Hello from The National and welcome to the View from London – your weekly guide to the big stories from our London bureau
Talking up
For a guide to what the financial services industry thinks of Chancellor Rachel Reeves's options in her landmark financial statement this morning, I turned to a doyen of the sector. Growth has been illusory so far this year. Next week Donald Trump is promising the US liberation day with the global tariff regime.
Is there a sweet spot that could turn things around for the UK? Chris Hayward, policy director of the City of London, which is home to the financial services industry, advised Ms Reeves that with focus on better investment conditions and relative UK stability, the statement could be hailed as a success.
"The City of London is being seen as a safe haven for investment at the moment and it's helped, of course, by having a stable government, the government that's got a large majority for four or five years," Mr Hayward told The National in the run-up to the Chancellor's signature spring statement. "The conditions to invest and the language of the government around it are actually an attraction."
The Labour government is less than a year old and, while proclaiming economic growth as a priority, it has been trapped with a flatlining economy and deteriorating public finances. To Mr Hayward, a necessary message of recovery would go a long way towards stopping the slide.
"We tend to always be a nation that spends a lot of time apologising or explaining why things can't happen. What we've got to do is take a much more proactively positive approach to when we're talking about the opportunities," he said.
One initiative Ms Reeves is expected to bring forward that is overtly pro-foreign investment is joining up with the City of London's expertise for a new approach to cultivating foreign investment in the UK.
I have to say I was less generous in my assessment of how the Heathrow Airport shutdown on Friday symbolised how things in the UK are too hidebound. The country has had something of a lost decade of low-to-nil productivity growth and higher taxes. This is a whole-of-society problem that, at the top of the funnel, resulted in the high-profile failure at the airport, a global transport node transiting hundreds of thousands of passengers every day.
On the day, reporters asked about the critical infrastructure risks of leaving the UK's only hub airport reliant on a single substation for its electrical supply. Subsequent accounts revealed it did have other sources of electricity but would have needed an out-of-hours reboot to bring these into its systems. Instead, authorities decided to close the airport for the day, causing major airline disruptions. It also emerged that the crucial decisions were made while Heathrow’s chief executive slept, having turned the response over to his deputies after midnight.
Damien McElroy
London bureau chief
Hassabis on AI
Meet Demis Hassabis. Or at least, our columnist Chris Blackhurst has just done so. The 48-year old tech bro is self-made, super-rich, a veritable demigod in software coding and AI, Blackhurst says. He is also dedicating his abilities to a solution to one of the toughest medical challenges: how to predict the folding of protein into the different shapes that herald all manner of conditions, from Alzheimer’s to cancer.
As a result of his application of AI and his generosity, medical research teams around the planet are accelerating their efforts in leaps that were never thought possible. Breakthroughs are coming and they will be down to Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, an achievement for which they were jointly awarded last year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Hassabis is the focus of the new documentary film, The Thinking Game. In a nutshell, when he was setting out in computing, giant mainframes were the leading edge of a costly and slow industry. In no time at all, computers were on desks, then they were laptops and hand-held. Programming went from being exclusive and rarefied to being practised by people in their bedrooms. Now the suggestion is AI will soon be modelled in those same bedrooms.
Something of colossal capability will be readily accessible to anyone who puts their mind to it.
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German gremlins
A row over whether to deny refugees entry to Germany if they come from Syria, Afghanistan or Turkey is delaying a new government from being formed in Berlin.
Olaf Scholz's term as chancellor formally ended on Tuesday as Germany's new parliament met for the first time, after Friedrich Merz's conservatives won an election last month. Mr Scholz has been asked to stay on as caretaker until a new coalition is finalised.
Mr Merz campaigned on blocking asylum seekers at Germany's borders – a concept Mr Scholz called illegal under EU law. Mr Merz had hoped to be in power by Easter but that appears to be doubtful as the two parties squabble in coalition talks, with migration a crucial dividing line.
