Ross Clark

Can anyone really be surprised that among the worst districts for social mobility identified by Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility Commission are some of the wealthiest areas in Britain? Ranked out of 324 districts in England West Berkshire comes in at 265, Cotswold at 268, Herefordshire 271, Chichester 287 and West Somerset bottom at 324. Surely it can’t really come as that much of a shock given how governments of both colours have thrown educational resources at ‘deprived’ areas. It might look good politically to sprinkle extra resources on places which the public associates with deprivation, but it rather overlooks the fact that while some areas of the country have high overall wealth there are plenty of low-income families who inhabit them.

What could be more terrifying than a return to the 15 per cent interest rates with which homebuyers had to contend in the early 1990s? Possibly the vision presented last week in UBS’s Global Economic Outlook: interest rates at minus 5 per cent. It would take us to an unknown world where savers who deposited £100 in a bank would return a year later to find only £95 left. This month’s small rise in interest rates has rekindled fears that the era of ultra-low rates could be at an end and that millions of borrowers, enticed into loans thinking rates of virtual zero are normal, could be left with debts they could not repay. But there is an alternative scenario. UBS notes that during the last crisis the Bank of England slashed rates from a peak of 5.

So where are the nasties? Philip Hammond’s Budget speech can be summed up as follows:  £2.8 billion for the NHS, £44 billion of capital funding and loan guarantees for housing, £400 million for a new charging infrastructure for electric cars, £2.3 billion investment in research and development, £1.5 billion worth of changes to Universal Credit, an extra £2 billion for Scotland – all to be paid for, apparently, with higher taxes on super-strength cider, fags, a few of the smokiest diesel cars and the end of indexation for allowances on corporate capital gains tax.

Wasn’t the whole point of electric vehicles supposed to be to civilise our cities, making them safer and less-polluted places to live? I just wonder what the mung bean-eaters who act as cheerleaders for the industry are making of the latest performance by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla. Launching his latest vehicle, a £150,000 ($200,000) roadster which apparently does 0-60 mph in 1.9 seconds, he was asked what the point of the vehicle was. He replied: “to deliver a hardcore smackdown to gasoline cars”.   A hardcore smackdown, eh? I am not sure that is quite what environment secretary Michael Gove had in mind in July when he announced that, as of 2040, no new conventional petrol or diesel cars would be sold in Britain.

Vegetables are rotting in the fields for want of Eastern European pickers, patients are being left untreated thanks to a haemorrhaging of EU nurses, our universities are in peril as European academics flee from a xenophobic Britain which no longer wants them. That, at least, is the picture that is continually presented to us by the rearguard Remain lobby, which wants us to think that the EU nationals who make our economy go round have had enough and, as the Guardian says of nurses and midwives, are ‘leaving in droves’. There is one problem with this analysis: it is directly contradicted by the facts. Figures released by the Office of National Statistics yesterday show that in the third quarter of this year there were 2.

It took all of five minutes for news of the Bank of England’s first rise in base rate for over a decade to be blamed on Brexit. The Guardian’s live blog, for example, suggested that the rise was 'to prevent the cost of goods bought in the UK from spiralling further', following the fall in sterling. Well no, actually. The explanatory notes from the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) explain that it voted 7-2 to raise rates because the slack in the UK economy has fallen. With unemployment at a 40 year low, it fears that inflation could run ahead of itself unless dampened by an interest rate rise. The inflationary effects of low sterling, it adds, are falling away, but 'net trade is bolstered by the strong global expansion and the past depreciation of sterling.

When will the climate change lobby finally realise that it is undermining its own arguments through hyperbole? Yesterday, the Lancet published its latest climate change ‘indicators’, accompanied by a comment piece in the Guardian by Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and now chair of the Lancet Countdown advisory board.  The piece, headed 'Climate change isn’t just hurting the planet – it’s a public health emergency' makes the assertion that climate change is affecting 'the health of you, your family, your neighbours – each and every one of us.

There is a weird psychology behind economic forecasts. We know they are going to be wrong, because they always are. Yet such is our appetite for information – any information – that nevertheless we can’t stop ourselves taking them seriously. The Sunday Times this morning has gone big on a report by serial doomsayers the EY Item Club claiming that the government needs to move quickly to obtain a transitional deal on Brexit or face a collapse in business investment. Even with a deal it predicts that the growth in business investment next year will fall to 1.5 per cent, from 2.1 per cent this year. Maybe. But then again, maybe not. There is absolutely no evidence from previous EY Item Club forecasts to suggest that this is better than a figure plucked out of the sky.

As an object lesson in how the process of regulation is hijacked by rich and powerful interests, today’s introduction of a £10 Toxic – or ‘T’ – Charge on cars over 11 years old entering Central London during peak hours could hardly be bettered. Almost everyone is in favour of clean air, but the effect of this charge will be to tax the poor and excuse the wealthy while adding to the revenues of car manufacturers who have shown contempt for emissions laws. The charge is to be levied only on cars which fail to meet the Euro 4 regulations on car emissions – which effectively means any car manufactured before 2006, when the regulations were introduced. If newer cars really did emit fewer emissions the concept would be reasonable enough.