Martin Vander Weyer

I’m eager to order a Nokia 3310, the classic mobile phone of the millennium that was relaunched this week. The original was famed for its simple functions, unbreakable casing and ultra-long battery life; my earlier 3210 was just as good. I lost it on a coach trip 15 years ago and haven’t been truly happy since, having never learned to love my iPhone. But what’s more interesting about this revival is what it tells us about the turbulent evolution of the mobile device market, as well as the curious history of Nokia itself. Nokia is Finland’s contribution to corporate parable.

I campaigned hard for a business rates review, and even tried to claim credit for it — or at least for its pro-northern bias — when details emerged last September. The smallest enterprises are exempt and the provinces will gain some benefit; but it’s clear that new rateable values from 1 April will impose undeservedly harsh rises on mid-sized businesses in London and the south-east. I’m even feeling a twinge of sympathy for Victoria Beckham, whose Dover Street boutique reportedly faces a 415 per cent hike. Philip Hammond, meanwhile, is in ‘listening mode’ — not least, we might imagine, when accosted by furious shopkeepers in his Runnymede and Weybridge constituency — and is expected to introduce extra reliefs in his Budget next week.

I was sorry Kraft Heinz’s £115 billion bid for Unilever collapsed so fast — unveiled on Friday, it was dead by Sunday. Not that I saw the aggressor as a worthy potential victor; but a longer battle would have provided great material for column-sermons on good and bad capitalism. Aha, I hear you ask, but which side is which? Unilever is the Anglo-Dutch maker of Dove soap and Magnum ice creams. With its dual headquarters in London and Rotterdam, its multi-layered bureaucracy and its bosses who bang on about social responsibility, it might be seen as a big fat corporate proxy for the European Union — in urgent need of a shake-up.

Many thanks to the stampede of readers who sent news of bank branch closures. There’s certainly a national pattern, and possibly an epidemic, with HSBC, NatWest, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank closing outlets as fast as they can, and only the Nationwide building society making a virtue of offering an undiminished service. Counter staff still in post are praised for their kindness, particularly to readers’ elderly mothers, but sham ‘consultations’ on closures that are faits accomplis are a frequent cause of irritation. It’s clear that many towns will soon be left with no more than a single ATM plus, if they’re lucky, a post-office counter — making life particularly tough for small businesses.

Almost a decade after the financial crisis loomed, our high streets and town centres are full of life again: who ever thought consumers could sustain so many cafés, bakeries and nail bars? But the revival is being undermined by yet another wave of bank branch closures, leaving small businesses adrift and personal customers at the mercy of call centres and insecure, ill-designed online platforms. More than a thousand branches have closed over the past two years, and another 400 or so are scheduled to go soon. HSBC is showing the way with a savage cull of its network.

President Donald Trump is demolishing his predecessor’s legacy as fast as he can sign executive orders, but one thing for which the Obama administration will be remembered is its zest for imposing fines on UK and European banks. In a flurry of Department of Justice activity ahead of the transfer of power, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $7.2 billion and Credit Suisse $5.3 billion for misleading investors in mortgage-backed securities before 2008, while Deutsche also copped a $630 million penalty (from UK as well as US regulators) for alleged money-laundering on behalf of Russian clients. Meanwhile, Royal Bank of Scotland set aside another $3.8 billion, making a total provision of $8.

I’ve objected before to the fact that supporters of Oxfam shops are unknowingly funding not only an aid charity but also a left-wing thinktank that promotes its beliefs with considerably more zest and clout than Jeremy Corbyn does. Its latest paper, An Economy for the 99%, issued to coincide with the gathering of the global elite at Davos, offers a killer factoid: that whereas three years ago the richest 85 people on the planet ‘had the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity’, today that equivalence applies to just eight mega-billionaires, led by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Amancio Ortega, founder of the Spanish fashion chain Zara.

From supermarkets to superyacht builders, sales figures are remarkably buoyant: consumer debt may be rising too, but no one can say the New Year economic mood is markedly downbeat. This column feels obliged to find something on the horizon to worry about, however, and my telescope is focused on inflation. If deflation was a real threat to developed economies in recent years, the pendulum is now swinging the other way. UK inflation is expected to hit 3 per cent by late 2017, what with higher import costs generally thanks to the weak pound, fuel-price rises as a result of Opec’s effort to restrict oil production, the pass-through to consumers of higher business rates in London and the south-east, and higher rail fares for no good reason at all.

The FTSE 100 ended the year strong, at 7142, and reopened even stronger. For 2016 overall the index gained 14 per cent, with multinational mining giants as top performers, while the pound lost 16.5 per cent against the dollar — those facts being closely related, since they mean London blue-chips are still cheaper in dollars than they were 12 months ago. Current optimism rests on the idea of a Trump spending spree on US infrastructure, but such is the perversity of markets that if common City wisdom decides that Brexit will actually boost the UK economy, stocks may fall as the pound resurges and foreign investors take profits.

Most of my predictions for 2016 were wrong; so let’s not revisit them. But I was right, in January, to identify as a theme of the coming year an evident gulf between ‘the reinvigorated and the demoralised’. In small business sectors and provincial towns, as well as in the attitudes of millions of citizen voters here and abroad, the divergence between optimism and disgruntlement grew as the year went on. And when it came to elections and referendums, it was the downbeat that prevailed. So here we are, fearful of the craziness of Trump, the disintegration of Italy, the triumph of Marine Le Pen and the non-resolution of the Brexit muddle. My top prediction for 2017? We won’t feel any more prosperous at the end of the year than we do at the beginning.

Many (well, several) of you asked me what happened to George, the supermarket chairman who was the anti-hero of my Christmas fable last year. So I tracked him down, somewhere in the provinces, to bring you another episode… ‘Five minutes, Sir George,’ said a young man in black. ‘New boobs OK?’ George nodded, adjusted his embonpoint, and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. How the hell had it come to this? Actually 2016 had begun well. Readers may recall last December’s ‘Free Turkey’ incident, in which a boardroom invasion by carol-singing Santas, led by George’s student son Simon, coerced the supermarket group into giving Christmas fare to the poor in the spirit of King Wenceslas.