Saturday September 7 2024
Swindon & Wiltshire News
Each month John Davies, senior corporate partner at Top 100 law firm Thrings, casts an honest, humorous and at times, irreverent eye over a topical news or business-related issue. This month: the General Election.
Readers beware! As 2014 becomes a dim and distant memory and we look to our business strategies and forecasts for 2015 and beyond, a word of caution. Two words actually: General Election.
Polling day has been set for 7 May, and between now and spring, UK citizens will subjected to 24-hour, Election-themed news, as political editors, political correspondents and worthy and noble commentators take hold of our airwaves, ether-web and newspapers and tell us what we ought to be thinking.
The media will whip up a frenzy. Politicians will, in one spin-doctored breath, cry foul and hail success in the push and pull of political debate. We will be poked and prodded about our beliefs and our allegiances. Are we blue, yellow, red, green or indeed purple? I say “reader beware” because it’s easy to get distracted by the ritual carnage of Westminster, or ‘The Tussle on the Thames’.
But neither UK PLC nor our own regional economy can afford to get too distracted. If those delicate green shoots of recovery are to further sprout and blossom, then we in business must keep our eyes open to opportunity and our heads down to build a stronger economy. Westminster can argue until the cows come home, but without those of us at the coalface doing our utmost to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ there will be nothing to argue over.
So enjoy the circus, revel in the debate, laugh at the laughable and even change your socks to your chosen colour of the day. But don’t forget to remember what’s really important: that the business of doing business, seizing opportunity and creating wealth needs just as much, if not more, attention.
Non-party political broadcast over.
Since leaving Wales to set up home in Swindon in 1997, John Davies has become a leading figure in the South West business community. He lists advising Wiltshire-based Watson Petroleum on its sale to World Fuel in 2014, being named Client Partner of the Year by The Lawyer and sitting next to Max Boyce at a funeral among his greatest achievements.
