Ross Clark

It is quite a challenge to boil down the Labour manifesto to its 10 silliest ideas, but here are my nominations: 1. 'Within a decade we will reduce average full-time weekly working hours to 32 across the economy, with no loss of pay, funded by productivity' – as well as introducing four new bank holidays on national saints’ days and establishing a Working Time Commission to advise on raising holiday entitlements. How we are going to find the time to build Corbyn’s new Jerusalem I haven’t a clue, but it is greatly going to add to the cost of the NHS and other public services 2. 'Introducing a legal right to collective consultation on the implementation of new technology in workplaces.

I have already decided how I am going to vote in the general election: for whichever party produces a manifesto with the fewest uses of the phrase ‘green jobs’. Was there ever such a numb-skulled phrase? It has become the fallback for any politician who hasn’t the faintest idea of how we are going to meet these self-imposed targets to eliminate all carbon emissions by 2050, 2030, 2025, next Tuesday or whatever. Are you worried that we might end up with no heavy industry, that you won’t be able to fly or drive anywhere, that the gas grid will be turned off and your house left freezing? Never mind, we’re going to have lots of ‘green jobs’ – which sounds like what Martians do when they crouch down for a crap in some dusty crater.

John McDonnell this morning invited Phones4U entrepreneur John Caudwell around for a cup of tea. If I were Caudwell I would treat it a bit like an invitation to afternoon tea in Miss Marple’s village – and keep a keen nose out for the smell of bitter almonds. No good will come of the invitation, that is for sure. Day by day, it is becoming clear McDonnell really is engaged in what he has described in his Who’s Who entry as ‘fermenting the overthrow of capitalism’. Today’s offering is to impose a maximum 20:1 ratio of the highest-earning employee to the lowest-earning in any company which bids for government contracts – and to threaten to delist any company which fails to reach decarbonisation targets.

'Elect me once more and we will finish off socialism for good,' declared Mrs Thatcher before the 1987 general election, or words to that effect. Not so fast. Thirty two years on and we are engaged in an unseemly contest as to which party can increase public spending, and with it the size of the state, the most. The latest wheeze on Corbyn's part is to promise us all free broadband. Yes, you, I, the Duke of Westminster, Barclays Bank: we will all qualify for internet on the house. It won't really be free of course. Labour's compulsory purchase of BT Openreach will cost up to £25 billion, on top of which will come the cost of maintaining the broadband service. The income from subscriptions, such as my £46 a month, will no longer be available.

When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise their status so that they could start paying taxes and contributing to the country in other ways? When this magazine reprised the issue last week, the usual objections were recycled: why reward criminality? But the actual cases are more complicated. Trevor Rene is one such case. He was born in Dominica in 1969 when it was still a British colony, so as a child he had a British passport.

I’m sending someone down to the supermarket later to do a bit of shopping on my behalf. I have given them a rough idea of what I want but my main instruction is that they must spend the entire £150 that I am giving them.       If that was really how I did my shopping it isn’t hard to imagine the result. I would end up with bagfuls of stuff I didn’t really want and didn’t need. Some of the food might be good value but an awful lot of it wouldn’t be. Whoever did my shopping would simply pile up the trolley as quickly as they could, until they had spent my £150. It sounds stupid, so why, then, are the main parties promising to do a very similar exercise with the NHS?

One wonders what Tom Watson would have left in his vocabulary if the Conservatives announced a policy of kicking away the crutches of the elderly – given, that is, that this morning he described the ‘Tory’ policy of abolishing free TV licences for the over 75s as ‘utterly callous’. Ending universal free licences for the over 75s is not, of course, a Conservative policy – it was a decision made by the BBC itself in order to preserve the earnings of Gary Lineker, although to be fair to Watson the government did hand the BBC the power to make that decision.

For once, Jeremy Corbyn is right. The government’s announcement of a moratorium in fracking is an election stunt – and attempt to snatch a few leave-voting seats in the North at the expense of damaging Britain’s energy policy for the next couple of decades, as well as causing higher carbon emissions.  Announcing the block on fracking on Radio Four on Saturday morning, business secretary Andrea Leadsom said the government had reached its decision because the Oil and Gas Authority had concluded that it was impossible to predict when ‘earthquakes’ might be caused and what magnitude they might be. This followed a tremor measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale in August.

Yet again, listeners to the Today programme awoke this morning to hear a dire forecast for the economic consequences of leaving the EU – with no critical analysis nor even explanation of how the forecast was arrived at. This morning’s horror story came courtesy of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), a think tank which claims the economy will be 3.5 per cent – or £70bn – smaller in 10 years’ time than if we had never voted to leave the EU. The NIESR claims the economy is already 2.5 per cent smaller than it would have been had we voted to remain in 2016 and that this loss will last ‘in perpetuity’. Well, there it is.

We are, of course, on the cusp of an exodus of UK businesses as they leave to set up home in other EU countries. We know this because Remainers keep telling us so. Banking jobs are going to disappear to Frankfurt, manufacturing jobs to France or the Czech Republic. Or maybe not. It is not quite how the World Bank sees it. Its latest survey of the world’s best countries in which to do business – which takes into account such things as tax and regulatory barriers as well as access to energy and other services – ranks Britain as eighth out of 190 countries, one place higher than last year and higher than any other EU country except Denmark. Most EU countries do not score highly. Germany is at 22, France 32, Belgium 46 and Italy 58.

In an astonishing interview on the Today programme this morning, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson tried to explain why she was tabling an amendment which would force a referendum on any deal the government presents to the House of Commons on the grounds that we should 'let the people decide'. She then asserted that the country had changed its mind since the 2016 referendum and now wanted to remain. It had to be pointed out to her that her party has, in fact, just adopted a policy of reversing Article 50 without a referendum – so much for letting the people decide. The truth is that like so many Remain campaigners, Swinson will banter on about letting the people have a say when it suits her while knowing it would be fatal to her cause to have another referendum at the moment.