Jim Armitage: Theresa May showing way?
I doubt if Sir Philip and Mike Ashley were invited to tonight’s Guildhall dinner for City grandees. But they’ll be a heavy presence in the room as Theresa May warms up her business-bashing rhetoric in the wake of the US election.
When she cites the public’s anger at executives who “game the system and work to a different set of rules”, we know exactly who she’s talking about.
The trouble is that, while Green and Ashley fit the bill for being greedy and uncaring in the public’s mind, such corporate characteristics did not spur the main resentments of Trump voters.
The greatest anger among those communities here and in the US that May describes as “the overlooked” is that big employers have outsourced skilled jobs abroad and become too close to government elites.
Say what you will about our two pantomime villains of retail, they’re guilty of neither of those charges.
The unemployment and low wages angering supporters of Trump, and for that matter Ukip and Marine Le Pen, are the by-products of the globalisation which generations of businesses and governments have welcomed.
And, for all the anger that it generates in those who suffer from it, globalisation is here to stay.
Unravelling the systematic global shift in the way goods are made and services delivered is too big a task for any government on a five-year term. If Trump doesn’t already know it, he will soon learn.
May is perhaps a step ahead: far easier to demonise a tiny minority of businesspeople than admit she’s at the whim of far greater global forces than herself.
