Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better
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Bitcoin, we’re told endlessly, is both the currency of choice for tax-dodging criminals and a vehicle to instant wealth for incautious dreamers (who in reality are destined to lose their money). But that’s not how many of the entrepreneurs who have latched onto it see things. There’s a kind of utopian ideology emerging from crypto-currencies.
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The conundrum of economic growth continues. The withdrawal process from the EU is, even by the admission of the most ardent Brexiteers, going pretty badly. We have a rearguard Remain lobby trying to talk down the economy at every opportunity – something which you might think ought to be undermining confidence. And yet still there
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Just when you thought identity politics couldn’t get any more confusing, along comes along Emile Ratelband. Mr Ratelband, who is described in the Guardian as a ‘motivational speaker’ and ‘positivity guru’, has appeared in a court in Arnhem in the Netherlands trying to persuade the judge to allow him to change his official birth date
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The rearguard Remain lobby, which has far from given up on its ambition to reverse the Brexit vote, has put much store in the alleged electoral malpractice of Aaron Banks and his Leave.EU campaign, as well as the actions of the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica. Along the way it has found the Electoral Commission and the
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The world’s poor are, as we know, suffering under the yoke of capitalism, getting ever poorer as we rich grab an ever-greater share of the world’s resources and pollute the environment for everyone else. We know this because the Left keeps telling us so. But amidst the unrelenting gloom of an ever-more unequal world, one
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Labour, as we know, is a party which has fallen into the hands of a dreamy left-wing idealist who is out of touch with the public, and who has managed to push out the party’s down-to-Earth moderates – people who, like Tony Blair, understand that if Labour wants to win power it must appeal to
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Now it is London museums bleating about Brexit. A memo from the V&A released under Freedom of Information laws, warns darkly: ‘we will struggle to keep the museum open to the public in the immediate short term’. A no deal Brexit, it is claimed, could affect visitor numbers from the EU, diminish donations and also
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As Nick Clegg, George HW Bush and many other politicians have proved to their cost, manifesto promises matter. How damaging, then, will Philip Hammond’s brazen abandonment of the 2017 Conservative pledge be, whereby financial discipline was supposed to ‘guide us to a balanced budget by the middle of next decade’? Now, Hammond seems to be
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Remainers’ first response to the news that James Dyson will build his new electric car in Singapore was to accuse him of hypocrisy. Here is a man who expects others to be patriotic, goes the argument, and yet when it comes to his own interests he dumps Britain and takes his business elsewhere. But those
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If Britain crashes out of the EU with no deal and the Conservatives plunge to a defeat against Labour in a subsequent general election, Theresa May, not without reason, will take the blame. But the blame will not be all hers. William Hague will deserve a fair slice of it as well. It has become
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In two weeks’ time, Philip Hammond is expected to declare an ‘end to austerity’. Today’s figures on wage growth are a reminder of why he needs to tread extremely carefully on this. What he will mean is that austerity is over for the public finances – he is confident enough to start increasing government spending
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Now that fracking has resumed in Lancashire after a seven year hiatus, the green lobby which sought to frustrate it and delay it at every turn can reflect on what they have achieved: keeping the UK’s carbon emissions rather higher than they would have been, had our native fracking industry been allowed to develop more
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From 30 March next year, of course, we will no longer be subject to all those silly EU laws on bent bananas (which was genuine, not a myth), toasters, balloons and all the rest. Instead we will be able to concentrate on passing our own good old British silly laws. Even the European Commission never
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I imagine that Daniel and Amy McArthur, owners of Ashers bakery in Northern Ireland, may well want to celebrate their victory in the Supreme Court with a spot of baking today. If so, I suggest this slogan should be written in icing: the equality industry stinks. It has taken Ashers four years and a sequence
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Phew! The dangers of global warming are receding. Admittedly that is not how most news sources are reporting the publication of the latest IPCC report this morning. But it is the logical conclusion of reading coverage of the issue over the past decade. According to today’s IPCC report we now have 12 years to avert
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How funny. Remember how, when Unilever announced back in March that it had decided to move its headquarters from London to Rotterdam, it was all to do with Brexit? According to the Guardian’s subheadline on 14 March: ‘Brexit and favourable business conditions in Netherlands said to be behind decision’. The following day an FT leader
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Congratulations once again to the BBC’s anti-Brexit propaganda unit, for its news website headline this morning: “Car sales plunge as Nissan warns on Brexit”. It takes talent to pin something on Brexit which even the Guardian admits is caused by something quite different – indeed, something which might more naturally be seen as constituting a case
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According to a Vienna-based think tank, the World Data Lab, a remarkable milestone was reached this week – for the first time, half the world’s population can be classified as middle class. Obviously, there is wide room for interpretation as to what constitutes membership of the middle classes – the World Data Lab defines it
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Much as I deplore the integration of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law there are some battles which really aren’t worth fighting. Today, Theresa May announced that civil partnerships are to be made available to heterosexual couples for the first time. This follows a ruling by the Supreme Court in June that
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The news that the US, Canada and Mexico have agreed a new trade deal, USMCA, may have caused a little surprise this morning among Trump critics. Isn’t the US President supposed to be leading the world into a new dark age of protectionism, sparking a 1930s-style depression as he puts the interests of a few
