Airline chaos not exactly a good advert for Global Britain June 5, 2022 The chaos at Britain’s airports in recent weeks has been little short of a national embarrassment. The farce – for that is what it is – is the child of many mothers, with government, airlines and airports all at least in part to blame. It is therefore rather frustrating that the trio seem unable to [...]
Cutting the fast stream won’t speed up renewal of the civil service May 31, 2022 There are many problems with Britain’s civil service. It is clunky, bureaucratic, probably too large, oftentimes unable to keep up with technological advances and has an institutional bias towards expanding, rather than reducing, its remit. One of its many problems is not, however, the fast stream – a program designed to elevate smart young graduates [...]
Leaders right to call on government to reset relationship with London May 30, 2022 Londoners are not typically known for their patience, but in truth the leaders of this city have shown a remarkable ability in recent years to bite their tongue amid unprecedented attacks on the capital. That patience appears finally to have worn thin, at least judging from last night’s speeches at the Mansion House from both [...]
Auditors make their move but their homework needs checking May 29, 2022 Compiling a list of all the scandals, cock-ups and mistakes that auditors have been implicated in over the past decade would take up more space than this column allows. Even a high bar for only the most catastrophic would still require us to pursue the errors in the audits of Patisserie Valerie, Conviviality, Carilion and [...]
Another wasted crisis as government shows no appetite for growth May 26, 2022 It has become fashionable to say in recent months that principles don’t seem to matter in British politics anymore. Most of that criticism is in the aftermath of a partygate scandal that, for all of its jaw-dropping detail, is not of grand importance in the scheme of things. We will now lay that criticism at [...]
Downing Street in need of a cultural turnaround project May 25, 2022 There is a possibly apocryphal story about a high-flying financial services executive who, when hiring, always took their preferred candidate for lunch before signing on the dotted line. Unknown to the ambitious, keen to impress applicant, the exec pulled this trick at the same restaurant every time – and always told the restaurant to deliberately [...]
The Bank’s climate warnings are too overblown to help May 25, 2022 What was it HSBC’s now-suspended banker Stuart Kirk said about alarmist climate warnings? “Unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan, self-serving, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS WRONG” was the title of the slide which has seen him taking some unexpected time in the garden, as he dared to offer the heretical view that reports of the world’s imminent demise may [...]
Editorial: HSBC brouhaha should kick off a worthwhile ESG debate May 23, 2022 It is ironic that in a speech criticising hyperbole, the now-suspended HSBC Head of Responsible Investing Stuart Kirk went to some effort to out-hyperbole even those who he sought to lambast. As a former journalist, Kirk will surely have known that criticising alarmist “nut jobs” was unlikely to do anything but stir a hornet’s nest. [...]
TUC urges action on gender pensions gap May 19, 2022 Unions are stepping up calls to tackle the “huge problem” of the gender pension gap after a study suggested that in many industries women have workplace pensions worth less than a fifth of male colleagues. The TUC dubbed Thursday ‘gender pensions gap day’, when it estimated that women pensioners start getting paid because retired women [...]
Back to the ’80s? Rishi should borrow from the playbook May 18, 2022 An embattled Tory Prime Minister hunkered down in Westminster. A cost of living crisis becoming the defining issue of the political age. Unions plotting strike action. The similarities between 1982 and 2022 are eerie, and they don’t even stop there: it was that year that a promising England team headed off to a World Cup [...]
