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?

Thursday

Ross Clark

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 pandemic. However, that number needs to be put in the context of the country’s population of 1.3 billion. Grim as it is, it works out at 3.5 deaths per million. This is a fraction of the 27.6 deaths per million recorded in Britain on 20 January 2021. Tuesday’s figure is likely to be the high tide mark in India’s second wave of Covid Tuesday’s figure is also likely to be the high tide mark in India’s second wave of Covid.

Ross Clark

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' on 9 November, when the results of the first phase 3 trials of Covid vaccine were made public, the opposite advice has served investors just as well: buy any bricks and mortar company that was dumped during the first phase and sell anything touted as a tech stock. The economy was going to spring back quickly into life, leaving over-valued tech stocks struggling to maintain their toppy values.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

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 infection. The students involved in the study, which is published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, were each swabbed for a PCR test last autumn, as a condition of being allowed to return to campus. They were swabbed again this spring in similar circumstances.  Out of 16,101 students, 2,021 were found to be infected in the autumn. Of these, 44 – or 2.

Ross Clark

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 Minister as well as all of Downing Street, the Cabinet Office and much of the Foreign Office, too. This immense pile, we are told, is the quantity of plastic waste which we are dumping daily on developing countries. I’ll take Greenpeace’s word for it that the size of the pile is accurate.

Monday

Ross Clark

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 hiring extra staff or are expecting to do so over the next few months. The survey, which goes out to 1,000 employers in the private, public, and voluntary sectors, found that 36 per cent of employers are planning to increase staff levels over the next three months. Nine per cent said they are expecting to shrink staff levels, 50 per cent will keep numbers the same and 6 per cent don’t know.

wuhan institute of virology lab theory
Ross Clark

Scientists: WHO wrong to dismiss theory that COVID came from lab

From our US edition

If the World Health Organization was hoping that its report earlier this year into the origins of COVID-19 would be the last word on the matter, it is going to be sorely disappointed. A group of 18 immunologists, biologists and other scientists have written to Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to make it clear that they reject WHO’s conclusion that it is ‘extremely unlikely’ that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, entered the human population through a laboratory accident. The report, published on February 28, pretty well rejected the theory that SARS-CoV-2 could have originated as a virus held, even invented, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which it escaped.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Study: AstraZeneca vaccine highly effective in India

Does the Indian variant of Sars-CoV-2, B1.617.2, have the capacity to escape vaccines? Is it really more transmissible than the Kent variant, and by how much? Those are the urgent questions which government scientific advisers are going to have to try to answer over the next week or two – and the answers will have profound consequences for life in Britain over the next few months. If the reopening of society and the economy is to be stalled, or even reversed – as some doctors, including the BMA seem to want – it will suppress an economic recovery, and depress an extremely large number of people who had been led to believe that the reopening was ‘irreversible’, to use the Prime Minister’s word.

Friday

Ross Clark

Could the Indian variant slow unlocking?

So is the 'irreversible' lifting of lockdown really irreversible after all? There is a grim echo of what happened last year in the sudden panic over the Indian variant of SARS-CoV-2. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that he 'rules nothing out', following a meeting of the Sage committee over how to respond to the variant. Next month’s proposed reopening of society must now look in doubt. Monday’s relaxation, which will allow indoor hospitality for the first time this year, will for the moment go ahead, but we have seen how quickly these things can change — and with what little notice.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Will our vaccines stop the Indian variant?

As we have often found with Covid-19, no sooner does a path seem to emerge out of the woods than the trees close in again. On Monday, the Prime Minister confirmed that the further relaxation of lockdown rules – including the reopening of indoor hospitality – would go ahead as planned next week. Daily totals of deaths from Covid-19 have been running at very low levels – indeed deaths from all causes are now running 7.3 per cent lower than the recent five-year average, according to the ONS.

Ross Clark

Why stamp duty should be lowered for good

Rishi Sunak’s stamp duty holiday has been credited with reviving the property market and blamed for stoking house price inflation, but what has been its effect on the public purse? Remarkably, far from reducing receipts it has actually modestly increased them. In the first quarter of 2021 the public coffers swallowed one per cent more income from stamp duty than they did in the first quarter of 2020, before the holiday was announced on 8 July last year. How come? Because stamp duty hasn’t been suspended altogether; the upper bound of the nil rate band for people buying a main home has been increased from £125,000 to £500,000. But stamp duty is still payable on properties sold for more than that.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Were fears of a third wave overblown?

So, the third wave is officially no more. New modelling by SPI-M, the government’s committee on modelling for pandemics, has, at a stroke, eradicated the predicted surge in new infections, hospital admissions and deaths which it had pencilled in for the autumn or winter as a result of lockdown being eased.  Previous modelling published in April suggested that we could end up with 20,000 in hospital — higher than during the first peak last April. Now the third wave is looking less like the swell off Newquay during an Atlantic storm and a little more like a ripple on the Serpentine.

Monday

Ross Clark

Are Meghan’s Covid claims correct?

