Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
Unilever’s abandonment of plans to scrap its Anglo-Dutch corporate structure and leave London is a huge embarrassment for chief executive Paul Polman, whose days in post must surely be numbered. More significantly, it’s a rare demonstration of the power of UK institutional investors (the likes of Aviva, Legal & General, M&G and Schroders) to exercise
‘Let me say it, loud and clear: the Conservative party is, and always will be, the party of business,’ declared Philip Hammond at Birmingham — a few hours after City tycoon and former Tory treasurer Michael Spencer told the BBC that the Prime Minister had ‘let herself down personally by not being a champion of
Today we’re in the baronial setting of Hampton Manor Hotel in Warwickshire — a long iron shot from Birmingham Airport, but happily out of earshot of the fractious Tory Party conference up the road. We’re here to meet the Midlands regional finalists for The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards: our host is Mark
The least convincing thing said by Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell at the Labour party conference in Liverpool was ‘I believe we’ll be elected for a second term.’ In all his other remarks about plans for compulsory employee share schemes, workers on boards, higher corporate taxes, extended employment rights, attacks on the rich and below-market
This week we gathered in the elegant dining room of our sponsor, the private bank Julius Baer, to meet the regional finalists from London and the South for The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Award. Our host was David Durlacher, chief executive of Julius Baer International, and with him were Tracey Reddings, the bank’s
The least convincing thing said by Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell at the Labour party conference in Liverpool was ‘I believe we’ll be elected for a second term.’ In all his other remarks about plans for compulsory employee share schemes, workers on boards, higher corporate taxes, extended employment rights, attacks on the rich and below-market
‘I’m afraid I think he’s making it up,’ was the retort of Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin on Monday’s Today programme to the claim by Ralf Speth, boss of Jaguar Land Rover, that a bad Brexit deal could put tens of thousands of jobs at risk in JLR and its suppliers, and cost his company
Our cinema is showing Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and I’m reminded of a remark attributed to Mark Twain, that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes’. On 3 October 2008, three weeks after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, treasury secretary Hank Paulson’s $700 billion bailout for the US banking system was passed
All good things must come to an end, including summer holidays and bull markets. The bull run in US shares that began in the aftermath of the financial crisis in March 2009 has now officially passed the previous record of 3,452 more-up-than-down days from October 1990 to March 2000. This time round, the S&P500 index
Costa, in my opinion, sells a decent cup of coffee. It employs polite youngsters who seem happy in their work. If you’re desperate for caffeine, even its petrol-station vending machines are not too bad. And unlike the UK operation of Starbucks, whose coffee is vile, it pays tax on its profits at close to the
The wonder of Wonga is that it lasted so long. The arch-villain of the payday loan sector, which grew like a mutant fungus out of the wreckage of the financial crisis, once clocked up a record Representative Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on its loans to gullible and desperate cash-seekers of 5,853 per cent, and was
As to public subsidy for broadband, the conclusion to be drawn from the DCMS report, though it may not please some readers, is that it should be heavily tilted towards business premises. The report comes up with a benefit-to-cost ratio per pound of subsidy of £1.18 for residential superfast connections but £12.28 for non-residential. The
All good things must come to an end, including summer holidays and bull markets. The bull run in US shares that began in the aftermath of the financial crisis in March 2009 has now officially passed the previous record of 3,452 more-up-than-down days from October 1990 to March 2000. This time round, the S&P500 index
As I set to compiling your email responses into our ‘broadband dossier’ to send to BT chairman Jan du Plessis, the government issued its own evaluation of the ‘economic impact and public value’ of the superfast broadband roll-out programme launched in 2010. Compiled by outside experts, this document from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media
The award by a Californian court of $289 million in damages to Dewayne Johnson, a groundsman who claimed the weedkiller Roundup caused his cancer, has the makings of what investment pessimists call a ‘black swan’: an unforeseen event with extreme consequences. Roundup is made by Monsanto, the US company that leads the world in genetic modification
This column has consistently stood up for Mike Ashley, even when the lonesome billionaire’s notions of corporate governance at Sports Direct and staff welfare at its Shirebrook warehouse made that a challenging position to sustain — not to mention his troubled ownership of Newcastle United. Ashley has grown his core business over 35 years from
Let’s remind ourselves what we mean by ‘disruptor’. A truly disruptive business revolutionises its marketplace by delivering radical improvements in choice, price and accessibility. A disruptor may be a boffin or a bold lateral thinker: Henry Ford did not invent the motorcar any more than Airbnb invented the ‘homestay’, but both created systems that made
Let’s remind ourselves what we mean by ‘disruptor’. A truly disruptive business revolutionises its marketplace by delivering radical improvements in choice, price and accessibility. A disruptor may be a boffin or a bold lateral thinker: Henry Ford did not invent the motorcar any more than Airbnb invented the ‘homestay’, but both created systems that made
‘There has to be a level playing field so that… Amazon cannot undercut domestic booksellers by using the tax advantage of booking in Luxembourg a sale to a UK customer that is fulfilled from a UK warehouse.’ I wrote that five years ago: since then, no government anywhere has effectively addressed the issue of global
What are we to make of a 19 per cent fall in both Facebook and Twitter shares at the end of last week, with Facebook shedding a barely imaginable $120 billion of value in a single day? Of course there are factors relating to performance: Twitter user numbers have been declining and Facebook’s profitability is
