Here are all the predictions I got wrong in 2018 December 21, 2018 I should have given up making predictions in June 2017. Three months earlier, I had spoken at a conference on Brexit and suggested that the best way forward for Theresa May would be to call a snap election and strengthen her negotiating hand. I don’t know how the Prime Minister got word of my advice, [...]
DEBATE: As the year draws to a close, do we still have reasons to be cheerful? December 21, 2018 As the year draws to a close, do we still have reasons to be cheerful? Viscount Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, says YES. Yes, we do. A lot went wrong in 2018 for a lot of people; but a lot more went right. Levels of absolute poverty, rates of infant mortality, age-adjusted death rates [...]
Sweat at the Donmar Warehouse review: This Pulitzer winning play is a comprehensive dissection of de-industrialised American heartlands December 20, 2018 Following the US Presidential election in 2016, a slew of reporters were hastily dispatched to the backwaters of de-industrialised America to discover why large sections of the working class population there thought Donald Trump was the answer to their problems. They needn’t have made the trip. This play by Lynn Nottage, first performed in 2015, [...]
Twitter shares slide as company dubbed ‘Harvey Weinstein of Social Media’ December 20, 2018 Shares in Twitter are down 12.6 per cent as the social media giant heads towards for its biggest one-day fall in nearly five months. It comes after a report from Citron Research said the technology company “has become the Harvey Weinstein of Social Media”, following a damning Amnesty International study. The human rights charity said on [...]
A second referendum wouldn’t be undemocratic… but it would be disastrous December 20, 2018 As a Dutch Anglophile and a committed European, my natural sympathies lie with those currently aiming to preserve the ties that bind the UK to the European Union. What the massive street protests and the passionate people’s vote campaign make clear is that many Brits are as attached to their newly-won European rights as they [...]
The fine line between banter and bullying December 20, 2018 Philip Green found himself under fire when he dismissed allegations of bullying and harassment as just “banter”. And while many of us might have considered former Waitrose magazine editor William Sitwell’s comments on vegans to a freelance writer as a quip, it eventually cost him his job. There is no doubt that a friendly working [...]
Brands must learn to use social video to reach Generation Z December 19, 2018 UK retail giant John Lewis claims that its Christmas television adverts are among “the most effective marketing campaigns in the industry”. Perhaps this was the case once, but faced with impressing video obsessed Generation Z (those born since 1995), does it still hold true now? It appears that I am not the only one with [...]
You’ll soon be able to charge your car at the pub, as long as you stick to the Diet Coke, but London’s electric vehicle infrastructure is still in need of some juice December 18, 2018 One of the country’s leading pub chains has announced it’s planning to roll out electric vehicle charging points to boozers up and down the country. For Londoners, it’s jarring enough to be reminded that pubs outside the M25 even have their own car parks, let alone ones that will soon dispense a fleet of perfectly silent [...]
The Kingman review, digested: Five key points from today’s report December 18, 2018 Today saw the release of two big reports into the audit sector: Sir John Kingman’s review of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), and the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) interim report into competition in the audit sector. The CMA – which has opened a can of worms by putting a radical split of professional services [...]
Halo Top ice cream defrosted from the startup doldrums to become a retail success December 17, 2018 Junk food is, rightly, under assault. This year, we’ve seen the introduction of a sugar tax on soft drinks, and last month London mayor Sadiq Khan announced a ban on junk food advertising on the capital’s public transportation network. This comes after tougher TV advertising rules introduced last year, which meant that ads for food [...]