Tomorrow's Business Today
Britain needs some good PR
A Dark Day for England howls the back page of The Daily Mail which has alighted on football in its latest bid to Be Very Cross.
The England football team’s new manager is German and Nigel Farage is predictably upset.
They could point out that this gives him the same heritage as the Royal Family, but they don’t mention that for some reason.
Working for The Mail must be exhausting, since you constantly have to pretend that this was the best country on earth, until yesterday, when it all got completely ruined.
If you listened to Farage or indeed most of the mainstream news this week, you’d get the idea that Britain is a backwards, struggling place, up to its eye-balls in debt and falling well behind its peers in most ways.
The nation really needs some good PR.
Sadly the people in charge of providing that are the new government ministers, and they are into self-promotion only.
Paul Weller, about to make his acting debut, isn’t remotely surprised. He tells The Observer about his dabbling with politics: “Once I met the people involved, I thought, ‘Get me out of here.’ Forget showbusiness, these people had egos the size of that barn.”
The MPs are also complicit in driving the narrative that everything is broken. The fight is about who to blame.
They could challenge this set-up, if they had any gumption.
I’m not saying I miss Boris Johnson’s boosterism, but it was in some ways preferable to Keir Starmer, who permanently looks like he is about to say sorry for something he insists he didn’t do.
In other developments, four of this year’s Nobel prize winners were born and educated in the UK.
Of the world’s top 10 universities, three are in the UK.
Starmer’s speech this week gave a nod to life sciences, AI, tech, creative industries and legal services, but he managed to make it sound glum.
Poppy Gustafsson, the former Darktrace boss who is now his head of Office For Investment put it like this:
“When you’re marketing into the US you have to say ‘this is the best technology that has ever existed in the world’,” she said. “Whereas British marketing tends to be ‘terribly sorry, if you have a spare minute, would you mind possibly having a look?’”
A few other things at which we excel: Museums. Music. Electrical plugs (best in the world). Tolerance. Aerospace. Sarcasm.
And engineering. We’re brilliant at it. HS2 is a disaster, but that’s down to the politicians not the engineers.
The PR industry also seems to be doing well. Time for its best brains to do some pro bono work in the name of cheering us up and reminding us that most of the problems we face are global and those that aren’t are fixable.
Please send candidates for press release of the day to: Simon.english@roxhillmedia.com
Press release of the day
Competition for graduate jobs has hit a record high, with 140 applicants per position, up 59% on a year ago.
Digital and IT roles attract the most applicants, roles in charity and the public sector the fewest, says the Institute of Student Employers.
Stephen Isherwood, joint CEO of ISE, says: “The current jobs market is tough for graduates with a considerable jump in applications per vacancy. While this marks a positive move from employers encouraging applications from a broader pool of candidates, the downside is that this amounts to millions of rejection messages to students in the last year.”
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