Britain needs better billionaires Mike Ashley is not an aberration of British capitalism. He is the norm Aug 27th 2026 Mike Ashley, a billionaire retailer, is more synonymous with a £6 ($8) Slazenger t-shirt than a £6,000 Saint Laurent leather jacket. After buying Harvey Nichols, with its flagship Knightsbridge department store, earlier this month, Mr Ashley commands an empire that does both. The deal would be easy to ignore. At £40m, the Harvey Nichols sale is a tiddler. With a net worth of £3.4bn, Mr Ashley is far from Britain’s richest man. Frasers, the retail conglomerate that he built from a single sportswear shop in Maidenhead, does not quite creep into the ftse 100. Yet Mr Ashley, more than any other figure, has come to personify the state of British capitalism, for good and ill.
To understand how, leave “Harvey Nicks”, hop on a Lime bike and pedal ten minutes up Piccadilly. Stop outside Lillywhites, a department store on Regent Street, Britain’s grandest shopping street. What was once an imposing old Victorian sports emporium that sold equipment is today in effect a branch of Sports Direct, the discount sportswear store that made Mr Ashley rich. In it piles of polyester shirts at 70% off are sold alongside £6 “beer pong” sets, where Lillywhites once sold croquet mallets. At Sports Direct Mr Ashley performed retail alchemy, turning polyester into billions. How did he manage it? Hammering suppliers, cheap labour and lousy working conditions. “We have it described to us as a gulag, as Victorian, as a workhouse, not a warehouse,” one union wallah told a parliamentary inquiry in 2016. A sheepish Mr Ashley appeared before mps, promising to undo the worst excesses. If he was guilty of anything it was giving people what they wanted: cheap goods. There is no period where working in a warehouse was well-paid, dignified work. Do you want five pairs of Slazenger socks for £4 or not? Poor management is often cited as a British malaise. In some ways, Frasers is an exception. Sports Direct, the group’s cash cow, is a ferociously well- run business to the chagrin of its critics. In others, it is an illustration of a lack of professionalism. Head to the Horse and Groom, a pub just north of Regent Street, to consider how. It was in here that a Sports Direct adviser claimed Mr Ashley agreed to pay a £15m bonus if the group’s share price hit £8. When it duly did, Mr Ashley argued any agreement should not be taken seriously given how much booze had been drunk. (“I’m a power drinker,” said Mr Ashley on the stand.) The executive argued this was par for the course in Mr Ashley’s meetings, recalling one event where Mr Ashley drank so much he puked into a fireplace, cheered on by colleagues. Mr Ashley won. Laments about British management gained another data point. Since then, Mr Ashley’s company has engaged in a hyperactive buying spree. And so a walk up Regent Street is a walk across his empire. That Burberry store? Mr Ashley controls about 4% of Britain’s only truly global luxury brand. He also owns just over a third of Mulberry, an expensive handbag company, whose shop is across the road. Hugo Boss? Mr Ashley upped his stake to 48% of the prominent German label. Frasers is less a retailer than a sort of hedge fund for people who want a mishmash of retail
stocks bought on a whim. Call it adhd Capital. What do Mr Ashley’s investors have to show from this hyperactivity? In 2014 Sports Direct was worth a bit over £4bn. In 2026, after a decade of frantic activity, it is worth a bit under £4bn. For all his riches, Mr Ashley is a symbol of British stagnation. But then this is typical of Britain’s best-known billionaires. A scroll through the Sunday Times rich list is a rundown of Bollygarchs, dukes and wheeler- dealers made good, like Mr Ashley. Among them are a few more successful entrepreneurs such as Nik Storonsky, founder of Revolut, a bank and one of the rare giants to have emerged in Britain in the past decade or so. Unlike America, Britain is far from the frontier of capitalism and its billionaires reflect that. For now, British capitalism is still better represented by Mr Ashley and his kind rather than any tech company. Bluntly, Britain is less rich than it thinks it is. Put it another way: British billionaires are so broke they can barely afford Britain’s trophy assets. The country’s most valuable ones are now out of reach for humble billionaires like Mr Ashley. He owned Newcastle United for 14 years, in which the club won nothing and was relegated (twice). Only oil states and American billionaires can afford to take a run at the Premier League. Mr Ashley sold Newcastle to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund in 2021; the club won its first major trophy in decades four years later. Instead, Mr Ashley is left bargain-hunting, picking up ostensibly luxury brands at poundshop prices, including the struggling Harvey Nichols. Turn off Regent Street and head to 1 Savile Row. Here stands Gieves & Hawkes, a tailor that dates back to the 18th century and fitted up Horatio Nelson. It has been part of Mr Ashley’s stable since 2022. Britain struggles to create new icons. All it can do is sell off its old ones to the highest bidder. Increasingly those bids are not high at all: Mr Ashley paid so little for Gieves & Hawkes it did not require a stock-market update. It is fashionable to believe that Britain would be better off without Mr Ashley, an entirely self-made man who contributes hundreds of millions to the exchequer each year by selling things people want. Yet for all that Mr Ashley personifies some of the failures of British capitalism, Britons have little choice but to hope for his future success. Few others are so invested in
