Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
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I remember the arrival of Toys ‘R’ Us in Britain, because as a young banker in 1984 I was tasked with devising a menu of exciting financial products to offer a brash American retailer that was clearly going to take a bite out of our sleepy — and in those days still Christmas-seasonal — domestic
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My decision to vote Remain was driven in part by an exercise in which I tried to identify anyone close to me in Yorkshire — family, neighbour, business owner, farmer — who was worse off as a result of UK membership of the EU. The only people uncontestably in that category, I concluded, were the
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Human progress has depended on economic disruptors since long before the advent of the internet. The internal combustion engine was a hugely significant invention, but motor cars remained rare luxuries until a disruptor called Henry Ford perfected the assembly line that enabled the Model T to be mass-produced at a price the ordinary citizen could
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As ‘business lobby groups’ go, the Institute of Directors has always struck me as worthy but unexciting: a more authentic voice of mid-sized corporate Britain than the fat-cat smugfest that is the CBI; a fount of sound advice on governance, gender equality and ‘mental health at work’; and a handy Pall Mall watering hole for
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This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any other business’ column, in this week’s Spectator. Unilever, the consumer goods conglomerate formed in 1929 by the merger of Margarine Unie of Rotterdam with Lever Brothers of Port Sunlight, is a model of cross-Channel collaboration that pre-dates the European Union we’re about to leave. So the
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On the matter of President Trump’s imposition of a 25 per cent tariff on US imports of steel and 10 per cent on aluminium, I cannot improve on the comments of the sage of Washington, the former Bank of England monetary policy committee member Adam Posen, who called it ‘straight-up stupid’ and ‘fundamentally incompetent, corrupt
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Theresa May has belatedly taken the advice I offered her here last May and named a supremo to tackle the housing crisis — which has been getting steadily worse since her campaign promise to ‘fix the broken market’. But the supremo isn’t Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary who is, the prime minister says, doing ‘incredible
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A mixed bag of annual results from the big banks. RBS, still 73 per cent owned by the taxpayer, recorded a small profit for the first time since 2008 but took flak for a newly released report on the outrageous behaviour of its Global Restructuring Group, the team that mistreated struggling business customers in the
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Some time ago I labelled Oxfam ‘the anti-capitalist lobby group which is also a part-time aid charity’: my column has repeatedly highlighted the fact that donors have unknowingly funded a hard-left think-tank (recent publisher of a list of ‘the eight people who own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’) as well
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This week’s funniest parable of capitalism unravelling was the news that KFC had run out of chicken — or at least 550 of its 900 UK outlets had done so. In the way of the modern world, an immediate search began for someone to blame, and the finger of guilt swiftly pointed to DHL, the
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The fallout from Carillion’s bankruptcy spreads in slow motion — just as the outsourcing and construction giant’s finances gradually stretched to breaking point over the months before it went down in January. The company’s auditor, KPMG, was rightly under the spotlight this week. But the impact on the ground seems to have been less disruptive
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Fake news of the week, I suggest, was the sudden warming of relations on the Korean peninsula following the visit to the Winter Olympics of cute little Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korea’s nuke-waving Kim Jong-un — not only attracting positive coverage for the games but driving a splinter between South Korea and the US
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The Serious Fraud Office has upped the stakes in the case of the controversial $3 billion Qatari financing that saved Barclays from a taxpayer bailout in 2008, by extending the charge of ‘unlawful financial assistance’ to the operating company, Barclays Bank plc, as well as the parent, Barclays plc. Four senior former Barclays employees, including
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Regular passengers on the East Coast mainline are inured to change — and baffled as to why this transport artery cannot be run at a steady but modest profit by a private-sector operator. We recall with sadness the demise of GNER, the first post-privatisation franchisee from 1996 to 2007: part of the Sea Containers group
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If you were the incoming or retiring chairman of the Federal Reserve, you might be quietly pleased to see stock markets plunge on the day of the handover. As Jerome Powell was sworn in on Monday to succeed Dr Janet Yellen as head of America’s central bank, the Dow Jones index of leading US stocks
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Ingvar Kamprad, who died this week aged 91, was a tortured soul but a retail genius. As the founder of Ikea he sold cheap but stylish furniture to millions of what are now called ‘hard-working families’: those who want to improve their homes and make better nests for their children on limited budgets. Though his
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I visited St Thomas’ Hospital on Monday, to discuss fundraising for a cardiology research project. On the way in, I spotted an acquaintance taking her little boy for tests; she was busy explaining why the doctors needed to do what they were about to do, so I didn’t interrupt. I also spotted a block on
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This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any other business’ column, in this week’s Spectator. In a week that felt rather starved of exciting business stories — the fat cats were evidently too busy packing for Davos — an unknown called Stapleton Capital, previously described as a telecoms investor, notched up a brief 130
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This column has long been a sucker for a grand projet. ‘Time for a trip to Boris Island,’ I gushed in 2010 when London’s then mayor came up with his much-mocked (though in engineering terms not unfeasible) wheeze to shift Heathrow to a giant man-made landing strip in the Thames estuary. But even I could
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This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any other business’ column in this week’s Spectator. Carillion is a disaster on all fronts, but my sympathies go first to the fallen contracting giant’s sub–contractors. Upwards of 30,000 smaller firms were already facing 120-day payment delays and may now have to fight court battles to get
