Ross Clark

I am a bit confused: are scientists supposed to be the folk heroes of environmental activists or not? When the subject is climate change they certainly fulfil this role: the likes of Naomi Klein are forever pushing the conceit that some vast global capitalist conspiracy is engaged in the denial of scientific reason. But when the subject is the herbicide glyphosate? The great majority of scientists whose work has found it safe are dismissed as nothing more than dupes of agribusiness firm Monsanto. Last week, Monsanto lost a court case against a school groundsman from California who claims his non-Hodgkins lymphona was caused by glyphosate in the Roundup herbicide he used as part of his job.

Maybe I should really give it a few more hours, but I can’t help noticing the lack of headlines this morning along the lines “UK economy growing faster than Eurozone”. Goodness knows we had enough headlines drawing attention to the opposite, when that was the case. There was the Guardian’s “Eurozone Grows Twice as Fast as UK after GDP Rises by 0.6 percent” from 1 August last year, the Independent’s “UK economic growth dwarfed again by Eurozone in third quarter” from 31 October last year, and the BBC’s “Eurozone Growing Faster than UK” from 2 May this year. But now that the economic boot is suddenly on the other foot – and none of these news outlets seem to want to draw attention to that fact.

There is a big glaring problem for anyone trying to accuse the government of ‘austerity’ – a charge that is continuously laid by virtually all opposition parties. Just where does that charge fit in with HS2? True, the nation’s roads are full of potholes, the bins in some places are being emptied only once every three weeks and the NHS is trying to wriggle out of offering hernia operations – something it seemed to manage perfectly well to perform in 1948. But still it is a little hard to square the charge of austerity with a government planning to spend £56 billion of public money on a single railway line, to be built at a cost, per mile, of more than four times what the French paid for their high speed line from Paris to Strasbourg.

When interest rates were lowered to an ‘emergency’ level of 0.5 per cent in 2009, the market consensus was that rates would probably rise again by the following February. I am sure that absolutely no-one would have predicted we would have to wait until 2nd August 2018. Not even Mark Carney, then still governor of the Bank of Canada. How many times has he given us ‘guidance’ on when interest rates would rise – only for it to be no guide at all? Exactly five years ago, for example, he said that rates would rise once the unemployment rate, then 7.8 per cent, fell below 7 per cent. It is now 4.2 per cent, lower than at any time in the past 45 years.

I know the Guardian is desperate to stop Brexit and will dredge up anything to try to back its case – daily running fanciful predictions of economic Armageddon made by think-tanks as if they were fact, even though those same think tanks have been hopelessly wrong in the past. But honestly, there comes a point when even the newspaper’s editors must be beginning to realise that their demented doom-mongering is making them look ridiculous.     This week the Office of National Statistics (ONS) put out figures showing yet another decline in the number of days lost to sickness by British workers. It is now down to an average of 4.1 days per annum compared with 7.2 days in 1993.

There is one form of female under-representation which no-one seems concerned about – the fact that a mere 4.5 per cent of the prison population is made up of women. No one says we must rebalance that so as to make it 50-50 by 2025, or whatever. It just seems to be accepted that men are more prone to greed, lust and violence, and that greater numbers of them deserve to be behind bars. I guess that is right. If we have 20 times more male offenders than female ones, then I want the prison population to reflect that. But why the need to readjust the criminal justice system in order to try to exaggerate the gender imbalance in our jails even further?

I can think of many people who deserve to be in jail but perhaps not Stanislaw Skupien. The homeless Pole was watching the London Marathon in April when he suddenly fancied a go himself. He clambered over a barrier and started running. When 300 yards form the finish, he picked up a race number which had fallen from a competitor’s short and decided to cross the line himself, picking up the finisher’s medal which should really have gone to a man who was on a charity run. I guess that is technically fraud, but does it really deserve 16 weeks in jail? It is hardly as if being the 3000th finisher – or whatever – in the London marathon is going to land you with a lucrative sponsorship deal.

Was there ever a more fatuous contribution to a political debate than Lord Hague following up the case of 12-year-old Billy Caldwell — the boy whose mother says he needs cannabis oil to control his epilepsy — with a demand for recreational cannabis to be legalised? But the former foreign secretary has done us a favour of sorts. He has inadvertently explained why Billy Caldwell has become such a cause célèbre over the past few days: the drug-legalisation lobby has cottoned on to his huge propaganda potential. The reason why cannabis oil is not licensed for use as a treatment for epilepsy in Britain has nothing to do with the prohibition of cannabis as a recreational drug.