What marketers should do in a recession from Jonathan Gabay on Vimeo.
Friday, 8 May 2009
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Iain Dale on MP's expenses
Iain Dale has just posted this on Twitter:
ALERT: Telegraph has bought disc of MPs expenses. They are splashing on it tomorrow. Will try to monitor developments over the next hours.
Sounds exciting.
ALERT: Telegraph has bought disc of MPs expenses. They are splashing on it tomorrow. Will try to monitor developments over the next hours.
Sounds exciting.
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Jonathan Gabay On ITV News
This evening, communications consultant and speaker, Jonathan Gabay featured on the ITV News. He was holding some discussions earlier today in Dulwich, the district in south-east London where schools have been closed due to swine 'flu.
Monday, 4 May 2009
Iain Dale writes about UKIP
Iain Dale recently interviewed Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP
My GQ Interview With Nigel Farage
Iain Dale 8:25 PM
In the May issue of GQ Magazine I wrote a lengthy profile of UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Now that the issue is no longer on sale, I am posting it on the blog...
Being leader of a political party which stands a snowball’s chance in hell of ever achieving real power is not a very rewarding occupation. You need the patience of a saint, the hide of a wildebeest and the tenacity of a Duracell bunny. Luckily for his party, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party possesses all three, and if Oscars were awarded for optimism in the face of adversity, Nigel Farage would sweep the board.
In his two and a half years in the post, Farage has given UKIP a profile they had previously only attained during European election campaigns. He has aggressively courted the media and to some effect. He is the only recognizable face of a political party previously dominated by old fogies but now being dragged kicking and screaming into the new media age. Farage’s personal profile has engendered bitter jealousies from those who believe he is using UKIP for his own ends. His enemies accuse him of personal vanity and far worse. But he is unrepentant. He knows that any modern day politician’s success or failure is largely defined through the prism of the media.
So who is this man who his critics decry as a ‘Little Englander’ and his supporters believe could be the saviour of British sovereignty?
Nigel Farage was born 45 years ago in the village of Downe, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where he still lives. Down is famous as the birthplace of another famous man who rebelled against the conventional wisdom and believed in the survival of the fittest, Charles Darwin. But there, the similarities end. Farage is a chain smoking, hard drinking, pin-striped loving, Fedora wearing father of four with a German wife, and who bears an uncanny likeness to the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.
Farage went to the local prep school and then attended his father’s alma mater Dulwich College. He was in his element there. “I loved the tradition of it all,” he explains. “I couldn’t have been more involved in the life of the school if I had tried.” He was in the Army Cadet Force, the politics society, the cricket club, the rugby club – everything. He loved to challenge what he was taught and delighted in being argumentative, especially with the kind of teachers who he refers to as the ‘Bob Dylan set’. He had far more time for the more traditional schoolmasters who had had a good war and drifted into teaching. “I adored them and responded well to them,” he reflects. “They thought nothing of doing nets with you three nights a week. It was a vocation for them.” But even at school, he was obsessed by the issue of Europe according to his then classmate Nick Owen. “He chuntered on about Europe and everyone thought he was barking mad. He’s still chuntering on about Europe…” Owen recalls that even at school, the young Nigel Farage was into making money. “He ran a shoe shining business. He paid the juniors to clean shoes and then skimmed a commission off the top.”
Farage determined very early on that he did not want to go to university, a decision which caused anguish among his family. “It was the early 1980s. Exchange controls had been abolished. The City was exciting and it was where I wanted to be. It was partly lifestyle and partly because I wanted to earn serious money.” Farage Senior was a successful stockbroker, but Farage Junior decided it was the London Metal Exchange that had more appeal, and it neatly avoided the risk of being permanently in his father’s shadow. “I loved it, I was good at it and was good with clients. I knew within six months it was the lifestyle I would enjoy,” he recalls. His first employer was the aggressive Wall Street investment bank, Drexel Burnham Lambert, which collapsed in 1990. Farage recalls that the company motto was “no guts, no glory”, an epithet which might equally be applied to his own political career.
