#ross clark

Boris Johnson "hasn’t quite got it in him to over-rule scientists bearing prophecies of doom. From Neil Ferguson’s 500,000 deaths, to Patrick Vallance’s dodgy 4,000 deaths-a-day graph to Chris Whitty’s new variant that is 70 per cent more transmissible than the old variant, when he finds himself in a roomful of boffins determined to change his mind, change it he eventually will. Moreover, to judge by past experience he will have agreed to Tier 4 without asking the tough questions about the 70 per cent claim that he should have asked.

There are two wings to the Net Zero movement. The first argues that the only route to salvation is for us all to reduce our living standards, to abandon consumerism, or even to do away with capitalism for good. This is the wing represented, at the extreme end, by Extinction Rebellion. The second argues that technology will save us, without us having to make great sacrifices; indeed, it often asserts that, far from costing us, the Net Zero target will end up enriching us by unleashing a rush of wealth-creating innovation that otherwise would not have taken place. The market, somehow, will provide. This is, broadly, the position of Britain's Conservative government.

The tragedy is that for a few days Johnson had a good, middle-way policy. Having made the rules, he wasn’t going to change them at the last moment, and risk inspiring civil disobedience in the process. Instead, he wanted to appeal to our own judgment – it was up to us to decide whether we wanted to take the risk of a family gathering or to leave it until the spring, when Granny, at least, would have been vaccinated. Instead, we’ve had three new sets of rules unleashed on us in just six days, upsetting the plans of millions. It is no way to treat a country. Never mind the virus, there are too many variants of Boris Johnson for any of us to keep up.

Whole tranches of the state have been privatised over the past 40 years, and yet still we have a state broadcasting service that is funded via a hypothecated tax – a system that dates from the days when the technology did not exist to charge for watching an individual TV channel and devised at a time when broadcasting was, in any case, a state monopoly. It ought to be pretty obvious that such an arrangement is bad for competition. It is as if we were all forced to pay an annual fee to Tesco, in return for which we could help ourselves to all the groceries we liked at no further cost, and we still had to pay Tesco even if we wanted to do our shopping at Sainsbury’s or Asda. What would that do for the market in food? It would quite clearly kill all competition, as well as damage the quality of the food on sale at Tesco