British retailing guru says Ireland will find a solution

IRELAND WILL be “fine”, according to Sir Stuart Rose, one of Britain’s most powerful retailers.

“The fact that you’ve got a local conversation going on at the moment on the basis of nervousness in the euro zone, and/or a conversation with the IMF or the European banking officials, is just what I call routine business as usual,” said the Marks & Spencer chairman.

Sir Stuart had been speaking at a Business in the Community conference on corporate responsibility at Dublin’s Aviva stadium on Lansdowne Road yesterday.

“I’m sure you’ll end up with a solution,” he said. Describing himself as an “optimist” and “an unreconstructed capitalist”, he outlined the profitability of M&S’s “Plan A” ethical commitments, before being drawn into a good- humoured debate about whether “sustainable growth” was an oxymoron in these days of finite planetary resources.

Roger Steare, a philosopher at the Cass Business School, argued that sustainability was incompatible with corporate growth. “Growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell,” said Mr Steare, proposing a return to a localism.

“Corporations are a dysfunctional form of human organisation, a feudal plutocracy led by people who are the equivalent of gun-toting bandits . . . with some honourable exceptions,” he said, mindful of his audience.

“It’s a good thing I’m five weeks away from retirement,” Sir Stuart joked.

“Delist, become a mutual and MS will embrace Plan B,” Mr Steare advised.

“We looked at it, it wasn’t financially doable,” Sir Stuart replied.

M&S, which opens its 21st Irish store at Douglas in Cork next week, is 126 years old.

“We’ve been through the first World War, we’ve been through the second World War,” he said, explaining why he was taking it all in his stride.

The former M&S chief executive, whose double-jobbing spell as executive chairman earned the ire of shareholders, passed on the reins to Marc Bolland – one of the UK’s best- paid chief executives – in May.

Sir Stuart said he did not “have any problem with creating money or paying money”, but there was perhaps a “conversation” to be had about profit and pay.

“On an individual basis, should a chief executive earn a thousand times more than a worker on the shop floor? What is the right balance?”

At the end of this year, Sir Stuart will leave the retailer that first employed him in 1972. After stints at the Burton Group, Argos, Booker and Arcadia, he returned to M&S in 2004 to fend off a hostile takeover bid from Arcadia’s owner, Sir Philip Green.

“Listen, I had a specific role when I came back. The business, I’m not ashamed to say, was in a crisis, an identity crisis of its own,” he said. “I had a role to come in and stop the company from being sold privately, to retain its independence, to rejuvenate it . . . in the meantime, the bit which I didn’t expect, is that we had a recession come along as well.”

What will he do next?

“I’m going to download my brain of Marks & Spencer stuff. I’m going to go to Australia to watch the fifth [Ashes] test with my son. Then I’m going to come back around January 20th and wait for the phone to ring.”