Primark: The corporate symbol of a discount Brexit Britain?

Where the analogy falls down is that this is a focussed and successful business run by clever people

Primark is increasing its global clout, by contrast to the nation it calls home (Getty)

If each country had a corporate symbol, what would it be?

For America under Barak Obama it might have been Google. Innovative, inclusive, ambitious, outward looking, with, let’s not forget, a sizeable slug of self regard and self interest at the same time.

Under Donald Trump? He’d like it to be the Trump Organization, but a better analogue might be a polluting, backward looking oil major. But one that could still clean up its act if the CEO were to be fired.

For South Korea you might say Samsung. For China, Huawei (fast growing, slightly scary), for Russia Gazprom (obviously) and for Germany, one of its industrial giants.

Which brings us to Britain. I don’t doubt the choice of the naval gazing Brexiteers who dominate the establishment and the country right now: HSBC.

Headquartered here, but with its feet planted firmly in the electric economies of South East Asia, it slots into their fantasies of a ‘global Britain’ shorn of the EU (where it doesn’t do much).

The colonial roots of the business also chime with their imperialist fever dreams.

As for its dark side - the money laundering allegations that plague the bank, the controversy over the involvement of its Swiss unit in tax avoidance? That also seems about right, if we’re being honest. After all, what do you think the City of London will turn to when the international banks have all disappeared off to Frankfurt?

So HSBC might work. But it's big and rich. That doesn't reflect the reality of the Britain those Europhobes are creating. That requires a rather different symbol: How about Primark.

It makes sense on several levels. It’s a discount retailer for a discount country. It's a business that will go on expanding in a Britain whose citizens have already been made poorer, with the prospect of worse to come, and so can’t afford posher shops. Under the Conseravtive Party we are a Primark nation. We'll probably have about as many rights as the people in the factories that make its clothes by the time the Government's done too.

But there are some respects in which the retailer as the business symbol of Britain fails, just as HSBC does.

Whatever you might think of it, Primark is a very, very good business, run by some very, very smart people. That, unfortunately for those of us that live here, is not something that can be said of the executives in charge of UK plc. Our board of directors, the Tory cabinet, is made up of a squabbling, back biting bunch. Parts of it are lobbying for the removal of one of its few semi-competent directors (Chancellor Philip Hammond), which speaks volumes.

Primark is also increasingly acquiring a global reputation. The nearly 20 per cent rise in revenues, evidenced in the just released results, was driven by the company’s growing international clout.

Primark has garnered that through being focussed and very clear about what it is and what it does.

The same cannot be said of Brexit Britain. The New York Times recently described us as an island nation “umoored”. “No One Knows What Britain is Anymore,” the headline opined. Sadly that's true.

So while Primark works as our corporate symbol on some levels, it falls flat on others.

Perhaps we need to go back the drawing board. Erm, Northern Rock?