Britain keeps on working
The most despairing aspect of the whole rotten parliamentary conniption over Brexit is the tendency, especially among those who would prefer the whole thing to go away, to denigrate Britain’s economic and social settlement. Yes, there is much that needs fixing post the financial crisis.
Policing, social care, the prisons and much else, following austerity. But the UK is in a much better place to do that with a jobless rate of 4.1pc, against 7.9pc across the euro area, rising real wages and a budget moving towards current balance allowing an extra £20bn to be spend on the NhS.
The remarkable thing is how little of Britain’s genius has been crushed by the political furore. Our pharma giants Astrazeneca and Glaxosmithkline, building on the research strength of our universities, are shaping up to be leaders in the next generation of oncology and other medicines.
The creative industries continue to shine, with Forbes declaring the Star Wars movies a ‘billion-dollar blockbuster for Britain’. This week British cosmetics brand elemis was snapped by L’Occitane for £700m.
We may despair of the tax avoidance efforts of Silicon Valley by Apple, Google and Amazon, but they all seem, like the US investment banks, to regard London as the natural home for european campuses irrespective of whether we are in or out.
It is a pity that business investment temporarily suffers through uncertainty. But warnings by the employers’ group the CBI that a no-deal Brexit would be a disaster for jobs simply undermine confidence.
A disaster for jobs is what much of the euro area has inside the customs union and the single market.
House divided
AS The the first housebuilder to scale the heights with profits of £1bn, Persimmon might expect to be garlanded. Instead, the stock market is cool, wondering how long the help To Buy subsidy can continue to propel it forward and when management will realise that new homes are a social good, not a path to get rich quickly.
The replacement of £75m chief executive Jeff Fairburn with his £40m colleague David Jenkinson cannot be a sensible permanent arrangement.
If Persimmon is to restore the trust of investors, customers and the rest of the industry it must recognise that although turnover, profits, cash flow and dividend yield are very welcome, public companies have wider responsibilities.
It needs to shed past baggage, including further bonuses to those who were recipients of the last jackpot packages.
No longer can it be acceptable to produce shoddy houses. It needs to deal with past complaints rapidly and buy back pernicious leaseholds from clients unfortunate enough to have been sold homes on this basis. On a practical note, every new home must be built with access to fibre-optic broadband.
Persimmon did well to spot the opportunity of help To Buy, but the quid pro quo for backing this winning horse ought to be giving more back to society.
Funds once set aside for bonuses and perhaps a share of the dividend should be ringfenced to help deal with Britain’s homeless problem. Persimmon would also be well advised to exceed local requirements on social housing in each of the 31 areas in which it operates.
That is the least that can be expected of a FTSe100 company sitting on more than £1bn of cash.
Storing up trouble
ONe hesitates to question the judgment of Marks & Spencer chairman Archie Norman. But in shutting 17 stores in towns as diverse as Weston-super-Mare and Rotherham, a retailer which for more than a century stood at the core of communities is tearing the heart out of high streets.
The company is known to claim that, because its store portfolio is much older than rival Next, often its outlets are in the wrong places. Then it should move them to a part of town which is more relevant.
The plan is to shift one-third of sales online. But one can’t help but feel that M&S is putting the cart before the horse.
Until it has online services, including food delivery, fit for purpose it is going to lose not just footfall but customers too. The stores are the showroom of the enterprise and can be collection and service centres.
Surviving members of the founding families must be pulling their hair out at the negativism. Retailers live on confidence and M&S is losing the plot.