As aficionados of 1970s situation comedy know well, Basil Fawlty did not support the UK’s entering the “continent”, but graciously pledged to make as good a stab at it as he could.
“I didn’t vote for it myself, quite honestly, but now that we’re in I’m determined to make it work,” he told a family of unfortunate German visitors staying at his terrible Torquay hotel. That was just after a bump on the head was to have disastrous consequences, causing Fawlty to ignore his own advice and repeatedly mention the war to his guests.
If you worry that we haven’t travelled all that far in the almost three years since the EU referendum, then watch the Fawlty Towers episode entitled The Germans and it might put those concerns into perspective. You will possibly conclude that we haven’t budged that much in 44 years, either.
Anyway, in a segue so strained it might come from a sitcom script, a comparable collection of themes will present itself this week at the annual conference of the British Chambers of Commerce. Organisers are keen to inform patrons that the business lobby group is aiming “not to mention the B word”, although, like Fawlty Towers viewers, delegates know the term will inevitably keep slipping out.
Still, the conference, which takes place a mere can-kick down the road from parliament, is a major event in the corporate calendar and has always attracted a big-name cast. Over recent years, delegates have heard from the likes of the former prime minister Gordon Brown in 2008, the former chancellor George Osborne in 2011, and, er, the trade secretary, Liam Fox, last year, as well as a gaggle of top opposition politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn and Chuka Umunna (though not at the same time).
This year’s line-up is similarly star-studded. Two ministers will deliver keynotes (security concerns mean we can’t mention them either) while Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and Keir Starmer, the shadow secretary of state for the impending event that cannot be named, will also take to the stage. It would be nice to bring you a preview of what all of these statespeople might say, but it’s unlikely that the political speeches will be written much more than a day in advance though please don’t take that as a suggestion that our leaders are making it up on the hoof).
Along with the politicians come the bosses and theorists, including the Tesco chief executive, Dave Lewis, (he’ll be speaking on the future of the high street) and Pawel Adrjan, a former Goldman Sachs economist who now plies his trade at the jobs group Indeed. Adrjan will be dealing with his analysis of the state of the UK labour market, including the question of whether, in an era of almost full employment, there is anyone left in the UK to hire. The answer, according to Adrjan, is yes
Employers struggling to find recruits might consider looking in new places, he will say, by increasing their efforts to search across underemployed demographic groups (young people, single parents, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities) in order to “offset pressures from the fall in the number of European workers in the UK”.
He has previously argued that while employers have “increased hiring from some underutilised domestic groups, unemployment rates for all those groups are still high. These represent areas of hiring opportunity.”
All of which brings us back to enduring relevance of Fawlty, who’s the sort of business owner Adrjan might be addressing. As the dreadful hotelier complained: “You can’t get the staff.” You still can, it seems.
