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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One of the mysteries of the Covid-19 crisis is how the disease seemed to bubble up out of nowhere in Italy at the end of February – at a time when it seemed to be under control in China. In spite of local quarantines and the isolation of individual patients, the epidemic quickly took hold.
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How helpful of the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen to reveal that there are two or three people in America who are happy to join in a sing-along containing the line ‘Liberals, what we gonna do? Inject them with the Wuhan flu.’ Trouble is, it really only was two or three people. If Baron Cohen really
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Imagine if a European agency had just announced that it was to close a site in the Midlands, withdrawing from Britain and taking jobs of scientists with it. It isn’t hard to work out where that would feature on BBC news – up top. It would be presented as another cost of Brexit, another result
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The Covidiots are at it again – crowding onto beaches in flagrant breach of lockdown rules, treating the pandemic as if it were an extended bank holiday. Pictures of crowded beaches on Thursday inspired Chris Whitty to tweet that Covid-19 is ‘still in general circulation’, and worked Matt Hancock into such a froth that he
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Will Britain turn into Zimbabwe or Japan? In other words, will the fallout from the economic crisis precipitated by Covid 19 lead to hyper-inflation or to deflation? Are we going back to the 1970s – or to a strange world of which no living Briton has any recollection? Or, more graphically, will it be savers
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As is often said, choose your statistics carefully and you can use them make just about any point you want to. But rarely does the Office for National Statistics put out two releases on the same day whose statistics point in totally opposite directions. If you listened to the BBC midday news, you may have
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Infections up 15 per cent in a fortnight, with 37,000 recorded in a day. For those who are inclined to see it that way, the graph of US Covid-19 cases is confirmation of the folly of reopening society far too soon, and ‘throwing away’ all that hard work during lockdown, as Matt Hancock likes to
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With the Covid alert level being reduced from 4 to 3 it is surely only a matter of days before the government announces that it is relaxing the two metre rule – a move for which the hospitality industry has been lobbying for heavily, warning that pubs and restaurants will not be able to reopen
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Cynics might wonder whether the timing of Matt Hancock’s announcement this morning that the Covid alert level is to be reduced from four to three is an attempt to deflect the government’s embarrassment from the failed test and trace app. The cynics may well be right with the timing (although the decision is ultimately in
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Police were no match for the Black Lives Matter mob that pulled down a statue of Edward Colston last week and threw it in Bristol harbour. But the Scouts are evidently a force to be reckoned with. No sooner had Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council announced that it was planning to take down a statue
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It would not have been obvious to those drafting the Conservative manifesto last autumn that they were planting a very large bomb beneath the government. After all, the triple lock had already featured in three general election campaigns and had yet to cause the public finances a problem. But the very special circumstances of the
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Anders Tegnell is either a hero or villain, depending on whether you think Sweden’s approach to Covid-19 has saved the economy and respected individual freedom or whether you think it has needlessly cost lives. But is the country’s refusal to impose a lockdown a result of his wisdom and judgement – or was the Swedish
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Just how a big a deal is today’s announcement that the steroid anti-inflammatory drug Dexamethasone has been shown to be effective at lowering the death toll of Covid-19 patients? At first sight, this is a modest breakthrough. The drug was shown to reduce the death rate among patients on ventilators by a third and among
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Beijing’s renewed outbreak of Covid-19 could not possibly, of course, have originated within China. It had to be implanted on the population via imported salmon. But thank God the manager of the city’s Xinfadi food market has been dismissed, so it won’t happen again. That, at least, is the Chinese version of events. For weeks,
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The suspension of schooling has already led to fears of a lasting impact on children’s education, especially among poorer children. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, the Education Endowment Foundation has estimated that a six-month closure of schools could lead to an attainment gap of 36 per cent between children from the
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Is anyone really surprised that GDP fell by 20.4 percent in April? Perhaps we should be. It doesn’t sound high enough to me. We have just been through a great economic experiment in which most shops have been forced to close, all pubs and restaurants been forced to shut their doors and the public ordered
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What would happen if the government suddenly announced that from next week it was ending all lockdown measures and that life could go back to normal? Would we end up with the dreaded second spike as people were suddenly released to go and celebrate in pubs and clubs, jamming public spaces, spreading the virus as
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I don’t know how much of a organisational structure there is to Black Lives Matter in Britain but if I were part of it I’m sure I would be furious at the crowd who felled the stature of Edward Colston and deposited it in Bristol harbour. They have set off a tsunami of civil virtue-signalling
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Resigning in disgrace has come to take on a very different meaning than it did in the days when John Profumo withdrew from public life and dedicated himself to Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in east London. Now, it seems to mean a few weeks in the sinbin before you are allowed to creep back
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At midnight last night Britain passed a milestone: it was two months since a coal plant anywhere in the country fed any electricity into the national grid. You have to go back to the 1880s for the last time this occurred – to 1882, to be precise, when a single coal-fired power station was opened