Business

Thursday

James Forsyth

What Rishi Sunak could learn from the vaccine rollout

Barely a year has passed since Rishi Sunak’s first Budget. Its centrepiece was a £30 billion stimulus designed to calm nerves about Covid-19 even though barely 500 cases had been diagnosed in the country. The Commons chamber was packed, with not a mask in sight. Few that day would have thought that in a year’s time the country would be in its third national lockdown and the economy would have suffered its worst slump since the Great Frost of 1709. The pandemic has made a mockery of nearly every optimistic prediction. The government is now moving with extreme caution. Even though vaccines have a greater effect with every passing day,

Monday

Kate Andrews

The roadmap paints a grim picture for business

As the Prime Minister announced the details of his government’s ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown in the Commons on Monday, no doubt some will have been cheering on the announcements, which will allow them to keep their pre-planned parties or holidays scheduled in their diaries. But the timeline has painted a grim picture for business in the months to come. According to the timetable, we are nearly two months away from outdoor dining being made legal again, and three months away from a return to indoor dining. While non-essential retail and personal care premises (including hair and nail salons) are billed to open on 12 April, social distancing measures look set to

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The City is losing its battle with Brussels and Amsterdam

No sign of progress towards a workable deal with the EU for financial services, on which news is due next month. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned in unusually frank terms this week that although the UK has granted ‘equivalence’ to the EU in some financial activities, ‘the EU has not so far done likewise to the UK’ and seems unwilling to do so by reference to a ‘common framework of global standards’. Instead, Brussels is seeking to apply to the UK ‘a standard that the EU holds no other country to’, amounting to ‘rule-taking pure and simple’. Given the importance of financial services to the UK economy, that’s

Friday

Nick Tyrone

Has Starmer’s Labour found the Tories’ weak spot?

A leaked email from Keir Starmer’s director of policy that hit the headlines this week contained an interesting line: that Labour must become ‘unashamedly pro-business’ in order to ‘be the party of working people and their communities’. This has caused predictable outrage on the left of the party. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Tories have been quick to mock the whole idea. At this week’s PMQs, Boris reminded Starmer that at the last election Labour wanted to dismantle capitalism – now it wants to be the party of business? Really? But the Tories need to be careful about how hard they laugh at this one. While

Thursday

Gerard Lyons

No, Amsterdam hasn’t overtaken the City

London is Europe’s major financial centre and one of the world’s two leading financial hubs. This is unlikely to change following Brexit. Its main competition is with New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and other centres like Shanghai that will emerge in the coming years. However, the headline of today’s main story in the Financial Times proclaimed, ‘Amsterdam ousts London as Europe’s top share trading hub’. The article correctly reported that more shares were traded last month on ‘Euronext, Amsterdam and the Dutch arms of CBOE Europe and Turquoise in January’ than ‘in London’. While the data in this story is naturally correct, it needs to be put within context in order to

Thursday

The Spectator

What were the GameStop investors actually buying?

Best before The government plans to introduce labels on domestic appliances informing consumers how long they are likely to last. Which appliances have lasted the longest? — In 2017, Sydney and Rachel Saunders of Exeter, both in their eighties, were reported to be getting rid of appliances bought soon after their marriage in 1956 and still working. They included a Baby Belling cooker, bought for £19; a Servis washing machine, bought for £60; and a Burco dryer. — In 2013, a couple from Montgomery in New York state were reported still to be using a General Electric refrigerator which was made between 1929 and 1931. Flu away How many people

Thursday

James Walton

John DeLorean: man of mystery – and full-blown psychopath

DeLorean: Back from the Future was one of those documentaries — for me at least — that takes a story you thought you sort of knew and makes you realise a) that you didn’t really, and b) what a great story it is. The programme began, as it was pretty much duty-bound to, with a clip of Michael J. Fox and the time-travelling DeLorean car from the movie that inspired Wednesday’s means-less-the-more-you-think-about-it subtitle. A series of captions then introduced us to John DeLorean himself: a man who ‘had everything’ (cue shots of a much younger ex-model wife and some Rolexes) until he ‘risked it all’ in the mid-1970s, when he

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Business rebirth is always possible – with the right help

