Refugees can be a welcome boost for companies seeking talent
Global Britain cannot continue to overwhelm refugees from Ukraine with off-putting bureaucratic hurdles - this has dealt a damaging blow to the country’s standing. We need, instead, a recalibration of policies to attract talent. Because of UK government’s fear of immigration is out of sync with the public and the needs of the nation.
Is Poland next?
President Putin’s troops are making slow progress in Ukraine but the lack of speed in no way detracts from what military minds see as a foregone conclusion: the physical destruction of a European nation.
In 2017, with a headline-dominating North Korea looking like the biggest threat to global stability, Ben Hodges, then Commanding General of US troops in Europe, told Karina’s Column: “Of course Russia, and its behaviour over the last three years [with invasions of Crimea and Ukraine] is the only nation that really possesses the ability, the capability, to destroy a European country or the United States with their nuclear weapons.”
The New Paradigm
The summer of 1982 was a fine one in Venezuela, as I was chauffeured from party to party in Caracas and spent weekends lying in the sun on private islands or riding around estates the size of small countries. Not a word was said about my internship working in the office of a pulp and paper company, which was the reason for my visit.
President Hugo Chavez did not come to power until 1998. He destroyed the economy, a task ably carried on by his successor. But the seeds had been sown in the earlier decades amid the elite’s corruption, and failure to share the oil bonanza more widely.
Overcoming tribal challenges
The most successful species on this planet revels in the comfort of conformity. Just think of the boost and subsequent bonhomie that comes from a ‘successful’ meeting where everyone agrees. Yet with instability as the defining condition of our times, executives must evolve to become comfortable with discomfort.
Who, in the City, would hire someone who had failed a Maths O level? Twice. Yet that is the case of Sir Robert Stheeman, one of the most successful and trusted CEOs of the Debt Management Office, which is responsible for issuing UK government debt. It didn’t seem to affect the £2 trillion – give or take a few billion – that he has issued over 17 years in the job.
UK General Election 2019
Safeguarding the country
This edition of Karina’s Column is based on an interview with James Arbuthnot, a long-standing Conservative politician who now sits in the House of Lords
With the UK’s momentous General Election a day away, yet another respected career politician is joining the chorus lead by former Prime Ministers Sir John Major and Tony Blair in calling for moderates to vote across parties, be it the Liberal Democrats in some cases, or a “sensible Conservative or a sensible Labour person.”
James Arbuthnot, a Conservative peer whose career encompassed the role of Chief Whip, Minister for Defence Procurement and a decade as Chairman of the influential Defence Select Committee, has a one-word answer when asked if he is still a member of the Party: “No.”
“I cancelled my subscription when Boris Johnson became leader, for two reasons,” he adds. “First, because I didn’t believe the policies the Conservative Party was following over Brexit. And the second because I didn’t have faith or belief or respect for Boris Johnson.”
Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator of The Financial Times, argues that a hung Parliament would be the best result of the December 12th election, as it would make the major parties realise the damage arising out of their extreme positions and force them to rediscover their moderate souls.
Sustainable Survival
Future-proofing your firm
Academics and far-sighted business leaders can go blue in the face calling for modifications to the capitalist model that has prevailed over the last 30 years and left too many behind. It takes riots in Chile, votes for populist authoritarians like Donald Trump and the emergence of a proto-fascist party in Spain for reality to hit home.
The decimation of the middle class through stagnant wages and job insecurity and the increasingly visible inequality of wealth were missed amidst the congratulatory backslapping of Davos Man, more focused on the huge growth in spending power in large emerging markets.
Those companies that want to survive and thrive within a world of constant upheaval must concentrate on transforming themselves. Sitting back comfortably and assuming politicians will bear the brunt of the anger is not an option.
The lightweight vs the heavyweight
Getting to be a heavyweight boxing champion takes many years of training, a top coach and clear rules of engagement. Talent may well be the least of it.
The UK is sadly bereft of all of these as it bravely makes its way in a world where the boxing ring is riven with cracks and the ropes are frayed and broken. Trade giants of the likes of Peter Sutherland and Pascal Lamy built the global trade structure brick by brick, compromise by comprise, backed most notably and most crucially by the US.
But President Donald Trump’s disdain for traditional allies and alliances extends to the World Trade Organisation and its carefully wrought rules, which are in any case due for modernisation in a services and digital centred world. The application of unilateral tariffs on China, leading to an exchange of tit-for-tat, is not the worst of it. Rather, it is taking the fight outside the ring, as Mr Trump did by pressuring Canada to arrest the CFO of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, or blackmailing Mexico with a progressive 5% tariff on exports if it did not do more to curb illegal immigrants from Central America.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson last week held out the exciting prospect of a trade deal with the US in 2020. Here are six home truths on global trade which he might wish to share with the nation.