Ross Clark

Did anyone seriously think that Donald Trump was going to emerge this morning as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize? First, there were the mechanics. Nominations for the prize closed on 31 January, at which point Trump was only 11 days into his second term and there was hardly a glint of hope in Gaza. The prize committee will have met for the last time around a week ago, when there was still doubt as to whether Hamas would accept this deal. Of necessity the committee will have had to make its decision a few days before the announcement because certain formalities will have had to be undertaken, such as checking whether the recipient actually wants the prize. For those reasons, next year was always going to be a more appropriate time for Trump to win the prize.

According to Theresa May, Kemi Badenoch’s promise to repeal the Climate Change Act is a ‘catastrophic mistake’. Writing for The Spectator today, Ed Shackle, who works for a market research firm called Public First, was adamant that the policy change won’t just degrade the planet or obliterate Lady May’s thin political legacy – it is a bad electoral error, too. Quoting one of his polls, he claims that 37 per cent of Conservative voters say they wouldn’t vote for a party which is not committed to reaching net zero. He also claimed: “The British public consistently backs energy infrastructure – even when it’s close to their homes.’ Not round my way, in Cambridgeshire.

Last week, Keir Starner swallowed Tony Blair’s argument for ID cards and announced that all we going to be forced to have them if we want a job, just as the former prime minister has been advocating for years. This week, however, the current PM has poured scorn on one of his predecessor’s cherished policies, and ditched Blair’s target for getting 50 per cent of young adults into higher education. Instead, Starmer yet again invoked his tool-making dad to argue that the target was wrong. It is to be replaced, he said, with a target of getting 75 per cent of young people into either university or on to a high quality apprenticeship.

Donald Trump has punished European pharmaceutical companies by imposing 100 percent tariffs on their branded products unless they are prepared to set up a manufacturing plants in the US. That is one way of putting it, but why is the issue of tariffs so often seen from the point of view of the producers and so rarely seen from the position of the consumers? Besides punishing drugs companies, the President has also whacked the American public – or at least that section of the population which relies on patented medicines made outside the US. The cost of treatment for many of these patients will soar as a result. Does Trump think that people will somehow fail to realize this?

Is Tony Blair pulling the strings of Keir Starmer’s government from beyond the political grave? Only two days ago the Tony Blair Institute released a report calling for digital ID cards. Now Starmer is expected to announce that the UK public will indeed have digital IDs forced upon them. The juxtaposition of these two things cannot have been an accident unless you believe firstly that Blair had no prior knowledge of what Starmer was going to announce, and secondly that Starmer decided to go ahead regardless of Blair’s intervention, knowing full well what it would look like. Has Starmer really thought through the practical consequences of digital ID cards?

'The British public is running out of patience with a state that does not work, where interactions with public services are beset by inconveniences and delays even as outcomes slip and costs rise.' The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is not wrong there, but what is its solution? Not to sack the state’s clock-watchers who only want to work four days a week and only from home, or the beach. Not to break up underperforming state monopolies and introduce some more business-minded discipline into public services. No, as is so often the case with the former prime minister’s think tank, the solution lies in Digital ID. Give us a digital ID app on our phones and we will be able to report things like potholes and get them swiftly repaired.

How refreshing to hear transport secretary Heidi Alexander approve plans for a second working runway at Gatwick Airport, taking on the ‘eco warriors’ she has previously attacked for blocking airport expansion. Just the one thing, though. Does she really think she has heard the last from them? If she thinks she is going to drive this plan through so that planes will be taking off on the second runway by the time of the next election, as she seems to think, then she is going to be disappointed. Indeed, Sadiq Khan has already threatened legal action against the expansion. This is going to end up in the courts, and sadly the eco warriors are going to win. Why? Because no airport expansion is compatible with the legally binding target to achieve net zero by 2050.

Policymakers must, of course, stick to the evidence and base their decisions around proper, peer-reviewed research. Until, that is, the evidence starts to tell you what you don’t want to hear. The Mayor of London’s office appears to have been caught red-handed in refusing to publish a study it had itself commissioned into the behaviour of residents following the imposition of low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs). The study, by the University of Westminster, found that the presence of an LTN resulted in more people cycling, but it did not decrease car use and had no discernible effect on walking. It reached this conclusion by quizzing more than 4,500 London residents, some of whom lived in LTNs and some who did not. Shouldn’t we be allowed to know this?

The government promised to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of this parliament. How close are they to reaching the annualised rate? We don’t yet have government statistics to cover the whole of Labour’s first year in office, yet in the year to March construction began on just 138,650 new homes across the UK. In other words, housebuilding is running at substantially less than half the rate needed for the government to meet its promise. In fact, construction is slowing compared with where it was under the Conservatives. A report by the House Builders’ Federation (HBF) on construction in London explains some of the reasons why. In London, the supply of new homes is running even further behind the government’s schedule than in other parts of the country.

It is not often that the NHS gets accused of being too good at negotiating down costs. But that seems to be gist of the case levelled against it regarding the cost of drugs. AstraZeneca has paused the expansion of a research facility in Cambridge and US pharmaceutical firm Merck has cancelled a plan to invest £1 billion in a research centre in London. In both cases the blame has been cast on the tight-fistedness of the NHS in not paying enough for drugs. If you don’t pay, goes the argument, then you won’t get investment in new drugs.     We have to accept that we are never going to get new drugs on the cheap That is fair enough – up to a point.