Why should Amazon be exempt from Biden’s global tax?
From our US edition
This ‘breakthrough’ is not all it is cracked up to be
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?
Monday
Saturday
Joe Biden’s long road to recovery
In the middle of last year the US economy was something of a marvel: an economy which was creating jobs at an unprecedented rate, as other economies around the world remained in the deep freeze. Having shed jobs by the million in March, by May it looked as if the jobs market would be back
Friday
Does the Indian variant increase the risk of hospitalisation?
Is the Indian variant really more like to land you in hospital? That is the claim being widely reported this morning, based on Public Health England’s technical briefing 14. The briefing claims that the Indian (or Delta variant) is associated with a ‘significantly increased risk of hospitalisation within 14 days of specimen date.’ If you
Thursday
Why the vaccines should prevent a deadly third wave
Among the scientists and medics calling this week for caution in the government’s reopening of the economy was Dr Lisa Spencer, a consultant in Liverpool and honorary secretary of the British Thoracic Society, who warned on the Today programme on Tuesday that the country was covered with a series of ‘mini Covid volcanoes’ which ‘could
Tuesday
Has Covid accelerated the cashless society?
Time is, I fear, running out. Running out, that is, to avoid handing to a small number of multinational corporations our right to buy and sell things. Running out to prevent governments and central banks helping themselves to our savings, by means of negative interest rates. The payments industry is closing in on its target
Is climate change really causing hundreds of UK deaths?
Given the power that the daily statistics of Covid deaths have exerted over us this year, it was only a matter of time before we started being bamboozled with terrifying figures of the estimated death toll from climate change. Sure enough, the latest issue of Nature Climate Change contains a widely-reported paper by the London
Monday
Why should Dr Christian Jessen's fans pay his legal bill?
Wasn’t the whole point of crowdfunding supposed to be about enabling community and artistic projects to take place? That was how I remember it being sold to us, at any rate. But no, I got it wrong. It turns out that the real point of it is to help celebrities pay their legal bills. Dr
Thursday
Biden's tax plan spells bad news for Ireland
Biden’s America, of course, is all about re-engaging with the world after four years of isolationism. But if you are the Irish finance minister, perhaps the new administration isn’t looking quite so cuddly at the moment. Biden’s first big achievement in international cooperation looks like being a global minimum corporate tax rate. It seems that
Covid deaths in context
What would have been your overall chances of dying in the first 19 weeks of 2021 compared with recent years? According to a measure called ‘standardised mortality’ your overall chances of dying so far in 2021 have been just 1 per cent over the average of the past ten years — that is in spite
The many failures of China’s vaccine programme
At the start of the year Sebastián Piñera, president of Chile, went to Santiago airport personally to greet a consignment of vaccines from China. ‘Today is a day of joy, excitement and hope,’ he said from a podium on the tarmac. ‘As you see behind me, there is the plane that brought a shipment of
Tuesday
The boiler ban fiasco and the true cost of net zero
Politically it must have seemed an easy promise for Theresa May to make in the dying days of her premiership: to commit Britain to a legally-binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, rather than the 80 per cent reduction previously stipulated in the Climate Change Act. It was the summer of 2019 and
Monday
Covid sufferers aren't the only victims of the pandemic
Covid deaths are down to a trickle, but what about the indirect consequences of the pandemic: deaths that come from people failing to access timely medical treatment for other conditions? Cancer Research UK has estimated what it believes to be the backlog from disturbance to cancer services and the reluctance of some people to seek
Sunday
Is it time to phase out the AstraZeneca vaccine?
We still await good data on the transmissibility of the Indian variants of Sars-CoV-2, something the government insists is vital as to whether the full reopening of the economy and society can go ahead as planned on 21 June. But we do now have some data on efficacy of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines against
Friday
The post-Covid boom means inflation will be back
Amid the panic over the Indian variant this week it would have been easy to miss news that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) more than doubled in a month, from 0.7 per cent in March to 1.5 per cent in April. That is still below the Bank of England’s 2.0 per cent target, but could
Thursday
The rail revolution is nothing of the sort
The government says it is ending a quarter of a century of the ‘fragmentation’ of the railways by gathering all mainline services into an entity called Great British Railways. That will please some critics of privatisation, but has the government actually renationalised the railways, as the unions, the Labour party and – to judge by
Has India's second Covid wave peaked?
While the Indian variant continues to dominate the headlines, India itself seems to have dropped out of the news a bit. What is going on there? It was reported yesterday that India notched up a record number of Covid deaths on Tuesday – 4525 – which indeed was the record of any country during the
The problem with investing in 'value' stocks
For the first half of the pandemic a simple investment rule would have served you well: buy anything that was being plugged as a ‘tech’ stock – and dump nearly everything else. Lockdown ushered in a new era in which everything would be done online, rendering the traditional bricks and mortar economy. Since ‘Pfizer Monday’
Wednesday
Does getting Covid-19 protect you against reinfection?
How well does prior exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus protect you against reinfection? It has been a hotly-debated subject since the first trickle of reported cases of reinfection with the virus began to be reported last spring. Now, a study involving 16,000 students from South Carolina has attempted to quantify the protective effect of natural
What Greenpeace's 'Wasteminster' stunt won't tell you
Greenpeace has been responsible for many a fatuous stunt over the years, but its latest video has a point. It shows an animated Boris Johnson making a speech outside 10 Downing Street, boasting about his government’s environmental achievements, like banning plastic straws. Meanwhile, plastic waste starts to rain out of the sky, engulfing the Prime
Monday
Is Britain facing a jobs crisis?
The ONS recorded a sharp recovery in economic growth in March. The Bank of England has already increased its forecast for the growth of the UK economy in 2021. Now comes more evidence of rapid growth. The quarterly CIPD/Adecco Labour Market Outlook, published today, shows a sharp rise in the number of organisations that are
