Opinion

Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. I have read of countries in the world that actually fund their key services properly to ensure the country can keep its citizens well-educated, healthy and safe in times of emergency. Alas, they are all far away from here and, as a recent well-documented ‘survey’ suggests, half our population believes these European chaps have got it all wrong anyway and we have nothing to learn from them. Our education system, like the police...

A recent article by a dairy chief executive describes an industry in crisis, stating that demand for milk products are falling. It blames health professionals for warning the younger generations away from dairy, and speaks of a new ‘three-a-day’ dairy campaign to be launched soon. This initiative will promote daily portions of milk, butter and cheese. But hang on a minute: why are we being told yet again to ignore the experts? At the risk of stating the obvious, surely...

The author Lionel Shriver gave a speech at the Brisbane Writers' Festival recently outlining how the culture of hypersensitivity was a threat to fiction writing. How, she asked, could authors create fictional worlds and characters if every word they wrote was policed and every plot scrutinised for bias and – God forbid – cultural appropriation? Shriver outlined a no-win scenario for authors: depict people from outside your social group and you're accused of stealing their experiences, have no minorities in...

It was with a gnawing sense of despair that I haven’t felt since referendum results day that I watched my boss tip back his office chair, newspaper in hand and pronounce with great glee that, as he had so wisely predicted, things are back to normal for Britain. All those Remain doomsayers who predicted a slippery demise for Britain have been proved wrong. UK employment is on course for another record, the economy expanded at a reasonable rate, house prices...

By Angela Clements, CEO & Founder, Fair for You In 2014, in the world of unsecured personal credit, there were few offering credit to those people on low incomes, and who have to take credit and pay it back each week or fortnight; people who can’t get credit from their banks or building society. Most of those providers charged what most of us would consider to be high interest rates, high fees and inflated prices for the items, which would keep...

By Janelle Butterfield, Macmillan Cancer Support Companies teaming up with charities is by no mean a new endeavour, but as the market becomes ever busier and more competitive, non-for-profits are demonstrating the value of aligning with them by proposing more partnerships with a cross sector service element to extend reach whilst helping their corporate friends understand and engage key audiences. On a basic level, partnerships with charities are a great way to boost staff morale – particularly if times are uncertain. With...

By Asma Shah, CEO of You Make It Sports Direct saw a brief change in fortunes on Tuesday when its decision to drop ‘zero hour contracts’ apparently led to an immediate jump of five per cent in its share price. They are beset by a number of other problems at board level and have struggled to maintain this bounce. As a leading player in retail its actions over this type of contract may well cause a ripple across the sector. The...

Do we really need yet another Facebook friend suggestion? With 71 per cent of us admitting that there’s at least one person in our friends list that we don’t know, surely the answer is no. Identity has never been more important to us, but in a world of social media addicts, are we letting too many people in? There isn’t a single person who isn’t unique, even an identical twin is completely distinctive in their own way. Our identity is...

By Matt O’Connor, Founder, Fathers4Justice While the debate around the fatherless society is normally framed by emotional and legal arguments, few have considered the seismic impact this has on our economy. The devastating cancer of family breakdown and fatherlessness isn’t just laying waste to families, it also comes at a punitive human and economic cost to employers and the taxpayer. The numbers involved are jaw dropping. More than our defence budget According the Relationships Foundation ‘Cost of Family Failure Index’, the...