Ross Clark

It is really worth bothering with Mark Carney’s upgrading of the Bank of England’s growth forecast for 2018 from 1.5 per cent to 1.7 per cent? Carney, you might just remember, warned before the EU referendum that the UK would most likely suffer a technical recession if Britain voted to leave. Even in August of that year, six weeks after the vote, when it was already clear that the economy was not diving into the abyss, he was predicting a sharp slowdown. Growth in 2017, he suggested, would come out at 0.8 per cent. In the event it was 1.8 per cent. We have seen enough forecasts over the past couple of years to realise that Michael Gove was absolutely right when he said during the Leave campaign that the country has had enough of economic experts who try to foretell the future.

Anniversaries are very interesting, of course, but all the same I think a news programme ought to revolve around, well, the day’s news. That is something which increasingly seems to be missing from the Today Programme, once the BBC’s flagship news programme. Overnight, as I have read elsewhere, stock markets have plummeted around the world. Michel Barnier has made further statements on a future Brexit trade deal, again appearing to try to block the comprehensive trade deal which the government, and I suspect most business interests across the EU, want. But these were matters only sketched-over in a bizarre edition of the Today programme which devoted virtually every single item to the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

Ever since Labour published its manifesto for the snap election it became clear to me that tackling Jeremy Corbyn is going to require a bit more than simply calling him a bearded Trot. This is because some of his prominent policies, while notionally quite left wing, are actually rather popular with many natural Conservative voters. Renationalising the railways and utilities, ending the automatic contracting-out of public services – you will find plenty of support from people on the right who, while generally sceptical of state intervention, feel that the current arrangements are not a free, open market which offers consumers a genuine choice.

So was it Corbyn’s appeal to younger voters what swung last year’s general election in his favour?  Not according to the British Election Study  (BES) which today publishes a paper questioning the received wisdom that Labour’s unexpectedly strong showing was down to a surge of support from younger voters who managed to cast off their apathy for the first time.     Indeed, claims the team, the Oxford English Dictionary may have been a bit premature in declaring ‘Youthquake’ as its word of the year.

Theresa May has a very big failure to her name, but strangely few people seem to want to pick her up on it. The latest crime figures show a sharp increase in recorded offences in England and Wales, especially in knife crime, which rose 21 per cent to 37,443 incidents. This continues a trend which began four years ago, since when the number of recorded knife offences has risen by half. It reverses an equally sharp fall in recorded knife crime between 2010, when Theresa May became Home Secretary, and 2014. What happened to bring about the end of what looks like a very successful period of tackling knife crime?

Has an albatross ever wielded so much influence? The bewildered chick who regurgitated a plastic bag in front of Sir David Attenborough’s camera crew — fed to him by his mother after she had scooped it from the sea — has caused one of those regular ructions in public opinion. The supermarket chain Iceland has announced it would phase out all plastic packaging from its own-brand foods. The compulsory 5p charge on supermarket plastic bags is to be extended to all shops in England and a 25p ‘latte levy’ may be put on coffee cups containing plastic. Plastic ‘microbeads’ have been banned from cosmetic products. Such initiatives are largely a reflection of a sudden and violent public concern over plastic.

Were I a politician observing Henry Bolton’s embarrassment with glee I think I might just stop short of demanding his resignation as leader of Ukip. What point, anyway, in trying to destabilise a party which has destabilised itself to the point at which nearly every credible challenger for the leadership seems already to have left – along with quite a few incredible ones? Why not just sit back and enjoy the sight of an old fool falling in love with young glamour puss and falling flat on his face? Any public figure who goes further might find that it comes back to haunt them. As Lara Prendergast wrote in this week's Spectator, the age of social media has become a trap for anyone with any kind of past online life.

Was there ever a more pathetic piece of political posturing than the attempt by New York mayor Bill de Blasio to sue five oil companies, including BP and Shell, for the cost of building £14.8bn ($20bn) worth of sea defences to protect vulnerable parts of the city? To add to his virtue-signalling, de Blasio has also announced that the city’s pension funds will seek to divest from the shares of oil companies. One should never under-estimate the ability of the courts, whether in the US or elsewhere, to come up with perverse judgements but it ought to be pretty improbable that New York could win the case.

The Spectator, in association with Tate & Lyle Sugars, brought together MPs, representatives from Tate & Lyle, the Fairtrade Foundation and the Australian High Commissioner to discuss the future of the UK sugar sector following Brexit. This is a report of the discussion which followed. The sugar industry is an interesting case study for the opportunities as well as the challenges which could result from Britain’s departure from the EU. At present, 50 to 60 per cent of the sugar consumed in Britain comes from sugar beet grown and processed in this country. The industry has been subsidised since before Britain joined the EU and subsidy has continued under EU membership (not directly but via farm subsidies).