Ross Clark

Ross Clark

Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His book, Britain is Bust: The Coming Sovereign Debt Crisis and what it Will Mean for You, is out now

Thursday

Ross Clark

Britain is closing its trade gap with the EU

So it was just a blip after all. Remember those huge headlines last month revealing that exports to the EU had plunged by 41 per cent in January, leading frustrated remainers to bleat: we told you so? 'Brexit – the unfolding disaster' tweeted Lord Adonis for one, along with a graph showing the sharp fall in January. Now we have the figures for February, which has been reported rather less loudly, but which show just as strong a rebound. Exports in goods to the EU in February, records Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, were 56 per cent up on those in January. They are still down 11.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

James Dyson isn’t a Brexit hypocrite

He backed Brexit for a wheeze – and then, when he realised that it was actually going to happen and the implications for his business sank in, he fled to Singapore. That, very simply, is the Remainer case against Sir James Dyson. But how does it stand up against reality now that Brexit has happened? In an interview with the BBC, Dyson revealed a little more about his decision, in 2019, to relocate his HQ in Singapore, and why he backed Brexit. Dyson has burned his fingers, but not in the ways which Remainers asserted No, Sir James has not left Britain. His company still employs around 4,000 people here, and moreover, its Wiltshire operation is expanding. Moving the HQ to Singapore, he says, was not a relocation but an expansion into growing markets.

Monday

Ross Clark

The impact of lockdown on education

Just how damaging has lockdown been to children’s education? An Oxford University study has tried to quantify it by analysing data from Dutch schoolchildren — who, unlike in Britain where exams were cancelled, took tests shortly before and shortly after the first lockdown last spring. The level of parental education was a big predictor of falling performance If any country’s children had managed to get through lockdown with their education unscathed, suggest the authors, it ought to be those in the Netherlands. There, schools were closed for a relatively short period — eight weeks — and the penetration of broadband in homes is higher than in any other country.

Friday

Ross Clark

Show us the money

From our US edition

No one likes to waste a good crisis, and the digital-payments industry is certainly trying its hardest to spin the narrative that COVID-19 is about to deliver the coup de grâce to cash. Various lobbying efforts culminated in a recent CNBC report claiming we have all switched to payment apps to avoid catching the disease from dollar bills. A ‘cashless customer’, Heima Sritharan, supposedly speaks for the entire millennial generation: ‘Not that I was using cash that much before, but I find that during Covid especially, I just don’t want to use cash as much because of the germs aspect.’ The report quotes a figure from the Pew Research Center suggesting that 34 percent of consumers under the age of 50 went the previous week without making a single purchase with cash.

money cash cashless

Thursday

Ross Clark

Did Covid cases plateau in March?

Should we be concerned about the latest React study, which claims that the fall-off in new infections began to plateau from the middle of March? The latest instalment of the monthly study, led by Imperial College, tested a randomised sample of 140,000 volunteers between 11 and 30 March, each of whom was given a PCR test. While the results showed that incidence of infections had fallen by 60 per cent compared with tests conducted between 4 and 23 February, the researchers say that their data shows a flattening-off from mid March. That is interesting because data from the Public health England test and trace system shows a similar pattern: steep falls in new infections during February, followed by a flattening-off in March.

Ross Clark

The future of the Euro is uncertain

A decade ago, Europe clambered out of the 2008/09 financial crisis only to fall into the sovereign debt crisis of 2010. As the global economy rebounded, Greece, Italy and Spain all had to be bailed out by the ECB as investors lost faith in their ability to carry on servicing their loans. Deep economic cuts imposed in Greece as a condition of the bailout threatened political stability. Could it be about to happen again? Will Europe climb out of the very deep economic hole created by the Covid pandemic only to slide into a hole of sovereign debt? For the moment, that seems a distant question because the Covid hole is still getting deeper. A third wave of the disease has forced France, Germany and others into lockdowns which they had hoped to avoid.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Is the writing on the wall for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

It was the great British scientific triumph: an example of how big pharma can work altruistically for the good of the world, by making a vaccine available at cost price. But is the writing now on the wall for the AstraZeneca vaccine? This afternoon the European Medicines Agency (EMA) ruled that blood clots can be a 'very rare side effect' of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. It has encouraged health professionals to communicate that 'people receiving the vaccine to remain aware of the possibility of very rare cases of blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets occurring within two weeks of vaccination.' There may be an age factor as well: 'So far' it reports, 'most of the cases reported have occurred in women under 60 years of age within two weeks of vaccination.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Stop the global tax!

