Tag: UK

In Praise of the Entrepreneur: The Engine Behind Economic Growth

February 10, 2026 / David Alade

January’s news of the month centres on economic growth and the ecosystem in which it actually happens: a bold, ambitious one.

In a raw and unusually candid note about his time as Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak wrote that political pressure motivated him away from a strategic focus on economic growth and towards what he termed “affordability”. His own verdict was that this was a “[costly] mistake”. The note itself was written to draw the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer’s, attention to what he believes are the same errors being repeated (link below).

Octopus & Kraken: My Business of the Year (2025)

January 20, 2026 / David Alade

2025 was, on balance, a good year for UK business. And I would be right to say It did not always feel that way in real time.

There were the familiar frustrations: taxes rose again, political promises went unmet, and the drought of IPO on the London Stock Exchange continued to prompt uncomfortable questions about Britain’s competitiveness.

Yet beneath the surface noise, the picture was far from bleak. The FTSE 100 delivered a historic 21% return in 2025, closing the year at record highs and crossing the 10,000 mark on the first trading day of 2026. UK companies raised over $8 billion in venture capital, with investment up 3% in the first half of 2025 compared with the second half of 2024 (HSBC). Meanwhile, 426,000 new companies were incorporated in H1 2025 (NatWest), including record AI companies – pointing to a broad-based recovery in entrepreneurial confidence.

So there were the bad and the good.

December – Hope for affordable housing

January 2, 2026 / David Alade

If you’ve been waiting for an update on my most important business and economic news of December, it is finally here. The holidays delayed its publication until now.

November – Hope for energy affordability in the UK

November 30, 2025 / David Alade

As the curtain closes on November, I have my candidate for the most important piece of economic and business news from the UK for you (if you missed previous months, see comment for links)

It’s about energy in the UK. First, let’s do some reality checks

There Only 5000 ISA Millionaires in the UK

November 23, 2025 / David Alade

The millionaire threshold of wealth is often used to measure some sort of arrival, especially when based on hard currencies like the pound or usd or euro. So, it is often actively tracked. In the UK, there are approximately 3.1 million millionaires (1).

October – Matt Clifford’s 14-minute talk ignites entrepreneurial hope in the UK

October 31, 2025 / David Alade

When you think about the UK and take time to analyse all the news published about its business and economy, you could easily become depressed by the state of things. Government barely scraping by, businesses struggling to survive, consumers losing wealth — it’s often hard to find news that lifts you up. Well, that was the case until what I’m about to share.

September – Kraken spun out of Octopus Energy

September 30, 2025 / David Alade

For me, the most important business story of September out of the UK was the news of Kraken being spun out of Octopus Energy to become an independent company — valued at $10 billion.

In an earlier post I made on Twitter, I expressed how impressed I am with the success of the company. It’s a peerless story and one that makes for a great study: how a radical focus on customer satisfaction, enabled by technological innovation, can create tremendous shareholder value — even in a sector as old as energy.