The online fashion retailer Boohoo is buying Debenhams without its stores and staff, confirming the demise of the high street. Airlines face quarantine rules that could kill international travel for many months ahead, while the cross–Channel Eurostar rail service cries out for state rescue. The travel and hospitality sectors, alongside what’s left of bricks-and–mortar retail, watch their survival chances evaporating. Amid unremitting economic mayhem, new milestones are easily taken for gravestones. But here’s an optimistic parable from half a century ago. The bankruptcy of Rolls-Royce on 4 February 1971, crippled by a contract to supply newly developed RB211 jet engines for the US-built Lockheed TriStar aircraft, was a traumatic episode

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

‘Inessential’ workers have helped keep the country afloat

A common sight across Britain these past ten months has been those rainbow flags fluttering in urban and village streets: ‘Thank you NHS.’ Many add an afterthought: ‘And other key workers.’ And who would dispute either sentiment? To these expressions of gratitude are added ministers’ and their medical advisers’ thanks to everyone who just ‘stays home’. We are saving granny. We are, if only by inaction, doing our bit in a great national effort, pulling together with the team. We join the ranks of the public-spirited, the selfless, the just. And again, who would cavil? Prudence, caution, carefulness… in a pandemic these are needed qualities. But there’s a group of

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

My stamp duty solution for the Chancellor

On the Wednesday in early July when Rishi Sunak announced a temporary increase from £125,000 to £500,000 in the stamp duty threshold for house purchases, a record 8.5 million people visited the Rightmove property website and I’m pretty sure I was one of them. I continued visiting it weekly: it became a lockdown obsession, alongside French television thrillers, until last month I finally spotted a London flat I wanted to buy. Now, like thousands of others, I’m pushing to complete before 31 March, when the stamp duty holiday — a £15,000 saving for me but the equivalent of a £3.9 billion annual giveaway for the Treasury — is due to

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Will video-calling kill bureaucracy?

Having grown up in a family business, my earliest exposure to corporate life was often baffling. I remember the first time I presented some work in a client’s office 30 years ago. He suggested some small edits, and asked that they be enacted before he presented the work to his superior, who was called Dave. ‘I’ve got a window in Dave’s diary next Wednesday to present the work on up to him, so I’d like to have the changes made by then.’ Fair enough, I thought. Perhaps Dave was flying in from Chicago. Or maybe Dave was a highly elusive figure who only appeared in the building on Wednesdays during

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Save me from the cult of instant intimacy

The other day I made a couple of calls to a bank about a loan. After the usual jumping over hoops to get to talk to a human being — the failure of voice-activated systems to understand a word I say, even when it’s the word ‘loan’, is particularly wounding — I got through to a young man who passed me on to a young woman. In both cases the answer to my actual query was no; they ended the call with ‘Have a good one’ and ‘You take care now’. To which all you can say, a bit lamely, is: ‘You too!’ Whenever someone tells me to have a

Thursday

Harry Mount

Covid has become the go-to excuse for shoddy service

When we were hit by Britain’s biggest crisis since the war, some people behaved like heroes, laying their lives down to fight coronavirus. Others made their excuses, put their feet up and had a good long six-month snooze. My favourite Covid excuse came from Eurostar, which declared in August that, ‘As a result of coronavirus, we are only able to offer wifi in our Standard Premier and Business Premier carriages’. Wireless broadband was duly disabled in its standard-class coaches — until, besieged by complaints, the company conducted a full reverse–ferret operation and turned the wifi back on. Again and again since the virus struck, companies and institutions, big and small,

Sunday

Kate Andrews

Can cinemas survive a year of Covid restrictions?

Cineworld is to close its 128 cinemas – saying that the Covid restrictions have made its business “unviable”. It’s terrible to see that word applied to the cinema industry – and even worse to think of the 5,500 jobs this will impact. But the truth is that many businesses can’t survive what will be a year’s worth of restrictions – based on PM’s timeline where he’s talking about some kind of scientific breakthrough by Easter. The final straw for Cineworld was the delay of the new 007 film No Time to Die, now due out next April on the logic that this would maximise takings.  But how many cinemas will still be around then to show this