I’m sick of playing Footsie with 100 so I’m opting to get flirty with 30

VAT hikes, public-sector job cuts, problems in the eurozone are all cited by bosses as reasons to temper British business cheer for the New Year.

Yet analysts whom we polled predicted the
Footsie would rise by 11% in 2011 nonetheless.

Why so? Because the index these days is so dominated by foreign mining and exploration stocks with little more than a brass plaque in SW1 that it no longer bears any resemblance to the real British economy.

No matter what happens to UK businesses, if China's demand for minerals continues apace, the Footsie will keep on rising.

At the time of writing, on a dull day for the equities market, the FTSE 100 Index is down 6.95 points, of which 5.36 points is made up of the mainly foreign BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto.

The Footsie has become like the football Premier League — dominated by foreign superstars who mask the underlying weakness of our homegrown talent.

We can't just blame the newcomers to London for this situation. Many of Britain's biggest employers — Cadbury, Boots, BOC, Pilkington, Chloride — have been taken over by bigger foreign owners. Swathes of our industries have disappeared off the radar.

Despite the protests of the odd backbench MP, not much can be done about that.

So I'd like to make my pitch for the FT 30 Index. Like the German DAX and the mighty Dow Jones Industrial Average, it only covers 30 companies.

But, with a few howling exceptions (Tesco, Shell and HSBC spring to mind) which could be easily remedied by perhaps an FT 40, they offer a good reflection of Britain without the polluting effect of all those diggers from countries ending in 'stan.

The excellent Bloomberg helpdesk had never heard of it and the FT's own website only seems to give day-old prices, so it's clearly got some way to go before replacing its big brother in the minds of the major fund managers. But if you want to bet for (or against) UK Plc, surely the FT 40 is the place to be.