ANY OTHER BUSINESS| MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Has Hammond saved the high street?
No, but every little helps
mass-market demand for electric vehicles in
a decade’s time or less.
One obstacle, here and on the continent,
is the failure of governments to accelerate
the creation of networks of fast- charging
stations, as opposed to low-powered sock-
ets that require a 45-minute pitstop; Ham-
mond’s Budget barely nodded in that
direction, with an extension of an existing
tax relief. BMW, Daimler, Ford and Volk-
swagen have joined forces to solve the
problem for themselves with a 400-station
super-fast charging network called Ionity
— but only 45 of its stations will be in the
UK. If you happen to have ordered a state-
of-the-art Jaguar I-Pace, with a claimed but
reportedly variable range of up to 292 miles,
be prepared for old-fashioned motoring
adventure as you watch the power gauge
drop and scan the map for the next avail-
able charging point.
‘Thinkin’ of buyin’ an electric car,’ said a
chap in the club recently, suggesting not-so-
early adopters are starting to see the future.
‘Some of them can even reach Dorset, you
know.’ I hope he’s right.Highway robbery
While I’m in Mr Toad mode, as it were, let
me salute the FairFuelUK campaign for its
feisty post-Budget press release. Far from
content with Hammond’s ninth-year-in-a-
row fuel-duty freeze, it listed a stack of other
grievances, including ‘Still no independ-
ent pump price monitoring body to check
opportunistic profiteering in the fuel sup-
ply chain’ — and I’m in sympathy. One day
in September I filled up at Tesco at 126.9p
per litre; three days later at Moto’s Trow-
ell services on the M1, I paid 153.9p, break-
ing the £100-tank barrier for the first time.
There was no sudden global oil crisis, but
it was Sunday morning and an algorithm
somewhere must have jacked up the price
to exploit the fact that few other stations
were open in the vicinity: pure ‘opportunis-
tic profiteering’. If you see similar examples,
do email me: [email protected].H
ow much did Philip Hammond’s
giveaway Budget help dying town
centres? Not enough, say cam-
paigners, but let’s give the Chancellor some
credit. A one-third relief in business rates
for retail properties with a rateable value of
less than £51,000 means an annual saving of
up to £8,000 for a huge number of small
businesses; pubs where people still drink
beer and spirits in old-fashioned style ben-
efit from a duty freeze that one industry
body says will ‘secure upwards of 3,000 jobs’;
and there’s money to help convert disused
premises into homes.
On the other hand, there was a £3 bil-
lion sting for the growing army of freelance
‘consultants’ and techies who contribute so
much to the new urban economy but whom
the Treasury suspects of helping companies
that hire them to avoid payroll taxes. IPSE,
a lobby group for the self-employed, called
it ‘a short-term tax grab that will do lasting
damage... by taxing out of existence the
smallest and most agile businesses’. I suspect
that’s right: abuse may be curtailed, but with
too much collateral damage to those genu-
inely trying to go it alone.
Then there’s the ‘digital services tax’,
aimed at the online advertising revenues
of the likes of Google, Facebook and Twit-
ter, but not at direct sales by Amazon et al.
Even the Chancellor’s own figures say this
will raise only £400 million a year: a Labour
MP called it ‘pathetically tokenistic’. At best
it’s a stumbling step in a direction other gov-
ernments will follow, but I doubt it will make
a jot of difference to the ragtag rearguard of
bricks-and-mortar shopkeepers.
Temple of delusion
Our Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? event pro-
duced a rollicking debate, though I can’t
claim the house was evenly divided: mine
was the only sceptical voice among a congre-
gation eager to receive the gospel according
to Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bit-
coin Standard: the Decentralized Alternative
to Central Banking. He argued that bitcoin’s
finite supply — enshrined in its supposedly
unhackable software protocol — will even-
tually create an immutable store of value
at least as good as gold, and an alternative
reserve currency that will supplant the US
dollar and other debased ‘fiat’ money.
I argued in response that bitcoin is just
another online gambling chip, but one
that happens to come wrapped in cultish
ideology. If its performance becomes less
volatile than it has been over the past two
years, punters will drift elsewhere in search
of excitement. Arthur Hayes, chief execu-
tive of the BitMEX trading platform which
sponsored the conference, made my point
for me when he said his customers like bit-
coin ‘because the price moves a lot’. Asked
whether he’s a bitcoin investor himself, he
replied: ‘Why bet on the horses when you
own the racetrack?’
Ammous’s presentation ended bizarrely
with a slide comparing Michelangelo’s Sis-
tine Chapel to a modern abstract artwork,
his thesis being that bitcoin will be recog-
nised as a timeless masterpiece long after
other currencies, fiat or crypto, have been
exposed as ephemeral dross. That triggered
a memory which I struggled to crystallise
until later: it was of visiting the Venetian
casino resort complex in Las Vegas, with its
Rialto Bridge and its fake Tiepolo ceilings:
a temple of faux-grandeur and delusion in
which the odds will always favour the house.
That, to me, is what bitcoin is all about.Electric pitstops
It’s tempting to take another pop at the
Brexit-supporting inventor-industrialist Sir
James Dyson for announcing that his £2 bil-
lion electric car factory will be sited in Sin-
gapore, rather than adjacent to his Wiltshire
research centre. But the truth is that most of
the electric-car action, both in early adop-
tion by motorists and in development of
next-generation battery power, is in Asia,
with China well in the lead. Yet another
travail of the UK auto industry is its rela-
tive unreadiness to meet what’s likely to be