Ross Clark

Let’s face it, the decision today by TfL not to renew Uber’s licence to operate in London has not come about ultimately as a result of genuine concerns over passenger safety. It is a protectionist move to promote the business interests of London’s black cab drivers and to satisfy the unions and other left-wing activists who have latched onto Uber as a cause célèbre in their efforts to stamp out flexible ways of working. I don’t know much of what goes on the back rooms of Labour party HQ but it is fascinating that the decision has come to be made on the same day that it was announced that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, will be speaking at next week’s Labour party conference after all.

Nothing spoke of the fractious atmosphere in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum more than the death of 40-year-old Arek Jozwik in a shopping centre in Harlow, Essex in August 2016. What might, on any other weekend, have been passed over as just another grubby Saturday-night incident on Britain’s drunken high streets became elevated into a symptom of Brexit-induced racial hatred. James O’Brien, an LBC radio talk-show host, declared that certain Eurosceptics had ‘blood on their hands’ as did ‘anybody who has suggested speaking Polish in a public place is in any way undesirable’. This was the premise of almost all reporting on the story: a man seemed to have been murdered for being Polish.

So, the worst has happened, just as Ryanair said it would. The budget airline has had to cancel thousands of flights – around 50 of them, every day, for the next six weeks. It follows an ominous warning that was made by chief executive Michael O' Leary last month: “What is increasingly likely to happen is that there will be no flights. Mrs May and the Brexiteers will be trying to explain that to you in 12 months’ time, why getting a car to Scotland or a ferry to Ireland are the only options on offer.” Except, that is, while last month’s warning concerned Brexit, this week’s cancellations concerned a cock-up of Ryanair’s own making.

It used to be the weather that served as the catch-all excuse for poorly performing businesses – it is too cold or too hot for people to go shopping. How convenient, now we have grown a little tired with that one, that Brexit has come along to serve the same purpose. Speaking on the Today programme this morning, John Lewis chairman Sir Charlie Mayfield was asked to explain a 53 per cent fall in profits for the first half of the year. To be fair to him he didn’t initially mention Brexit at all but when the inevitable question came from Today’s business correspondent he said: 'We should be under no illusions. Brexit is having an effect on the economy, no question. It’s the same for everybody and the main effects are sterling and confidence.

The choice which faced us at the EU referendum has often been presented as lying between the status quo and the unknown, between security and uncertainty. Until the early hours of 24 June last year I was convinced that this would be the clincher: that the British public, though heavily Eurosceptic, would not quite have the balls to overcome their native conservatism and take what many would see as a leap in the dark. Yet Jean-Claude Juncker’s ‘state of the union’ speech today dispels the notion that voting Remain would have been a vote to keep things as they are. Remaining in the EU as it now is was not an option on the ballot paper.

Nothing has the potential to harm Theresa May’s weakened government more than a battle over the rights of Parliament. Just remember the PR disaster for the government that was the government’s High Court battle with Gina Miller over the right for a Parliamentary vote on the exercise of Article 50. Having fought and lost in the courts, the government had no trouble whatsoever in passing the Article 50 legislation. Why expend so much energy in a battle which makes you look authoritarian and yet which you never needed to fight in the first place? Tonight, Labour will be hoping to repeat the exercise with the vote on the second reading of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill.

Louise Richardson, Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, is, according to the university’s website, a political scientist whose research 'specialises in international security with a particular emphasis on terrorist movements'. Next time she tries to defend her £350,000 salary I suggest she corners someone from the economics department for advice. I don’t think, at her current state of understanding, she would get very far in a PhD on relative pay in the fields of business, entertainment and academia. I am sure Ms Richardson works very hard and her work is all terribly worthy but, alas, in a capitalist system that is not, and has never been, how financial rewards are dispensed.

It's been a busy week for Brexit, with David Davis and Michel Barnier going head-to-head in Brussels, and Theresa May and Liam Fox heading to Japan to try and kick-start a trade deal. Here's how the week unfolded: 1. UK-Japan trade deal lined up: In spite of predictions to the contrary, Theresa May won reassurance from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that Britain would benefit from a facsimile version of the trade deal being negotiated between Japan and the EU. This could be the first of a series of ‘cut and paste’ bilateral trade deals which the government wants to establish with countries which already have trade agreements with the EU – to ensure that British exporters will continue to have favourable access to these markets immediately following Brexit.

Yesterday was a golden day for the Despite Brexiteers – those who try to frame every piece of good economic news as if it is somehow a great surprise and shouldn’t really have happened. BMW announced that it is to build the electric version of the Mini in Britain, Amazon announced it was doubling the size of its research team in Britain, while according to the CBI, output from factories is growing at its fastest rate in 20 years. Today, though, comes news which is firmly on the other side of the fence: the ONS’s first estimate for economic growth has come in at 0.3 per cent. This is a little higher than the 0.

Isn’t it weird how Remainers, so keen to present themselves as pro-free trade when discussing the single market, turn into Little Englanders the moment that the subject switches to the prospect of Britain doing free trade deals with countries outside the EU? We are mad to be turning our backs on the world’s biggest market, they will say. But then remind them of the talks towards a bilateral trade deal between Britain and the EU – something which is only possible thanks to Brexit – and they start trying to scare us about the prospect of us being forced to eat chlorinated chicken from the US.

How right Michael Gove was, in his first speech as Environment Secretary, to promise to put an end to a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which 'puts resources in the hands of the already-wealthy'. But how bizarre that he then proposed a reform that will continue to do just that. Doing away with CAP ought to be one of the big gains from Brexit. For the past 44 years, taxpayers have been forced to fund a system which, in turn, has created food mountains, degraded the landscape, put millions in the pockets of wealthy landowners in return for doing virtually nothing and, in conjunction with protectionist tariffs from food imports from outside the EU, driven the price of food higher than it need be.