Ross Clark

Older readers might remember the night in April 1992 when, unexpectedly, a tyranny of the majority returned John Major’s Conservative government to power. That same night a local bunch of tyrants in Huntingdon sent Major back to Westminster with a majority of over 30,000, while a tyrannical mob up in Nottingham did the same for Ken Clarke – who was to become Home Secretary and later Chancellor. Funny enough, though, I don’t recall either John Major or Ken Clarke using the word ‘tyranny’ at the time – or anything approaching it. On the contrary, I vaguely remember them making remarks as to the effect that the good old British people had made a sensible decision in rejecting windbag Kinnock.

You would think there was enough financial scandal in the world to keep MPs exercised without denouncing the owners of private boxes at the Royal Albert Hall. But no. Sharon Hodgson, member for Washington and Sunderland West, has just shown once again that what really gets a Labour MP seething with indignation is not wrongdoing or injustice – it is the whiff of class. Sharon is upset that the Royal Albert Hall’s 330 members – who individually own 1276 privately-owned seats -- are exercising their right to sell tickets for those seats through third party websites. A ticket for the Last Night of the Proms in September has, shock, horror, been spotted for sale at £1,500. According to Sharon ‘privilege is being abused for greed’.

A hard Brexit, currency markets seemed to indicate yesterday, would mean an even weaker pound. How, then, to explain this afternoon’s surge in sterling, which surged from just over $1.20 to just under $1.24 within a couple of hours of Theresa May’s speech? The rise more than reversed the falls since Monday morning, when the contents of the Prime Minister’s speech first became apparent. In other words, the market for sterling seemed to fear hard Brexit, but when it got hard Brexit it turned jubilant.

At last October’s Conservative party conference, Amber Rudd revealed a rather silly proposal that companies operating in the UK should be obliged to publish data on the number of foreign workers they employ. It was rightly condemned and Rudd later said that the information would not be published, only used by the government to identify areas of skills shortages among British workers. But a ‘hate incident’? That is exactly how, it transpires, the police recorded it. When you read the inevitable headline in a few months’ time that ‘hate incidents have soared’, you may just want to reflect that one of them was a speech by the Home Secretary.

So, yet another business in trouble thanks to this foul recession caused by Brexit. Or that’s what chief executive of Jamie’s Italian, Simon Blagden, wants us to think, anyway. Announcing the closure of six restaurants he said: 'As every restaurant owner knows, this is a tough market and, post-Brexit, the pressures and unknowns have made it even harder' Well, not as every restaurant-owner knows, no. According to the ONS’ figures, published at the end of November, its economic index for hotels and restaurants was up 1.1 per cent in the third quarter – following the vote for Brexit. The latest Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), published yesterday, shows accelerating growth in services –the index climbing to 56.2 in November.

The rearguard Remain campaign is now living in a parallel universe. In the past 24 hours we have heard endless whining about Sir Ivan Rogers’ departure and how it will mean disaster for our trading relationship with the EU. We’ve had more claims that inflation is going to surge. The poor Christmas results put out by Next have been taken as a sign of a post-Brexit economic slump when they are really just part of a change in the patterns of retailing, with online sales growing at the expense of those in shops. Meanwhile, come yet more genuine good news on the economy. Yesterday, the Markit/CIPS Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for the manufacturing sector was published, showing a rise to 56.1 in December, from 53.6 in November.

How much more desperate can the Remain lobby’s propaganda become?    Having had its predictions of instant economic doom comprehensively disproved by events, it is dreaming up ever more devious ways of trying the hector the country into thinking that it made a huge mistake on 24 June. Today, the Institute of Public Policy Research, a think tank closely associated with the Blair-era Labour party, publishes a report trying to predict what life in Britain will be like in the 2020s. It was eagerly lapped up by the BBC and the Guardian, who seem to favour this sort of stuff over reporting genuine, good, economic news. Needless to say, neither picked up on the IPPR’s rather obvious economic illiteracy.

Just what is it about the proposal to require voters to show ID that so frightens the Labour party? Funny, but this was the party which, during 13 years in power, hugely added to the surveillance state; which passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, leading to councils snooping on our wheelie bins and, in one famous case, to Poole Council spying on a couple wrongly suspected of faking their address in order to get their child into a better school. It is the party which empowered agencies of the state to retain information on our emails and phone calls, which was happy to see our streets plastered with CCTV cameras. And yet here it is objecting to what seems an obvious precaution against electoral fraud: asking voters to show some form of identification at the polling station.

While a storm has blown up between Nigel Farage and Brendan Cox this morning over the role played by Angela Merkel’s migrant policy in the Berlin Christmas market attack, the Today programme managed to find a man with a possible alternative explanation for the carnage: Brexit. Yes, really. This morning’s show ended with a man, introduced as a political scientist who has advised the French and German governments on counter-terrorism, offering the wisdom: 'Brexit isn’t helpful…I mean so-called Islamic State were celebrating Brexit…we need to grow stronger, we need to find responses which are not only security-based , we need a common foreign policy.

So, the Remoaners have at last got a piece of economic news they can try to crow about – the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose last month from 0.9 per cent to 1.2 per cent, sparking a round of ‘I told you so’s’ on Twitter – one even describes it as a ‘cost of living crisis’. One suspects he wasn’t around in 1975 – incidentally the year that Britain voted to stay in what was then the Common Market – when inflation topped out 26 per cent. Except the CPI figures don’t really tell you what the Remain lobby wants to tell us at all. Remember how a few weeks ago the Marmite crisis was interpreted as a grim warning of what was to come as the sinking pound inflated food prices? Actually, food prices fell last month.

The existence of the Laffer Curve can be proved by thought-experiment alone. If a government levies an income tax rate of 0 per cent it will raise zero revenue. If it levies a rate of 100 per cent it will also raise zero revenue, as no-one will bother to earn any money – or at least declare any earnings. Somewhere between those extremes lies an optimum point at which the tax-take reaches a maximum value. Trouble is, no-one really knows where the peak of the Laffer Curve lies for income tax, or for any other tax for that matter. George Osborne asserted that – at least for income tax in Britain – it lies some way below 50 per cent.

Richmond Park has been in the news a bit lately. It is portrayed as a bastion of wealth and privilege, whose residents stand accused of trying to lord it over ordinary voters. But never mind blocking Brexit, do the people who live there deserve the right to an uninterrupted view of St Paul's? Outrage has greeted the construction of a 42-storey tower in Stratford, East London, which is accused of compromising the view of Wren’s great cathedral from a mound in Richmond Park. Planning permission for Manhattan Loft Gardens, which will incorporate 250 flats as well as a 145-bed hotel, was granted back in 2011. Yet no-one seemed to notice at the time that the block would stand directly behind St Paul’s when viewed from Richmond Park. The cathedral says it was not consulted.

'The people of Richmond Park and North Kingston have sent a shockwave through this Conservative Brexit government,' said Sarah Olney, the victorious Liberal Democrat candidate in the Richmond Park by-election. She went on to announce that she would interpret the result as a personal mandate to vote against the triggering of article 50 if it comes down to a Commons vote. The LibDems were perfectly entitled to try to turn the Richmond Park by-election into a protest against Brexit – in spite of Zac Goldsmith’s protests that it was all about Heathrow’s third runway. If you resign your seat and cause a by-election, opposition parties are entitled to fight on whatever issues they like.