Ross Clark

The BBC has a penchant for staging debates on the decriminalisation of drugs. I should know because I am often drafted in as the right-wing loon to provide a bit of balance to the enlightened drugs expert putting the more fashionable view. These debates always go the same way. I argue that if a substance is dangerous enough to be banned then you need to punish the users as well as the suppliers because it is they who are creating the market. Without these consumers, the drug-pushers would have nothing to sell. The enlightened expert is then invited to say how damaging it is to drug-users to be given a criminal record which will hurt their chances in life and prevent them from seeking help. But there is one subject on which the BBC seems rather less keen on decriminalisation.

Brexit voters are, of course, mostly fools who don’t know what is good for them – in contrast to all those Remain voters with their degrees and analytical skills. But none are so dim-witted as those in Sunderland who, like turkeys voting for Christmas, chose a course of action which will inevitably lead to them losing their jobs at the city’s Nissan plant. Or maybe not. It turns out that Sunderland’s Nissan workers might not be quite so stupid after all. It's been revealed that the company is looking at a scenario in which it would close its EU plants and transfer production to Sunderland instead, raising its UK output from 350,000 to 400,000 vehicles a year.

What a joy it is to travel on trains in Germany, where services are fast, efficient and always seem to arrive on time. Why can’t we have Deutsche Bahn running our own trains, rather than those imbeciles at Northern Rail, whose slovenly late-running services using rattling old rolling stock from the 1980s were so bad that its services are to be nationalised from 1 March? Oh, but hang a minute. Deutsche Bahn already is running those trains. Northern Rail’s parent company, Arriva, is a subsidiary of the German state railway company. In which case the question becomes: why can a company that seems to manage to run rail services in Germany make such a hash of running rail services in and around Leeds and Manchester?

How nice to hear Sir Mike Penning, chairman of something called the all-party parliamentary group for Roadside Rescue and Recovery, condemn ‘smart’ motorways as the death traps they are. The motorways use a variety of 'smart' methods to vary traffic flow, including part-time hard shoulders managed from a central control room and enforced using electronic motorway signs. Some smart motorways have no hard shoulder at all. This relatively new innovation was described by Penning’s group as a 'public policy failure' that has been introduced with a 'shocking degree of carelessness'.

If there is one thing that could yet save HS2 it is the 'letting down the North' argument. Didn’t Boris make a speech in the early hours of 13 December promising the party’s new-found voters in the north that he would never take their votes for granted and never forget them? How, then, would he escape the onslaught that would be launched against him if he decided to dump a high-speed rail line to the north? We’ve had endless open letters from council leaders, business people and so on in recent months begging the government to go ahead with the scheme.

Hands up if you have ever heard of Brian Moles? No? Then what about Anne Sacoolas? Yep, I bet that is registering a bit more. Sacoolas, as pretty well the whole country now knows, was spirited out of the country by US authorities after allegedly causing the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn by driving on the wrong side of the road near an airbase in Northamptonshire last August. Yesterday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he was rejecting a British demand for the extradition of Mrs Sacoolas, arguing that she had diplomatic immunity. And Mr Moles? Last year, Moles pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving at Southampton Crown Court after killing a motorcyclist while making an illegal turn.

It was pretty inevitable that once rain finally started to fall in South Eastern Australia, extinguishing some of the bushfires which have been raging for weeks, the wet weather, too, would be blamed on climate change. 'Climate apocalypse starts in Australia,' a human rights lawyer tweeted in response to golf ball sized hailstones falling in Canberra. 'You'd be hard-pressed to look at what is going on in Australia right now and not connect it to climate change.' said the website News & Guts, tweeting similar pictures of hailstones falling on the Australian capital. For the Weather Channel it was a case of 'record rains' – citing by way of example the 60mm of rain which fell in an hour in Newcastle, New South Wales. https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1219180999097057281?

It wasn’t so long ago that Sir David Attenborough came across as a calm voice of reason. His much-admired documentaries touched on environmental issues but were not driven by them; they were not morality plays. But something seems to have got into Sir David. He has become a Greta of the third age. The rot set in last April when he narrated a programme on climate change which used the same, tired old trick Al Gore has used: running a commentary on climate change against pictures of hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and floods, as if to plant in the viewer the idea that all these events were caused by, and therefore wouldn’t have happened without, climate change.