Any other business

There really isn’t much left to be said about Sir Philip Green as his Arcadia fashion empire collapses into administration, taking the Debenhams chain down with it, unless a new rescuer steps in. An aggressive rag-trade wheeler-dealer since he started selling cheap jeans in the 1970s, Green was also once regarded as a brilliant merchandiser — until, it seems, he got too rich to bother keeping up with online competitors such as Asos, rising brands such as Zara and price-slashers such as Primark. So he won’t be remembered for his fashion sense — as the era’s other trouble-prone ‘King of the High Street’, George Davies of Next and Per Una, might be.

We’ve heard a lot this week about infrastructure spending, and how much more will be needed if the UK is to achieve the ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ that the Prime Minister seems to have sketched on the back of a pizza box. We’ve also heard that the Chancellor is looking at ways to squeeze billions for Treasury coffers out of the private pension sector. What we haven’t heard so far is a plan to join those two pieces of the economic jigsaw — by encouraging pension managers to become committed investors in infrastructure projects.

It’s not axiomatic that taxes must rise to pay for the pandemic, if you seriously believe the surge in growth, jobs and prosperity that will follow the rollout of a hyper-efficient national vaccination programme will generate sufficient revenues for Rishi Sunak to stabilise the public finances, albeit at the highest level of debt ever seen in modern times. On the other hand, the Chancellor is surely pondering this question: in the current mood of public gratitude for the NHS and government support for the economy, there must be taxes I can tweak that won’t lose sackloads of Tory votes and might chip the peak off the debt mountain — so where are they?

FTSE indices soared as the Biden Bounce met vaccine euphoria, underpinned by the Bank of England’s announcement of another £150 billion injection of quantitative easing. It was heartening to see shares in airlines, hotels and Rolls-Royce, the aero engine maker, perking up — and hardly surprising to see lockdown winners such as Ocado and Just Eat among the fallers. Across the Atlantic, even mighty Amazon shed 5 per cent on Monday. But stock markets are one thing and real life is another. What matters in the short term is whether Boris Johnson can get us out of the lockdown he clearly didn’t want before the tide of redundancies, heading towards 150,000 a month, crushes the prospects for a consumer-led recovery, even after vaccine distribution has begun.

The ‘antitrust’ law suit launched by US authorities against Google has been reported as a potential turning point in the dominance of ‘big tech’ — and an echo of the courtroom dramas that diminished the excessive power of America’s late 19th--century oil, steel and railroad barons. But I wonder how much impact it will really have. The allegation, in brief, is that Google has created an illegal near-monopoly by paying large sums to Apple and other smartphone makers to secure its position as the default search engine for billions of consumers, its grip reinforced by ownership of Android, the phone operating system, and Chrome, the popular browser — all of which also gives it a stranglehold on the digital advertising market.

The Bank of England has told commercial banks to prepare for the possibility of negative interest rates. This last hypothetical spanner in the toolbox of monetary stimulus — since rates are stuck close to zero anyway and quantitative easing through bond-buying programmes has diminishing effects — sounds weird and worrying but has already been in use in Europe for some time. Its intended effect is to push the commercial banks to lend more to business by penalising them for depositing cash with central banks. But what on earth does it mean for personal savers? The fact is that all monetary policy since 2008 has been designed to stimulate moribund economies and keep companies alive on a broad front — with collateral impacts on individuals.

What advice can I offer Alok Sharma, who took a pasting in the weekend press for his lacklustre performance as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy? While Rishi Sunak knocks up as many runs as he can on a difficult wicket with his job support scheme and VAT deferrals, Sharma is the ‘dead bat’ (in one business chief’s phrase) at the other end — accused of offering no Brexit clarity, not much personal energy and no strategy at all. In defence of this former City accountant, we might say that his rag-bag department, operating under many different names since 1979, has rarely been regarded as an engine of British enterprise.

Good riddance to the passenger rail franchise system which has finally been killed off by Covid, though a majority of the travelling public might say it should long ago have been put out of its — and, more pertinently, their — misery. The complex scheme to privatise British Rail launched by the Major government in 1993 defied those who said it couldn’t be done and was designed by the Treasury to maximise proceeds to itself. In doing so, it fractured the industry into a myriad of separate owners, operators and service providers that rarely worked in harmony or created competition for the benefit of users. The consequences of this structural fiasco were as random as they were unsatisfactory.

A small cheer for Liz Truss’s treaty with Japan. It is, says the official press release, ‘the UK’s first major trade deal as an independent trading nation’ — and we must hope, the harbinger of much bigger deals to come. Even on the government’s own analysis, this one claims to deliver just £1.5 billion to the UK economy and an increase in UK workers’ wages of ‘£800 million in the long run’, whatever that means. What it highlights, I’m afraid, is the imbalance between the range of goods and services that the post-industrial UK is actually able to offer foreign partners — and how much more we need from them, chiefly in the form of inward investment.