Ross Clark

Angela Rayner must resign as Housing Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, obviously. How could she sit on the front bench through a tax-raising budget without everyone’s eyes gravitating towards her, as the minister who thinks tax rises are for everyone else, not her? But the fate of Rayner obscures the bigger scandal here, which is stamp duty itself. No one should be facing a £70,000 bill for buying a two-bedroom flat – nor, for that matter, a £30,000 one, which is the what the bill would be for someone who is genuinely buying a main home for £800,000. The latter sum is not far short of the annual average salary.

Trying to work out what is going on with global trade doesn’t get any easier. Just as the world was settling down to the new reality of Donald Trump’s trade war and governments were stitching up hurried trade deals to minimise the sweeping damage from the tariffs announced on ‘Liberation Day’ in April, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has thrown a very large spanner into the works. It has ruled that the whole exercise is unlawful because the tariffs were not approved by Congress. They will not be removed immediately – the court has allowed them to remain in place until 14 October to give Trump a chance to appeal to the Supreme Court – which he will almost certainly do. But it does rather look as if the matter of trade tariffs will ultimately be decided by judges.

Gosh, Labour really does hate private landlords. Rachel Reeves’ latest property tax proposal to be dangled before the public is to charge National Insurance contributions (NICs) on income from rental properties. This would set it aside from other forms of investment income, which are liable for income tax but not NICs. It would also represent a growing war against small-time private landlords as opposed to corporate ones. Companies letting properties would not be affected by the change and neither would private landlords with substantial salaries be hit badly – there is a ceiling on the main rate of NICs, with income over £50,000 a year taxed at only 2 per cent above that level.

So, according to the Met Office, Britain is reaching the end of what will 'almost certainly' be the warmest summer on record. The average temperature across Britain up until 25 August was 16.13 Celsius, compared with 15.76 Celsius for the previous record-holder, 2018. There is still a week to go, of course, and it is a week which, on average, you would expect to be one of the coolest weeks of the summer, coming as it does right at the end. But let us assume that the Met Office is right and 2025 really does grab its place in the record books. So what? It has also been a largely benign summer in Britain, with little in the way of extreme heat – the maximum for the summer so far was 35.8 Celsius, 4.5 Celsius below the UK record.

Just how thick are the public sector unions? The RMT’s announcement of a week-long strike on the London Underground in September is little short of a death wish. The unions spent 14 years trying to get rid of a Conservative government and its hated 'austerity'. Within days, an incoming Labour government had awarded public sector workers substantial pay rises with no strings attached: no job losses, no demands to improve productivity, no changes to working practices. On the contrary, they were granted new workers’ rights, the right to demand flexible working hours and all the rest. So what do they do in response?

That’s the trouble of trying to measure everything through the metric of race: sooner or later you will arrive at a situation very different from that which you intended. Namely, that in some cases it is white people who appear to be at some kind of disadvantage. At least Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is not trying to cover up the glaring disparity in GCSE results between ethnic groups. She has admitted that white working-class children are underperforming and suggests that the state has ‘failed them’. But she doesn’t really go on to ask herself how or why.   What is it about being white, for example, that makes pupils underperform in Maths and English? Last year, 63.7 per cent of white pupils achieved a grade 4 pass or above in both subjects, compared with 65.

Environmentalists always feared that Brexit would lead to a weakening of environmental protections, but who would have guessed that it would be a Labour government which would take a bulldozer to legislation acquired through the EU Habitats Directive? Rachel Reeves is reported to be contemplating a second planning bill which would make it far harder for conservationists to hold up infrastructure projects. Reeves has already paved the way – if that is not an unfortunate expression in this context – by saying last month that she cared more about young families getting on the housing ladder than 'protecting some snails'. The ability to use judicial reviews to block projects will be curtailed and the list of creatures offered protection will be shrunk.

Climate change is giving Britain more violent weather, with ever-increasing storms tearing down our trees and whipping up waves which erode our coastlines. No one ever seems to get into trouble for saying the above – as many did yet again during Storm Floris last week – in spite of it being the inverse of the truth. Actually, Britain has been experiencing a downwards trend in average and extreme wind speeds for the past four decades.

Who are all these people who keep being photographed on Bournemouth beach and elsewhere, frolicking in the midday sun? None of them, obviously, work for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) or the TUC. None of them can possibly be members of the Unite union, nor Unison, nor the GMB. It is little wonder that UK productivity is on the floor – and falling in the public sector How can I be so sure? Because if they were, they would be surely sheltering indoors, in the shade, with the fan on and their feet immersed in a bucket of cold water. All these organisations have been lobbying the government for a maximum working temperature.