London should be the go-to city for green finance as Britain takes on COP26 July 5, 2021 It’s just over four months to go until the UN Climate Change Conference – better known as COP26 – takes place in Glasgow, and few will deny we are at a pivotal moment for our planet, and for the future of finance. With this in mind, we recently held the second of our hybrid Green [...]
Nissan’s £1bn gambit in Sunderland is worth every penny of subsidies for Boris Johnson July 5, 2021 The campaign for the Brexit referendum seems a long time ago. By the calendar, it was only five years ago, and yet we remember it like another world: David Cameron was prime minister, Barack Obama was in the White House, François Hollande was sneaking out of the Elysée palace on the pillion of a scooter [...]
Smart cities can pioneer a new future for Britain with fully-integrated tech July 4, 2021 When a group of the country’s leading telecoms experts met with the DCMS Select Committee in July 2020, they advised that improved digital infrastructure and a move towards “smart cities” will be essential for a sustainable, post-pandemic recovery. When a group of the country’s leading telecoms experts met with the DCMS Select Committee in July [...]
Saturday essay: It’s easy to hate social media, to truly make it work we need to learn to love it July 3, 2021 It’s fashionable to be irrationally critical of social media. Almost every policy relating to social media serves to restrain, rather than nurture it. The image of online platforms, amongst politicos and policymakers, is often that it is nothing more than an inflammatory cesspit of trolls and creeps who debase every conversation with racist and sexist [...]
Screenshot: Who will win the summer TV ratings war? July 2, 2021 This week **Media Moment of the Week: Rob Beckett’s Wembley wisdom **Who will win the summer TV ratings war? **Kantar’s boardroom carousel Media Moment of the Week: Rob Beckett’s Wembley wisdom We all had a great time on Tuesday, didn’t we, but arguably no one had a better time than Rob Beckett. Fortunately, the comedian [...]
Financial services have an incredible power to improve social mobility – but it’s been left behind in ‘levelling up’ July 2, 2021 Levelling up has become the watchword for Boris Johnson’s political agenda. It has been used as an umbrella term for investment across the country where growth has traditionally been slower than that in the South East and London. Its focus, however, has overwhelmingly been for sectors such as manufacturing. We have seen dozens of pictures [...]
Facebook’s antitrust victory could be the inspiration Joe Biden needs to serve Big Tech a fatal blow July 2, 2021 When Charles Dickens’s Mr Bumble is confronted with the assumption that his overbearing wife “acts under his direction,” he responds with an argument for the ages: “If the law supposes that… the law is an ass.” Though Bumble’s argument might hold little water in a court of law, it isn’t an altogether bad one. It [...]
City leaders are constantly proposing ‘green initiatives’ but is the Square Mile really doing everything it can for climate change? July 2, 2021 During London Climate Action Week, a series of sustainability initiatives are capturing airtime. The Canada’s ‘Climate Action Strategy’ aims to make the Square Mile net-zero in its carbon emissions by 2040. A group of law firms has adopted a ‘greener litigation pledge’. And financial services, which form the backbone of the City, are keen to [...]
CEOs who weighed into GB News learnt a valuable lesson on the power of politics July 1, 2021 If CEOs learn anything from the campaign to boycott GB News and the fallout generated by companies’ responses, it is that they ignore politics at their peril. Over the last half-century, one of the most important shifts in the business world has been corporate leaders recognising they have wider responsibilities to society as well as [...]
From junk food ad bans to new smoking bans: the UK is in an age of state intervention July 1, 2021 We have slipped into a new age of state intervention. Even after a year of unprecedented interference in our everyday lives, attacks on personal freedoms are emerging from every quarter. Take gambling, for example. The government’s review of the Gambling Act looks set to introduce new spend limits to dictate what people can and can’t [...]