Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
From our UK edition
Is that a light at the end of the tunnel — or a second lockdown thundering unstoppably towards us? News of a viable vaccine is the one development in the Covid drama that could drag the national mood out of the current despair that’s pulverising economic recovery; it would also provoke a euphoric stock market
From our UK edition
For The Spectator’s 2020 Economic Innovator of the Year Awards, sponsored by Julius Baer, we have introduced a new award for Social Impact to reflect the fact that today’s entrepreneurs, especially younger ones, tend to believe that business should aspire beyond profit (even though they recognise that profit is essential for any business to survive,
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
What a pleasure to be reunited (via Zoom, needless to say) with our genial judging panel for Scotland and Northern Ireland in The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards, sponsored by Julius Baer. Irene McAleese is co-founder and chief strategy officer of See.Sense, the Northern Ireland-based ‘smart bike lights’ and road-use data analysis venture
From our UK edition
What a triumph of entrepreneurial empire-building — if that’s still an acceptable phrase — is the £6.8 billion acquisition of the Asda supermarket chain by Blackburn-born self-made billionaires Mohsin and Zuber Issa. Sons of Gujarati immigrants, these brothers have advanced from a single petrol station in Bury to a chain of almost 6,000 in ten
From our UK edition
Our London & South East finalists for The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards 2020, sponsored by Julius Baer, really did cover the span of human life from conception to cremation – and many of the challenges of the 21st century in between. This region has more finalists (12) than our other regions simply
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
The regional finalists in the West & South West Region of The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards 2020, sponsored by Julius Baer, were all, in very different ways, concerned with the human touch — though in two of the four entries, the business concept took us deep into virtual worlds. All four also
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
The greatest pain of lockdown has been, for me, the absence of am-dram. In one half of my life I’m your financial columnist with a constant eye on the villains and heroes of the global business scene. In the other half, I’m the panto dame of my Yorkshire home town and the veteran of dozens
From our UK edition
In previous years, regional judging sessions for The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards, sponsored by Julius Baer, have all taken place over convivial lunches – and readers of my weekly Any Other Business column know how much I enjoy throwing in a restaurant tip as part of an economic parable. This year, however,
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
‘Every country has a political problem with its fishermen,’ wrote Peter Walker, the Conservative minister who negotiated the first effective EU-UK fishing deal in 1983. ‘Everyone sympathises with the tough life they lead. They all want to take as much fish as they can.’ And here’s Michel Barnier, still speaking as the EU’s chief Brexit
From our UK edition
Along, cold weekend brought a haul of business news more bad than good. The worst was from aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce, which announced a £5.4 billion half-year loss — adverse currency movements plus a collapse in new orders and engine-repair work — and warned that in the ‘plausible downside scenario’ of an extended slump in global
From our UK edition
A takeover battle for BT would bring much-needed excitement to the City — as well as a major political row. The privatised telecoms giant that rarely pleases its customers and regulators has seen its shares fall by four-fifths since late 2015. While many other tech-related stocks have rebounded, BT’s price is still down where it
From our UK edition
We’re very pleased to announce the finalists for The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards 2020, sponsored by Julius Baer. We were excited to receive more entries than ever this year – despite the disruptions of the pandemic – including many more from the regions outside London and the South East. And we’re delighted
From our UK edition
Doing the math, as the Americans say, became this column’s theme after I abandoned another planned trip to France. Seven days in the Dordogne (where last week’s Covid infection rate was just 2.9 cases per 100,000) would have cost me 14 days lockup on return, so I spent the weekend doing arithmetic instead. As I
From our UK edition
At a low moment in late March, I suggested that all large companies should consider temporary cuts in executive salaries ‘both as a gesture of immediate solidarity and as a move to avert a longer-term backlash against wealth, privilege and the pillars of capitalism’. Latest research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and
From our UK edition
We should take heart from BP’s £5.1 billion second-quarter loss, accompanied by a halving of its dividend. What’s good about that? Nothing — except that the loss reflects a write-down of the value of oil and gas assets that shifts the company to a more realistic footing for an extended period of low oil prices
From our UK edition
Rishi Sunak is contemplating a 2 per cent tax on goods sold online, possibly combined with a ‘green’ levy on delivery vans and a radical review of business rates, all designed to improve the survival chances of high-street retailers while harvesting more revenue from online sellers who have boomed during lockdown. About time too —