When you are on the side of global enlightenment, the standards of proof required for your assertions tend to be somewhat lower. This perhaps explains why Meghan Markle’s comments during an event called the Global Citizen’s Vax Live concert were so widely reported yet so little challenged by the usual army of self-appointed ‘fact-checkers’ who swoop on anything to do with Covid. She claimed that women 'have been disproportionately affected by this pandemic', citing a 'surge in gender-based violence, the increased responsibility of unpaid care work and new obstacles which have reversed so much progress for women in the workplace'.

Ross Clark

The furlough scheme is holding back the jobs market

Last week the Bank of England increased its forecast for economic growth in 2021 from 5 to 7.25 per cent. Now comes more evidence of an economic recovery that is gathering pace, in spite of many lockdown measures still being in place. A UK report on jobs compiled by KPMG and REC, which uses data from 400 recruitment firms, measured in April the sharpest new increase in vacancies since it began in 1997. Contrary to the claims by the Labour party and others that British workers are facing a future of increasingly short-term contracts, the rise was principally down to a rise in vacancies for permanent roles which were at their highest since March 1998. The demand for temporary roles was at its highest since October 2014.

Friday

Ross Clark

Boris shouldn’t take the red wall vote for granted

There are two popular reactions to the Hartlepool by-election, which one you favour depending largely on your political tribe. The first holds that the white working class has reacted against a woke, metropolitan Labour party and its knee-taking leader, Keir Starmer. The second holds that the town’s racist and xenophobic population are still fearful that their beloved Brexit might yet be undone, and were desperate to vote against a Labour candidate who had backed Remain. Both of these narratives in fact boil down to pretty much the same thing: that the people of Hartlepool are a sad and angry bunch who tend to vote against things rather than vote for them.

Thursday

Ross Clark

The dangers of buying a ‘doer-upper’

Is there any television programme as cruel as Grand Designs? At least Jeux Sans Frontieres only offered 15 minutes of humiliation at a time. Grand Designs, by contrast, offers a lifetime’s worth, often with bankruptcy and divorce thrown in. But none have come quite such a cropper as Edward Short who, in 2008, paid £1 million for a building plot on the North Devon coast and has spent the past 13 years – as well as a further £6 million – trying to turn it into a lighthouse-inspired luxury home with infinity pool, home cinema and sauna. What stands there at the moment, however, looks more like the remains of Chernobyl nuclear power station.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The ‘Covid deaths’ that are not caused by Covid

Registered Covid deaths fell to just one on Monday, leading many to comment that the epidemic in Britain is effectively over. One day’s statistics don’t mean an awful lot, especially over a bank holiday, but what about the wider picture? Over the UK as a whole, there have been 90 deaths over the past seven days, a fall of 41.2 per cent over the previous seven day period – although that, too, may be affected by the bank holiday. A more in-depth analysis, offering more context – although a little out of date – is provided by the latest weekly analysis of deaths from all causes, published today by the Office for National Statistics and covering the week ending 23 April.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Will 95 per cent mortgages really help first-time buyers?

Did we end up learning anything from the 2008/09 financial crisis? If we did, we seem to have forgotten it pretty quickly again, to judge by the re-emergence of the 95 per cent mortgage. Numerous deals have been launched over the past week, with interest rates of around four per cent – the result of the Chancellor’s Budget initiative for the government to underwrite such loans. If you can sum up what went wrong in the late 2000s in one sentence it is that in their determination to grow their share of the mortgage market, banks overlooked that fact that it takes very little to turn a secured loan into an unsecured one.

Thursday

Ross Clark

What does the government’s green target mean for your money?

As if Covid hadn’t caused a big enough disruption to the economy and investors, along comes another shocker: the government’s announcement of an even-tighter target for reducing carbon emissions. Britain has now been put on a legally-binding commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 78 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. What does it mean for your money? Quite a lot. For one thing it means that it is more likely that the government will adopt the proposal by the Committee on Climate Change to ban the sale of all homes by 2028 unless they achieve a ‘C’ rating in an Energy Performance Certificate. That potentially exposes millions of homeowners to bills of £20,000 or more for insulation and other energy improvements.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Boris should heed Blair’s advice on the Covid vaccine data

We’ve known from the data from phase three trials that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines have good efficacy against symptomatic cases of Covid-19. The data also hinted at near 100 per cent efficacy against serious illness, although the limited numbers of participants made it hard to be sure.  This morning, however, comes real world data showing the vaccines have all but eliminated hospitalisations. According to figures obtained by the Daily Telegraph, 74,405 people were admitted to hospitals across the UK between September 2020 and March 2021. Of these, just 32 were people who had received a vaccine at least three weeks earlier. The figures don't reveal whether or not there were any deaths.

Monday

Ross Clark

How worried should we be about the Indian variant?

The Prime Minister has cancelled his trip to India, due to happen next week, though travellers coming from the country are yet to be told to quarantine for two weeks. But the fact India is yet to be put on the red list has caused some surprise given the surge in cases of Covid-19 — up from 12,000 a day in early February to 270,000 on Sunday, many of which will be the new Indian variant. The whole reason for the red list was to guard against new variants gaining a foothold here. Is India heading for the red list shortly — possibly even later today — or on what grounds might it escape?