From our US edition

Multilateralism was supposed to be the great theme of the Biden presidency. No longer would the US plow its lonely furrow. Instead it would engage with the rest of the world on matters of mutual interest. Where, though, does that fit with the attempt by treasury secretary Janet Yellen today to try to set a minimum level of corporate income tax for the whole world to whole world to observe? The US is no longer withdrawing from international agreements, as it did in Trump’s day — it is doing something far more objectionable, by trying to lay down American rules for the rest of the world to follow.

global tax
Ross Clark

Are we at risk of another Covid wave?

Could we really see another peak in Covid-19 hospitalisations as bad as January once society reopens in June? That was the story widely reported this morning, based on the latest modelling from SPI-M, the government’s advisory committee on modelling for scientific emergencies. The study caught attention not least because back in January very few people had received a vaccine: now, 56 per cent of the adult population has been vaccinated. By July, on current forecasts, every adult in Britain will have been offered at least a first vaccine dose. How, if vaccines actually work — and there is a lot of evidence to suggest they do — could we end up in as bad a situation as we did before we had population-wide vaccination?

Monday

Ross Clark

Go with the flow: how helpful is mass testing?

Over half the adult population has been vaccinated, new infections and deaths have plummeted to their lowest level since last September — and the government chooses this point to launch a programme to test every adult for Covid twice a week. The Prime Minister is due to announce this afternoon that lateral flow testing kits will be distributed by the million, free of charge to anyone who wants them. We will all be encouraged to test ourselves — and be placed under an obligation to self-isolate if they are positive. Why? We have spent the past three months on a massive vaccination programme, using vaccines that have proved pretty well 100 per cent effective at preventing deaths and serious illness.

Friday

Ross Clark

Do critics of the race report have any actual arguments?

I guess the authors of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities didn’t agree to the job for a quiet life. Even so, the sheer bitterness of the volley directed at them by the grievance industry must have taken them aback. The reaction from the left has been straight out of the Marxist playbook: don’t bother to engage with your opponents’ arguments, just try to delegitimise them by attacking those opponents’ credentials and questioning their right to speak at all. We’ve learned from Twitter and the pages of the Guardian that the panel of ten commissioners – who have all achieved success in their varied fields – are all stooges of the government.

Thursday

Ross Clark

The growing debate over vaccinating children

Should we vaccinate children against Covid-19? The question is going to be increasingly asked following positive results from a US trial of the Pfizer vaccine in 12 to 15-year-olds. The trial found the vaccine to have a 100 per cent efficacy in preventing symptomatic illness — higher than on older age groups. It was, however, based on a relatively small number of participants. The trial included 2,260 children, half of whom were given the vaccine and half of whom were given a placebo. Among the control group, 18 went on to develop Covid, compared with none in the group given the vaccine. The company announced yesterday that the vaccine had been ‘well tolerated’ among the group.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

What should we make of the WHO Covid report?

Should we believe the conclusions of the World Health Organization (WHO) report into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which, as expected, dismissed the possibility of a laboratory accident while giving credence to the theory that the virus was imported via frozen foods? The first thing to note is that the report does not even claim to be independent — it is billed as a 'joint WHO-China study'. It deserves to be read as such: as the product of an undemocratic government that has every incentive to deflect any responsibility for a pandemic that has, to date, been blamed for 2.7 million deaths globally.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why is vaccinated Chile locking down again?

