‘Virgin trains could be gone from the UK in November,’ blogged Sir Richard Branson from his billionaire hideaway after the Department for Transport barred Stagecoach, Virgin’s 49 per cent joint-venture partner, from bidding for new passenger rail franchises. This followed a row over Stagecoach’s reluctance to help fill a £6 billion black hole in the
This is no time for schadenfreude — but take comfort from the fact that the UK isn’t built like Germany. Being a world-leading exporter of manufactured goods — which they are and we’re not — is all very well until orders from China fade, Donald Trump adds you to his list of trade foes, your
Business investment in the UK declined in all four quarters of 2018 to complete a year-on-year dive of 2.4 per cent, according to the ONS. These are the worst capital spending figures since the 2008 crisis, and you’ll guess where the Bank of England places the blame: weaker global growth hasn’t helped but the ‘UK-specific factor’
How big is Brexodus — the flight of business and people from the City of London in parallel with our exit from the EU? I observed recently that squealing from the Square Mile has been minimal compared to sectors that make and move physical goods — suggesting that banks, insurers and investment houses have quietly
It never works to take two unhappy companies and blend them into a bigger pile of misery. That’s the way it looks at the investment giant Standard Life Aberdeen, known to some as ‘Staberdeen’, where Aberdeen Asset Management founder Martin Gilbert seems to have just lost a power struggle with his former co-chief executive Keith
The nation certainly needs optimism this week, so what better moment to start building our ‘UK Optimist Fund’ of shares with exciting prospects for the post-Brexit era, for which I invited suggestions last week? I’m grateful to all respondents but was particularly glad to hear from former minister Edwina Currie — whose stock picks show
Was Help to Buy a timely market intervention with a valid social purpose or a political gimmick that unintentionally showered housebuilders with taxpayers’ cash? Or both: this isn’t a straightforward question. ‘This government supports those who dream of owning their own home,’ said a statement from Philip Hammond last week. So far the ‘equity loan
What’s the very worst line of business you could be in, if we’re heading for a no-deal Brexit? Not finance, for sure: there’s a noticeable absence of squealing from the City, which has evidently made all the contingency plans it needs to continue making numbers dance on screens and booking the proceeds in convenient domiciles.
When I wrote a fortnight ago, in the context of Nissan’s decision not to build its new X-Trail model at Sunderland, that ‘British carmaking as a whole is on course to shrink back to the 1970s’, I was expecting the next bulletin of doom from US-owned Ford, whose bosses — I’d heard from an insider
‘It is seldom wise to sacrifice a present evil for a doubtful advantage in the future,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes as a precocious undergraduate in 1904. As we contemplate what no deal might be about to bring, those words seem to confirm the view of his living followers that the sage who died in 1946
Has ‘Jay’ Powell gone wobbly, or does he know something we don’t? That was the question being asked after the US Federal Reserve, of which Powell is chairman, kept dollar interest rates on hold last week — rather than continuing to notch them upwards as it has been doing for two years — and hinted
Paying tax — which many of us have been doing this week before HMRC’s 31 January deadline — is a citizen’s duty, not an act of virtue. But for the very rich it is also a choice, since with the help of expensive advisers they can duck it or pay very little of it by
Nobody who’s anybody is in Davos this week and, as usual, neither am I. World leaders from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi declined to attend the annual super-elite World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, while the UK was represented chiefly by Sir David Attenborough and a giant Union-Flag banner across the front of the
Transfixed as you were by Westminster chaos, did you also spot the news that Hitachi is about to cancel or suspend construction of the Wylfa nuclear power station in North Wales? The Japanese engineering giant has evidently failed to reach agreement on a guaranteed electricity price and terms for a UK government stake in the
In France after New Year, the only gilets jaunes I spotted were a rather dejected bunch near an autoroute exit. I was ready to give them a cheery thumbs-up rather than risk having my path blocked, but they took no notice of me — and no one I met expressed support for them. The novelty
A friend reminds me that she sold her house last summer because I warned her 18 months ago that Brexit chaos would loom over every aspect of life by the beginning of 2019. I got that horribly right, and I was right too that the dismissive attitude of Westminster politicians towards the Irish border problem
Are smartphones fuelling a pandemic of youthful anxiety and depression? That’s the question parents will wrestle with this Christmas as their offspring clamour for the latest Samsung or Huawei. And the answer seems to be yes: these must-have accessories are corroding the nature of human interaction for the next generation — but the young can’t
There’s been a strong sense of pre-Christmas turkeys coming home to roost in this week’s news, as stories I’ve written about for months or years have reached, if not a denouement, then at least a new twist in the plot. Saddest of these is Crossrail, London’s east-west mass–transit system that was originally scheduled for its
I wrote last week of my fear that we’ll never ‘take back control of our fish’, as Brexiteers ardently wish, because the rights of UK fishermen — whose diminished industry contributes less than half a per cent of GDP — will be too easy to give away in the next negotiating phase. Sure enough, last
The arrest of Carlos Ghosn and the move to oust him as chairman of Nissan in Japan has stunned the auto industry of which he’s a global megastar — serving simultaneously as head of Renault in France, and having bolted together the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance that built more than ten million cars last year. Nissan has
