Ross on Why

I'm going to write on government, economics and what is coming next

I am Ross Clark, a national newspaper journalist, author and broadcaster in Britain for the past 35 years. In several important debates over the years I have anticipated swings in popular opinion. In February 2023 I published, with Forum Press, Not Zero: how an irrational target will impoverish you, help China (and won’t even save the planet), a forensic analysis of what would need to be done to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. At the time, scepticism about Britain’s net zero target, which was set in law in 2019, was all but forbidden on the BBC, in the publishing business and some other media outlets. Many politicians, business people and industrialists knew the damage it would cause, but dared not say. Now, and thanks partly to my work on this subject, dropping the net zero target is the stated policy of two of Britain’s biggest political parties, and this view is now regularly expressed in the worlds of business and industry.

I was one of the first UK journalists, too, to oppose Covid lockdowns and argue that criminalising meeting up with members of your own family was a grotesque abuse of state power which would not ultimately address the pandemic. I was vindicated when Sweden, which did not impose a Covid lockdown, ended up with a lower death rate than did Britain. For two years during the pandemic I worked daily to reveal and analyse the latest research and regulations, picking out the many failures of modelling. I was one of the first to notice that the much milder Omicron variant in December 2021 could turn out to be the beginning of the end of the pandemic — at a time when many UK scientific advisers wanted to send the country back into lockdown for a fourth time.

Further back, I was one of the first journalists to write on the dangers of the burgeoning UK public deficit — back in the days when Gordon Brown was merrily borrowing his way through an economic boom. I was one of the first, too, to pick up on the damage that was being done to society through excessive inflation in house prices — something which was being fuelled by the policies of the Blair, Brown and Cameron governments, which threw subsidies at homebuyers while continuing to constrain supply through the planning system. The main political parties now recognise the problem. In 2011, in the Spectator, I predicted that socialism would be back with a vengeance if the government did not succeed in making it more affordable for young people to buy a home. Left-wing ideas such as rent controls have since made a comeback. The Greens are leading among 16-24 year old voters partly because they have promised to ban ‘landlordism’ (it would be a disastrous policy, but I can understand why young people should feel this way). I opposed HS2 from the beginning on the grounds that it was over-designed for unnecessarily high speeds in a compact country, and therefore over-expensive. Fifteen years later, James Stewart’s government-commissioned review into the failures of the project came to the same conclusion.

The global media has changed enormously in the time I have been writing. When I started, there was no email. The internet was an obscure institution only used, and known about, by academics. I had to dictate my newspaper columns over the telephone — or send my copy via a motorbike dispatch rider.

More than three decades on, the internet has made journalism far more democratic, which is a good thing. To reach an audience it is no longer necessary to go through gatekeepers or be bound by paymasters. We can all now reach an audience directly. As a free marketeer, I have never bleated about competition from new media. Now, I too want to build my audience to augment my work with the established press and address some of the issues which it hasn’t always been easy to venture into in the established media. Believe me, even in our largely free press it is not always easy to say what needs to be said.

I hope you will enjoy this Substack and consider subscribing in order to support it. I will put some posts, and partial posts, up here for free. But subscribers will always enjoy more in-depth analysis.

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