Get ahead with vaccination and you can open up your country sooner. It seems logical, but it is not quite how things are working in Britain, where in spite of this week’s relaxation our lockdown restrictions remain among the toughest in the world. This applies even less in Chile. On 29 March, 6.53 million of the country’s 19 million population had received a first dose of vaccine (either Pfizer or the Chinese Sinovac) and 3.37 million had received a second dose. In combined doses per million people, Chile is a little ahead of Britain. Yet large parts of the country have been placed back into a lockdown even more severe than Britain’s over the past three months.

Ross Clark

Are cryptocurrency transactions the future?

To most of us, cryptocurrencies remain an esoteric world, beloved by nerds and incomprehensible to the rest of us. Does Visa’s announcement this week that it will now process payments directly in a cryptocurrency called USDCoin change that, and hasten us to a day when we will all have cryptocurrency accounts which we use to do our day-to-day shopping? You don’t need to understand the mathematics of cryptocurrencies and blockchain to work out that the prospect of shopping with crypto is rather concerning for two reasons. Firstly, cryptocurrencies are an unregulated Wild West.

Thursday

Ross Clark

The practical problems with vaccine passports

The story of Covid has been one of government repeatedly ruling things out – and then coming back several weeks later and introducing them nonetheless. It happened with lockdown, compulsory wearing of masks, and now it looks as if it might be happening with vaccine passports. Remember vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi telling us of vaccine passports in February: ‘That’s not how we do things in Britain. We do them by consent.’ This week the Prime Minister seems to have changed the government’s tune, by suggesting that we might, after all, have to show some kind of proof of vaccination before being allowed into pubs or other such premises.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Is AstraZeneca’s Covid jab effective against the South African variant?

The AstraZeneca vaccine has been under attack ever since the results of its phase three trials were announced in December. When the results of US trials were released this week showing 79 per cent efficacy against symptomatic disease and 100 per cent protection from serious cases of Covid 19 – and failing to show up any serious side-effects – it seemed to help bolster its reputation.  Yet some of that was undone by subsequent accusations by the US Data and Safety Monitoring Board that AstraZeneca may have included out of date data in its trial results. The company has been asked to come back and present new calculations, using data gathered from its study up until March, rather than data up until February.

Ross Clark

Will British stocks bounce back after Covid?

'Unloved' is an adjective often applied to British shares in recent years. A more appropriate description might be 'abandoned, with half a dozen kids and the rent unpaid'. Since referendum day in June 2016 the FTSE100 index has grown by 10 per cent. Over the same period the Hang Seng is up 42 per cent, the DAX up 44 per cent, the Dow Jones up 88 per cent and the Nasdaq up 184 per cent. The FTSE100’s longstanding underperformance goes back far further, though, than that. It is still lower than it was on the last day of the last century – although there has been substantial growth in the midcap stocks which make up the FTSE250. Yet some seem to think that the ship has finally come in for UK shares.

Monday

Ross Clark

Is Boris right about a third wave?

Covid deaths fell to 17 on Sunday, the lowest daily figure since 28 September and no higher than the levels being recorded throughout much of last summer. Deaths are down over 40 per cent on the week, hospitalisations down 21 per cent. Yet the better the news on vaccinations and serious illness, the longer the road seems to be out of lockdown. The latest potential roadblock seems to be the threat of a third wave in Europe. The Prime Minister said this lunchtime: 'On the Continent right now, you can see, sadly, there is a third wave under way. And people in this country should be under no illusions that... when a wave hits our friends in Europe it washes up on our shores as well. I expect we will feel those effects in due course.

Ross Clark

Oxford vaccine gets a boost from US study

The hesitancy of many European countries to use the AstraZeneca vaccine (between bouts of complaining the company hasn’t delivered enough doses) has been widely reported. Less discussed is the delay in US authorities approving the vaccine for use there. But with the reporting of results from a US trial, that should now be a formality. The trial, run by Rochester and Columbia universities, involved 32,449 volunteers in the US, Peru and Chile. Two thirds were given the actual vaccine and the rest a saline placebo. In all, 141 people developed a symptomatic Covid illness. Those who were given the vaccine, however, were found to have their risk of developing symptomatic infection cut by 79 per cent. Their risk of developing serious illness was reduced by 100 per cent.