Ross Clark

Hopes for economic recovery have faded a little of late as Covid-19 cases continue to rack up in many parts of the world. The grand reopening of bars, restaurants and the like has turned into a bit of damp squib, serving to remind everyone how far we remain from normality. Yet today comes a double bill of good news – verging, indeed, on the dramatic. The Office for National Statistics put out its figures for retail sales in June, which turned out to be 13.9 per cent up on those in May. This is way in excess of what economists were expecting – a survey for Reuters showed a consensus of around 8 per cent – and takes retail sales pretty much back to where they were before the crisis struck. Year on year, sales for June were down just 1.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could debate climate change for five minutes without hearing about polar bears or being subjected to footage of them perched precariously on a melting ice floe? But that is a little too much to expect. Polar bears have become the pin-ups of climate change, the poor creatures who are supposed to jolt us out of thinking about abstract concepts and make us weep that our own selfishness is condemning these magnificent animals to a painful and hungry end. Needless to say, the Guardian and BBC jumped on the opportunity for more polar bear coverage when a paper appeared in the journal Nature Climate Change, predicting that a high carbon emissions scenario ‘will jeopardise the persistence of all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations by 2100.

How excited should we be about the latest news of the Oxford vaccine? At least this time – in contrast to previous updates, which have tended to come via Downing Street briefings – we have a paper in a scientific journal, the Lancet, to go by. The paper reports that 1,077 people took part in the trial and that 90 per cent developed antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus after a single dose of the vaccine. All developed antibodies after a second dose. The trial also tested for adverse side-effects – which were widespread, but all of which were described as ‘mild’ or ‘moderate’. Some patients were given paracetamol along with the vaccine, but of those who were not, 70 per cent reported a sense of fatigue and 68 per cent reported a headache.

It is steadily becoming clear where the woke brigade will go once the current moral panic over racism has run its course (which can’t be long, following the news that London estate agents have stopped using the term ‘master bedroom’ to avoid its connotations with slavery). A week ago Andrew Willshire wrote here of how the activist group Hope Not Hate has now decided that climate change ‘denialism’ is now a hate crime. Now comes another sign that climate change is becoming the next woke battleground. Earlier this week, an environmental campaigner, Michael Shellenberger wrote a mea culpa on the website of Forbes.com.

Without going into the ins and outs of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s withdrawal from royal life, still less the merits of the Duchess’s privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, a claim made by her lawyers this morning cannot be allowed to pass without comment. They claim: ‘This contribution of public funds towards crowd security was far outweighed by the tourism revenue of over £1 billion that was generated from the royal wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex which went directly into the public purse.’ Should we really be thankful to the Duke of Duchess of Sussex for stuffing the UK’s coffers as a result of tourists flocking here for the pair’s wedding or being inspired to come here after watching the event on TV?

Imagine if a vaccine for Covid-19 was approved tomorrow, and that within weeks we had all been vaccinated. Would life be able to go quickly back more or less to normal? Don’t bet on it. The long shadow of Covid-19 will mean mass panic every time another novel virus comes to light. Indeed, news of such a virus comes today in a paper by a team from China’s Agricultural University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They say they have identified a flu virus with pandemic potential, which is circulating in the pig population and has already infected significant numbers of humans who work with pigs. Crucially, however, it has not yet demonstrated any ability to be passed from human to human.

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 threatened to close the beaches. But are we really suffering a mass outbreak of irresponsibility or just the tyranny of the telephoto lens? Take a quick look at these two photos – and then take a more careful look.

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 heard that overall deaths in England and Wales, while they have fallen, are still running at 5.9 per cent above the average for the time of year. This was based on an ONS release entitled Deaths Registered Weekly in England and Wales. However, poke your nose in another release put out an hour or so earlier, entitled Deaths Involving Covid-19, and you would have come to exactly the opposite conclusion: that overall deaths in England and Wales are running at 5.

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 of Lord Robert Baden-Powell on the harbour front at Poole than the Scouts had mobilised themselves to defend it, setting up camp at its base. The council decided to board it up instead, to protect it from protestors. The ‘Topple the racists’ website had identified Baden-Powell among its targets, claiming that the creator of the Scout movement had ‘committed atrocities against the Zulus in his military career and was a Nazi sympathiser’.