more robust. This was especially true for medical supplies. Just-in-time supply chains have been developed over the years to increase efficiency, but had never been tested in a global crisis when demand for
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At times this summer, the government has been accused of fighting Covid-19 with an undeclared strategy that concentrates on vaccinating the old while allowing the young to build up herd immunity. The effort that the government has put into persuading young people to have the vaccine suggests this is more conspiracy theory than reality. Nevertheless,
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As a study in how hysteria develops, the reporting of World Weather Attribution study into last month’s floods in the Rhineland could hardly be bettered. You will no doubt have heard or seen headlines over the past couple of days claiming that climate change made the floods ‘up to nine times’ more likely. Some even
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How we all hollered with outrage in May when Emmanuel Macron closed France’s borders to people arriving from Britain on the dubious basis that Britons, and Britons alone, were in danger of infecting France with the Indian variant. I believed, and I still believe, that Macron and his government were in part motivated by Brexit
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Job vacancies at a record high, a shortage of 90,000 lorry drivers, farmers complaining about a lack of seasonal workers, care homes complaining about difficulties in recruiting staff — and 1.9 million people still on furlough at the end of June. It shouldn’t be difficult to put these figures together and work out what is going
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I am not usually on the same page as Greta Thunberg but she is absolutely right when she accuses the UK of lying about cutting its carbon emissions by 44 per cent since 1990. I have heard ministers repeatedly make this claim on radio and television while hardly ever being challenged on it — so
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Has the emergence of the Delta, or Indian, variant reduced the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and if so by how much? The fear that the Delta variant might be partially escaping our vaccines has often been expressed in recent weeks, especially given that highly-vaccinated countries such as Israel and parts of the US have suffered
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For a government to break a manifesto commitment is a serious matter which, quite rightly, is sure to rebound at the ballot box. But there is one commitment in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto which has simply got to go: the promise to maintain the ‘triple lock’ on pensions which sees the basic state pension increased
