Full fibre broadband is the next gold rush to get Britain connected October 14, 2021 There is a gold rush taking place in the UK right now. Private equity barons and telecoms cowboys are pouring money into BT Openreach challengers. Last month Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company and the IKEA holding company Intergogo injected over £1bn in CityFibre. It was the largest single round of funding into a UK full [...]
London has been resuscitated post-Covid and ambition will always keep cities alive October 14, 2021 The rumours of London’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. The pandemic has been linked to the decline, if not the death, of cities. This seemed practically inevitable as we were ordered to “stay at home” and city centres turned into glass and concrete ghost towns. Bans on socialising and the closure of businesses led many [...]
Editorial: Here’s to the billionaires heading for the final frontier October 14, 2021 So it’s beam me up, Bezos, as Captain Kirk almost said. Yesterday William Shatner became the oldest man to see space, sent off to near-orbit by Amazon’s Jeff on Blue Origin. To some, the competition between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and no doubt other soon-to-emerge billionaires is a sign of the worst of [...]
Letters: the many trains of Scotland October 13, 2021 [Re: Sturgeon’s dismal domestic record has derailed the SNP’s train of separatism, 8th October] It was an odd choice of metaphor with the “derailed train of separatism” for Nicola Sturgeon. Whatever the Scottish government’s other successes and failures, railways, and especially electrifying the Central Belt, are its crowning triumph. From just one rather indirect route [...]
Opinion-in-brief: Don’t judge a city by its WeWork offices October 13, 2021 WeWork’s failings, including expected losses of £1.1bn this year, should not distract from the vitality of Canada’s office market, which is showing that the office is far from dead. It should come as little surprise that WeWork has suffered from its own high-risk strategy. Its long-term lease commitments made for a brittle [...]
Sally Rooney, Billie Eilish and George Eliot: Can we ever divorce the art from the artist? October 13, 2021 PUBLISHING a book is the ultimate act of surrender for a profession as dedicated to control as writers. Once a book is in a reader’s hands, you have relinquished your ability to shape what they think of it, how they connect with the characters, or how lost they become in a story. So too with [...]
Liz Truss must stand up to China against the genocide of the Uyghur muslims October 13, 2021 At Conservative Party Conference, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called the UK a “lodestar of freedom and democracy” and called for Great Britain to work with allies to promote freedom around the world. “The democratic world order faces a stark choice,” she said. “Either we retreat and retrench in the face of malign actors … or [...]
Bail outs for businesses in strife only gloss over the truth, it’s time to face reality October 13, 2021 The price of both oil and gas has doubled across the world in the last year. The price of crude oil is at $84 a barrel for the first time in three years. As a result, fuel of every kind, for every purpose has become more expensive. The public has reacted in the most extraordinary [...]
Opinion-in-brief: Chancellor of the Blockchain Philip Hammond dabbles in crypto October 12, 2021 Former Chancellor Philip Hammond is following in the footsteps of many a fresh-faced tech graduate and joining a crypto start-up. It turns out a slap over the wrist from Westminster’s lobbying watchdog for hounding the Treasury on behalf of OakNorth bank was enough to leave Lord Hammond disillusioned with traditional finance. Instead, he will be [...]
It’s time to break the social housing stalemate and build affordable homes October 12, 2021 When you’re losing in a game of chess, you try to end it with a stalemate: no one wins and no one loses. The game ends in a draw. The social housing system in the UK finds itself exactly in this position. The difference is that someone is losing: the scores of families stuck on [...]