Ross Clark

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 again. Many individuals and families, on the other hand, remain deep in personal austerity. There is very little room for tax rises without making people feel poorer. News that wages are growing at their highest rate – 3.1 per cent – since the economic crash of 2008/09 is, on the face of it, a cause for celebration.

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 quickly. In the short term at least, the alternative to burning UK-produced shale gas is not, as the green lobby says, using more energy from wind and solar farms. We do not currently have anything close to the electricity storage capacity to cope with a supply which comes exclusively from intermittent sources, and is it not clear at present how this will be resolved. For now, the real alternative to shale gas is either coal or imported gas.

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 asserted: 'Unilever’s protestations that [the move] has nothing to do with Brexit do not convince'. It went on to add: 'The decision is clearly coloured by the approach Theresa May has taken on Brexit, and by the way she has handled relations with business.

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 against the EU.     It is true that there was a sharp fall in car sales in September – which at 338,834 were 20.5 per cent lower than the same month in 2017.

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 the current arrangements – whereby gay couples can enter into a civil partnership but not heterosexual ones – are in conflict with the convention. Why on Earth did the Government resist this change in the first place when it was so plainly obvious that it was discriminatory? David Cameron made a huge fuss about enabling gay marriage – presenting it as if it were the greatest breakthrough in individual freedom since the Magna Carta.

Farming out the development of post-Brexit UK migration policy to a professor from the LSE was a political masterstroke by the former Home Secretary Amber Rudd. How much harder it will be for Remainers to condemn the government’s position on migration as some kind of racist, xenophobic exercise knowing that it has been formed in one of the liberal establishment’s favourite seats of learning. Yet there is nothing in Sir Alan Manning’s report which could not have come from the pen of a ‘populist’ politician trying to satisfy public grievance on migration.

We don’t hear much of the phrase 'despite Brexit' any more – it is just a little too obvious. Instead, pro-remain news sources have decided to apportion good economic news on the weather and the World Cup. This morning, the ONS announced that GDP growth in the three months to the end of July had risen to 0.6 per cent, the fastest for a year and doing much to make up for a sluggish first quarter. The Guardian was quick to identify what it saw as the reason, giving the news the headline: 'UK Growth Picks up to 0.6 per cent after World Cup and heatwave boost.' The BBC followed suit, saying: 'UK growth helped by World Cup and warm weather', and the FT: 'The UK’s scorching summer fuelled a recovery in retail and construction.' That is, of course, a consensus.

The government was always onto a loser whether or not it published the 24 technical notices laying out what would happen in the event of a no-deal Brexit. If it didn’t publish them it would be accused of a cover up. If it did and they were terrifying it would provide ammunition for the Remain brigade. And if it published them and they weren’t terribly frightening? Then Remainers would accuse ministers of having their heads in the sand. The latter scenario is pretty much where we are today. There are few stand-out headlines from the 24 documents for anti-Brexit commentators to get their teeth into.

It is another black day for Project Fear. The latest employment figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show yet another fall in unemployment, to 1.36 million or 4 per cent of the adult population. There have never been more people employed in the UK economy, and the unemployment rate is at its lowest since early 1975. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, according to George Osborne’s crystal ball. In May 2016, a month before the referendum, he warned us all that should we vote to leave the EU we could expect unemployment to rise by up to 500,000 within two years. Admittedly, George himself has bagged a few jobs since then, but I don’t think his work ethic is wholly responsible for the rise in employment.