Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
It’s not much comfort, if you like pubs, that the rate at which they’re closing across the UK has fallen from 138 per month for the past several years to 76 per month in 2018; small consolation too that this is partly the result of a rare example of government policy working — in the
If you know my personal history with Barclays, you may be wondering whether I’m for or against Edward Bramson. To recap, I’m a former second-generation employee of the bank as well as the custodian of a family shareholding that’s never likely to be sold — and nowadays, rather miraculously given everything that’s happened to me
‘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
Trade associations are even better journalistic sources than talkative taxi drivers. If you want to know what’s happening in the economy of physical goods, consult a conclave of forklift truck operators; for a barometer of optimism among middle-class homeowners, mingle with managers of the nation’s garden centres. And if you want to feel the true
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
Siemens’ UK HQ happens to be in Manchester, where I was glad to find contrary evidence last week that all is far from lost on the innovation front, at the Northern Tech Awards, presented in rock’n’roll style by the investment bank GP Bullhound. Here were 100 high-growth companies, ranging from the self-explanatory (-Parcel2Go, Pharmacy2U) to
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’
I invited you to suggest smaller companies that are ‘potential world-beaters’ for the next layer of stocks in our UK Optimist Fund portfolio — and your wide-ranging responses gave rise to one big question. What are we really good at these days? We certainly have strengths in bioscience, where your picks included Angle (blood analysis
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
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
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.
My hopes of an invite from Jeff Bezos to the opening of Amazon’s proposed but now cancelled ‘HQ2’ at Long Island City in New York were slim, since I was thrown out of his existing Seattle HQ on the orders of the online giant’s PR police. But I disagree with rising-star Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Welcome to The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer. We’re waiting to hear from entrepreneurs in every business sector across the UK who are eager to tell us how their products are bringing radical benefits to consumers in terms of price and choice. We’re looking for disruptors who can
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
There’s a lesson for all boardrooms — and an echo of the lost era of big-bucks, big-ego banking — in the story of Santander’s withdrawal of its job offer to Andrea Orcel. The Italian-born former UBS and Merrill Lynch investment banker was named last September as the next chief executive of the Spanish giant that
‘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