Business News How we remained on course to
Paul Kehoe completes two years as Chamber president at the annual meeting on 28 September. Here he reflects on the political and economic changes in the UK during his time in office, not least the ramifications of
simply from the potential economic fallout that may transpire by a failure of political leadership to deliver a satisfactory outcome for the strategic direction of the nation with regard to its trading with the EU and the rest of the world. You might recall that the theme
T
of my presidency has been “Geography and Scale – our place in the world.” The geography is important in that we have always been a maritime nation with significant trading links across the world. True today as it was in the 16th to 20th Centuries. Our scale and pre-eminence has shifted with wars, trading recessions and changing trading partners. In the post WW2 years a move
away from our colonial past shifted us towards a rejuvenating Europe and the rise of the Common Market. That desire to be part of Europe led us into an ever- increasingly closer union with our European trading partners and we turned our backs to some extent on the very Commonwealth we helped create. Nevertheless, our place on the world stage was diminishing through the real economic fallout from fighting two world wars within the space of 25 years. Notwithstanding that decline, we
have in the last 20 years seen a resurgence in our overall business performance, albeit the mix of our product base has changed massively and we have become a service-based economy. What has remained and still
shines though is our resilience and our ability to invent new things even though the exploitation may be somewhat more difficult to deliver upon. We are a nation of ideas and continue to be one of the most creative nations. Being creative, looking for new
ways of doing things, will stand us in good stead but we must recognise that we need to train our people to work in and live in a society where skills are valued and you learn from your mistakes and excel at what you do. We need to ensure that we equip
our children with the skills to work in a world where change is
8 CHAMBERLINK September 2018
Paul Kehoe, president of the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce
constant and asymmetry is the norm. The rate of change seems even
faster than it was six years ago when I came up with my theme for
the presidency. We need to maintain a global presence and be outward- looking, diversifying our portfolios, creating organisations that can deal with risk and are not risk averse.
I hope that members of the
Chamber will have seen that my mission was to inform internally and externally, that our region is a creative and industrious one, which
he past two years have experienced some of the biggest challenges to the UK
Brexit on the UK’s trading relationship with not just Europe, but the rest of the world. All of this ties in with the theme that Mr Kehoe adopted at the start of his presidency, which was about the UK’s place in a changing world.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80