the country’s high streets, least of all the country’s shoppers: Britons will do anything to keep their high streets alive other than actually visit them. And so, come 2040, if an aged Mr Ashley is worth many multiples of his pile, Britain will be in a much better place. Britain may not much like Mr Ashley, but it does need him to flourish. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/08/27/britain-needs-better-billionaires
AI is changing religion and religions are trying to change AI As his presidency flounders, Trump is more dangerous than ever
AI is changing religion and religions are trying to change AI Will chatbots supplant the advice of imams and priests or help them spread the word? Aug 27th 2026 “WE HOPE POPE LEO will see us as his soldiers,” says Matthew Harvey Sanders, the boss of Longbeard, a Catholic startup. In a room near the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, the firm’s robots scan ancient books, manuscripts and codices. Scholars have long struggled to make accessible much of the “great wisdom sitting on shelves” of Catholic institutions, he says, but advances in AI mean “we can now understand the insights” of even the most worn, ancient texts. His firm then feeds this corpus into a more modern form of religious communication: Magisterium AI, a chatbot that draws on a curated library of Catholic doctrine and
scholarship. According to Mr Sanders, it has millions of users across 190 countries, who use it to get “answers to profound questions”. Longbeard’s work shows how the world’s most cutting-edge technology is changing its oldest traditions. It also illuminates religious institutions’ and firms’ scramble to influence how AI is being developed and used. The technology is beginning to perform tasks that religions have carried out for millennia: shaping people’s outlook on life and helping them find meaning in it. The leading models are being developed by labs in Silicon Valley and China, without much religious input, which worries religious leaders. Pope Leo XIV argued in his first encyclical in May that technology is never neutral and takes on “characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it”. The fear is that AI will be unduly secular, and will undermine or even supplant religious beliefs. AI is changing religion in ways that many of the pious find troubling. Some are mundane, such as clerics’ growing use of it to prepare sermons and instruction. The Mormon church discourages sermons written by AI because “People ought to use their own feeling and inspiration,” says Gerrit Gong, one of its leaders. Wrestling with original texts, rather than AI summaries of them, is essential to the practice of Judaism, among other faiths. And homilies that rely on AI may include hallucinations such as misquoted scripture. A bigger concern is that AI may change the relationship between clergy and laity. The printing press put the Bible in the hands of many more Christians, fostering new interpretations of the faith, and then helped disseminate those views despite clerical objections. In a similar vein, the religious counsel provided by AI may diminish the importance of that provided by spiritual leaders. Waleed Kadous, who has developed Ansari, an AI chatbot for Muslims, worries that, because models are often “sycophantic and focus on the user, not their community”, believers may drift towards “more individualised” practice. At the extreme, AI is fuelling “religious improvisation”, says Beth Singler of the University of Zurich. As people interact more intensely with chatbots and with like-minded soul-searchers, some are forming loosely organised new faiths. For example, “Theta Noir”, a “spiritual collective”, awaits
MENA, a future superintelligence with God-like powers which will bestow on humanity “the great upgrade”. Perhaps religious leaders’ biggest worry about AI is that many people are turning to it rather than to spiritual authorities for answers. Shaza Nasheha, a 37-year-old Muslim from Singapore, says she often asks ChatGPT to explain Islamic concepts. Religious queries accounted for roughly 5% of the total in a publicly released data set of millions of conversations with AI chatbots, according to CEFE AI, a research initiative involving several faith- based universities. Yet these frontier models have a secular bias. A recent analysis by The Economist found that OpenAI’s models were more secular than respondents in any country on Earth (see chart). CEFE AI has put 150 questions about grief, relationships, morality and other personal or ethical problems to 27 large language models. In a forthcoming paper it describes how they invoke religion in only 5-16% of answers, even though people it surveyed averred that religious ideas would be relevant in 45-59% of cases. Users who ask AI for help because life feels meaningless, for example, may be directed to self-help rather than to an imam, priest or rabbi. “If companies assume secularism as defaults, there will be a weakening of faith,” says