The City needs to stay the world’s top choice October 16, 2011 BEING the Lord Mayor of the City of London is an all-consuming role; in the past 11 and a half months, I have visited 40 cities in 22 different countries across the globe, delivering around 900 speeches promoting not just the Square Mile, but the whole of the UK-wide financial and professional services industry. I [...]
RAPID RESPONSES October 16, 2011 Heathwick critic Despite Victoria Borwick’s defence of the “Heathwick” scheme on Friday [To keep the economy flying we need more air capacity], the idea is flawed in our view. British Airways already tried the idea of a dual hub a few years ago and it did not work, in part because connection times were uncompetitive [...]
To keep the economy flying we need more air capacity: Heathwick is our best hope October 13, 2011 AS AN island nation, the ability to move people and goods effectively and quickly to and from our shores is of vital importance to British business”. So says David Frost, former director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce, and he couldn’t be more right. A culture that throws so many obstacles in the way of [...]
A Slovakian MP reveals why he rejects bailouts October 13, 2011 CAN YOU SUM UP FOR BRITISH READERS WHY YOU AND YOUR PARLIAMENTARY COLLEAGUES VOTED TO REJECT THE BAILOUT MOTION? Many reasons – the moral hazard, the fallacy of trying to solve indebtedness with more debt which will only prolong the agony, the principle that poorer people in responsible countries must not pay for the irresponsibility [...]
Closing Britain’s doors turns creativity away October 13, 2011 I WISH David Cameron would stop insulting my wife. Of course, he doesn’t think he’s doing anything of the kind. His speech on immigration this week was scattered with careful phrases about wanting “the brightest and the best”, in between all the paragraphs detailing the slam of the national gate and the screwing tight of [...]
RAPID RESPONSES October 13, 2011 Smaller portions Actually, the idea that most food was local 100 years ago [Celebrate Big Food, in yesterday’s Forum] is a long way from the truth. In 1900 both J Sainsbury and Lipton stores carried a huge range of imported food from the Empire and the Continent. Egyptian quails, Bordeaux pigeons as well as French, [...]
Celebrate Big Food: Our diet is cheaper, richer and more nutritious than ever before October 12, 2011 BIG Food is widely regarded as the polar opposite of good food. Big food companies, we are told by campaigners and celebrity chefs, produce poor quality, waistline-busting, environment-wrecking, small-farmer-bankrupting products. The supermarkets allegedly destroy communities to sell rubbish to zombified shoppers. Industrial agriculture gives us nutrient-lite, flavourless, chemical-soaked food produced in a shockingly wasteful manner. [...]
Don’t end naked credit default swaps in Europe October 12, 2011 AT A TIME when the sovereign debt crisis is gripping Europe and threatening to destabilise the global economy, the European Union is considering doing something which would make global debt markets less efficient, less liquid and less transparent – making it more difficult rather than easier for EU states to raise money to fund their [...]
Bolder policies would help to limit job losses October 12, 2011 EVEN the government’s supporters admitted that yesterday’s unemployment figures were grim. The number of people out of work is now 2.57m, the highest for 17 years, with more than one in five young people now jobless. Labour was quick to make political capital out of it by blaming it on the government’s cuts, citing the [...]
RAPID RESPONSES October 12, 2011 Women welcomed The article by Jennifer Harris in Wednesday’s Forum rather misses the point on women in the boardroom. Voluntary quotas are quite different from compulsory targets. Earlier this year, voluntary EU quotas were proposed to bring women into high-level positions in business and I welcomed them. However, when later in 2011 the previously voluntary [...]