Just because trade unions are often in conflict with business does not mean they should not be businesslike. Now that the cabin-crews’ dispute with Britain Airways Plc (LON:BAY) is in its second year, union members ought to be wondering whether their leaders could learn something from the company’s management.
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Yes, the media was partly responsible for England failing to host the 2018 World Cup. Not because of the BBC and Sunday Times accusations about Fifa, however, but because the media carping would continue. Why ask an unfriendly nation to host the football tournament when so many other countries would welcome it?
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Now that Britain has a 30% Club to bring more women into boardrooms, how about a campaign to recruit more left-handed directors, more red-heads – more Welsh, more tall people, more…. You see how silly quotas are?
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If you want an answer to that old question of why there are so few women business managers, don’t look in Britain’s boardrooms, look in the country’s classrooms instead. A glance at the summer’s A-level results shows that girls don’t do commerce.
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On bids, business secretary Vince Cable is like a dog with a bone. Having bullied the Takeover Panel into revising its rules he has rejected the result and set up his own review. He can’t accept that the current system works well.
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It’s right that students pay for their university education but you don’t need a degree to see that a graduate tax is the wrong way to recoup the cost. Let’s hope we can rely on the former BP boss, Lord Browne, to tell politicians their proposed tax is bad.
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Hasn’t history taught us to be wary of empires built on pyramids of quoted companies? Yet one of the UK’s two main power generating companies is about to find itself as the middle bricks of just such a pyramid – a quoted company controlled by another yet owning the majority of subsidiaries that are themselves listed.
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What does it say when the government sets up an inquiry into why there are so few women in boardrooms – and appoints a man to head it. Is that to prove the inquiry’s independence or is it because the committee wanted a proven company leader and most such leaders are male?
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Honda Motor, Toyota Motor and Mazda Motor all hold their shareholders’ meeting on exactly the same day.
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What’s the worst late-deal from the Thomson holiday group? It’s dividend. Investors have to wait until October 2010 to receive profits earned 12 months earlier. Compared with a delayed flight, that’s a long wait with no compensation.

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