Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
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This column has long been a fan of the concept of ‘challenger banks’ offering alternatives for personal and small business customers who were mistreated or underserved by the big banks before and after the 2008 crash. Most challengers were internet-based, but Metro Bank — founded in 2010 by US entrepreneur Vernon Hill, whose early career
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Sainsbury’s chief executive Mike Coupe faces a fight for his job after the Competition and Markets Authority ruled against his proposed £12 billion merger with Asda that would have created a supermarket giant bigger than Tesco and supposedly better equipped to face down the discounters Aldi and Lidl. The CMA said the deal would have
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On the matter of whether former defence secretary Gavin Williamson was the real ‘H’ in Line of Duty, I admit I may have lost the plot. But meanwhile the rest of the media has rather lost sight of the key issue with Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant whose involvement in UK 5G networks was allegedly
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The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer, are open for entries at spectator.com/disruptor. The Awards salute innovative, high-growth businesses from every part of the UK that are disrupting their marketplaces in terms of price, choice and accessibility and have the potential to achieve national and international success. Meanwhile, here’s
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If you’re a bloke in a suit who’d like to apply for the governorship of the Bank of England (deadline 5 June), I suggest you browse the website of Sapphire Partners, the headhunters appointed by Philip Hammond to conduct the search. Run by ex-JPMorgan banker Kate Grussing with an all-female team plus Cherie Booth and
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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
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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
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‘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
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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
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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
From our UK edition
The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer, are open for entries at spectator.com/disruptor. We’re looking for innovators from every part of the UK who are disrupting their marketplace in terms of price, choice and accessibility and have the potential to scale up, nationally and internationally. Meanwhile, a shining example
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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
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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’
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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
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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
From our UK edition
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
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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
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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
From our UK edition
The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer, are now open: the entry form is at spectator.com/disruptor. We’re looking for innovators from across the UK who are disrupting their marketplace in terms of price, choice and accessibility — and have the potential to scale up, nationally and internationally. Meanwhile, in
From our UK edition
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