Ross Clark

I am all for taking ethical stands, but if you are going to do so it does help to show a little bit of consistency. Today, Argentina cancelled its World Cup warm-up game against Israel in protest, it seems, at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. According to striker Gonzalo Higuain, the players ‘have done the right thing’ in refusing to play – and have been warmly applauded by the Palestinian Football Association. So, the Argentinians will miss out their proposed stop in Israel and proceed directly to the World Cup in, er, Russia.

I am all for taking ethical stands, but if you are going to do so it does help to show a little bit of consistency.    Today, Argentina cancelled its World Cup warm-up game against Israel in protest, it seems, at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.   According to striker Gonzalo Higuain, the players ‘have done the right thing’ in refusing to play – and have been warmly applauded by the Palestinian Football Association. So, the Argentinians will miss out their proposed stop in Israel and proceed directly to the World Cup in, er, Russia.

David Lammy is upset again, as he is every week. This time it is thanks to data released by Ucas, which reveals that while black applicants make up nine per cent of the total, they account for 52 per cent of those whose applications have been flagged up for possible cheating – either because they may have falsified qualifications, used fake identities, sent false documents or because an algorithm has picked out their personal statement. According to Lammy, it is not good enough Ucas simply publishing this data – he says that the organisation 'needs to be able to explain this huge disproportionality and satisfy students from ethnic minorities that their applications will be looked upon fairly'.

So the year-long squeeze on real earnings is now officially over. Figures released by the ONS this morning show that average earnings in the first three months of this year were 2.9 per cent ahead of what they were in the same period of 2018, while CPI inflation was 2.7 per cent ahead. In other words, we are all, on average, 0.2 per cent better-off than we were last year. That is no great deal, it has to be said, and continues the poor run of growth in real incomes ever since the global economic crisis of a decade ago. It is unprecedented in the industrial era to have had such a long peacetime period in which the population does not really grow any richer.

The first instinct of many people towards Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights who finished her 11 day visit to Britain yesterday by claiming that Britain is in the grip of a Brexit-related upsurge in racial intolerance and discrimination, will be to tell her to keep her nose out of our affairs. I am not going to fall into the trap of offering material which could be used to try to prove her point.

The Resolution Foundation has called for 25-year-olds to be paid £10,000 to help them afford homes, saying the ‘generational contract’ between young and old has broken down. But is it really harder for young people to buy a home now than it was 30 years ago? House prices were booming in the first half of 1988, when a typical first-time buyer home could cost £50,000. That same property now, according to the Halifax UK House Price Index, would cost £234,850. Since 1988, the Retail Prices Index has increased 2.7 times, according to the ONS, so, in real terms, £50,000 in 1988 is now worth £135,000 – making it harder to afford a deposit.

A couple of years ago, Simon Barnes wrote a moving piece in this magazine about how his son Eddie, who has Down’s syndrome, had changed his mind about political correctness. Political correctness might be met with derision, he wrote, but it was also what made his son’s life bearable. In the not-so-distant past, Eddie would have been shut away and people like him made fun of in everyday conversation; now he is received everywhere with kindness and consideration. Simon was right. I am in the same position as him: I have a daughter, Eliza, who has grown up in a world of kindness that is a world away from that in which I grew up. I hate to think of the bullying and abuse she would have to endure if she were transported back in time to the 1970s classrooms I knew.

Should governments abolish their welfare states and replace them with a Universal Basic Income (UBI), paid to everyone, even billionaires, regardless of means? Such payments would be designed to cover essential living costs, leaving individuals free to make the choice of whether they wished to work in order to gain themselves a better lifestyle. It is an idea which until yesterday seemed to be in the ascendant. Bernie Sanders has advocated it. John McDonnell has launched a study to determine whether it should become Labour policy. It hasn’t just attracted the Left – Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have declared themselves in favour, seeing a UBI as a means of softening the mass job losses they expect as a result of technological advance.

A black youth living in London might be forgiven for a bit of confusion this morning. All week we have been hearing about the dreadful spate in knife killings on London streets, most of them, it is painfully obvious from the victims’ photographs and the locations, have taken place in black communities. We have heard calls for more stop and search, a clampdown on anyone caught carrying a knife, for youths to be educated in how to channel their anger in order to prevent their emotions erupting into murderous intent. Then an elderly white man stabs an intruder to death and we wake up to headlines such as “give him a medal” and “‘Murder’ fury – petition launched to clear ‘hero’ OAP arrested over ‘burglar murder’”.