America and Iran are sleepwalking towards disaster January 9, 2020 I well remember that I kept putting my hands to my head as I read, terror-stricken, Christopher Clark’s provocative The Sleepwalkers, which boldly posited that World War I was not part of anyone’s grand strategic design. Instead, Armageddon came about through a number of countries and statesmen making lesser errors, which compounded somehow produced the [...]
Modular housing: Four common buyers’ questions answered March 13, 2020 Modular housing; off-site construction; MMC. You might have seen these terms bandied about by the housing minister, or heard the news earlier this month that a 49-storey modular housing tower has been approved in Croydon, which will be one of the tallest in the world. But what does it all mean? Broadly, MMC – or [...]
China is fighting a Cold War. Has the West realised it yet? April 27, 2020 Beneath the endless conferences and diplomatic niceties, at root international diplomacy is always the handmaiden of power politics. As the 16th century English diplomat, Sir Henry Wotten, so aptly put it, an ambassador can be defined as ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.’ But the eternal contest for [...]
Laugh about the Lib Dems’ skills wallet all you like, but we’re all going to want one November 15, 2019 It is hard to think of a more unsexy name for a policy than the “skills wallet”. Juxtaposing two profoundly unexciting terms (as policy areas go, there’s nothing fun about skills, and “wallet” is the kind of word that starts to sound wrong if you say it in your head too many times), the Liberal [...]
Domestic abuse costs UK businesses £316m a year November 25, 2019 Domestic abuse against women costs UK businesses a total of £316m a year, according to a new study by KPMG for Vodafone. The new research suggests that per woman, the potential loss of earnings as a result of the negative impact domestic abuse can have on career progression could be as much as £5,800. Read [...]
When will Bitcoin be taken seriously by the masses? May 26, 2020 There are three types of people in the world today: People who have heard of Bitcoin, people who haven’t and the last group who acknowledges it’s existence, but refuse to accept it’s potential. Bitcoin’s rocky past and uncertain future has yet to win over the majority audience on the world’s financial and global stage. When [...]
We can make this the decade of purpose-driven capitalism January 6, 2020 As we enter the 2020s, capitalism is suffering a crisis of confidence. Populists around the world are putting a simple spin on globalisation as against the interests of ordinary people. By contrasting the growth in developed economies with a simultaneous squeeze on living standards, they argue that the link has been severed between a profitable [...]
Covid-19: the inescapable truths faced by investors May 22, 2020 Investors will need to be more agile than ever as Covid-19 reinforces many of the trends driving the world economy prior to the outbreak. “At the beginning of the plague, when there was now no more hope but that the whole city would be visited; when all that had friends or estates in the country [...]
Has the black swan left us with white elephants? April 23, 2020 The coronavirus crept up on us, in some ways. It began with a single illness in China in mid-November 2019, a 55-year-old in Hubei province, some records suggest, and it wasn’t until January this year that it became clear that there was an epidemic of this new respiratory disease in the city of Wuhan. In [...]
London calling: Why it’s time to bring life back to our city’s streets August 10, 2020 Despite a tentative easing of the national lockdown, the lingering economic and social consequences of this policy are frighteningly obvious to anyone venturing into central London. While social life and economic activity has, to a large extent, returned to the outer zones and suburbs, the offices and shops of London’s professional districts remain eerily and [...]