But at the age of 21, things started to go wrong for Farage. He was seriously injured after being run over by a car and spent four months in hospital. But worse was to come. Less than six months later he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of testicular cancer. “It was an horrendous experience,” he recounts. “There was an overwhelming feeling of it being so unfair. I hadn’t done any of the things I had wanted to do.” After the operation he was told by doctors that the cancer had spread to his stomach and lungs, with the clear implication that there was no hope of recovery. Two days later he had a Cat Scan and was given the all clear. “Those two days were like torture,” he says, his voice riven with emotion. For the next six months he had to go to London Bridge hospital twice a week for blood tests to see if, as he puts it, he was “allowed to leave the building or not.” He describes it as “psychologically worse” than having chemotherapy. But he emerged from the experience with a determination to seize the day, rather than worry about the future. It explains a lot. He’s known as one of life’s bon viveurs and is quite open about his love for – and over indulgence in - good wine and good food. “No one who’s been through what I went through could ever say that it is out of their mind totally. I’m very much a fatalist. Life’s for the living. You’ve got to follow your heart and I won’t pretend that didn’t shape my decision to leave business and enter politics.”
In his late teens Farage joined the local Tory Party but took no active part apart from delivering a few leaflets at election time. But over the course of the next few years Farage fell out of love with the Conservatives, firstly over the Anglo Irish Agreement but later over Europe. His split with the party came over Britain’s entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism in October 1990. “That was the big moment,” he recalls. “I fulminated with rage against the economic idiocy and proceeded to bore everyone to death predicting disaster and gloom.” By chance he then saw a small advert in the London Evening Standard for a meeting held by the Campaign for an Independent Britain. He went along, and the rest is history. Within a year he had become a founding member of the Anti Federalist League which turned into UKIP in 1993. In early 1994 left his job to go self employed and set up his own business Farage Futures. This gave him the time to pursue a political career. He stood in various by-elections, at the 1994 European elections and the 1997 general election, but it was only in 1999 that he succeeded in getting elected to the European Parliament, after the government introduced proportional representation. Three years later, time constraints led to him closing down his business and concentrating on politics full time. Those who knew him well thought it was inevitable he would end up leading UKIP. “It was written in the stars,” says one ally. “Everyone knew Nigel could take the party to the next step; it was a matter of how long it would take the party to realise it.”
And in the autumn of 2006, his chance came when its somewhat charismatically-challenged leader Roger Knapman stood down. After a fairly bitter campaign, Farage emerged triumphant and immediately set out to transform UKIP into a major political force and enhance the fortunes of the Independence & Democracy Group in the European Parliament, which he now chairs.
In his thirty months in office, Farage has attempted to turn UKIP from a ramshackle, rather shambolic operation into an election fighting machine. He has been conscious that the Party has been easy to pigeonhole as predominantly male, old and of the ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ tendency. He’s recruited former EU whistleblower Marta Andreasson to be a candidate and attempted to ensure that some younger and female candidates appear on the ballot papers. Hehas also headhunted a professional campaign manager - ex Tory candidate and Adam Smith Institute policy wonk Kenneth Irvine - for the Euro elections and appointed an aficionado of the political blogosphere, Tim Worstall, as UKIP’s Head of Press. In January they opened a new campaign office in the heart of Westminster and have geared up for a real push with an eight strong campaign team. But the spectre of financial overstretch is constantly present. They face having to pay back a donation of more than £360,000 from Alan Bown, after it was found he wasn’t on the electoral roll. The dispute has been rumbling on for two years and is now awaiting an appeal date. If they do have to pay the money pack, the party faces financial ruin over an oversight not of its own making.
The European Elections on 4 June present Farage with the toughest challenge of his political career yet. In 2004, UKIP achieved a record 16% vote share (beating the LibDems into fourth place) and elected no fewer than 12 MEPs. This time it may be very different. Despite having a much more impressive line-up of candidates than five years ago, UKIP’s performance may well depend on how far they can attract two types of voters – those who wish a plague on all politicians from the three main parties and those Conservatives who feel so strongly about the European issue that they will continue to lend their vote to UKIP in European elections. This is a sizeable group, which continues to view David Cameron’s various Eurosceptic policy initiatives with increasing scepticism. It is this part of the electorate which may determine Nigel Farage’s fate.
Most political pundits think 2004 was a high watermark for UKIP and that they will be lucky to be left with enough MEPs to fill a telephone box in June. If that happens, Farage says he will walk the plank without having to be ordered to do so. “If we win fewer than ten seats, that’s a failure and I will resign,” he says with the refreshing candour which mainstream party politicians find so difficult to emulate. “Quite clearly, if we do badly, then I’ve tried my hardest, and that’s that. It will be time for someone else to do it.” By even talking that way in advance of the elections, a psychoanalyst might draw the conclusion that he’s had enough and may well quit anyway. There’s an air of resignation in his voice when he says, “I have tried to change the party, to modernize it, change the attitude and outlook,” but he knows also that the knives are out for him in his own party come what may. Even if they achieve a higher vote share and more MEPs than they currently have, there are plenty of people within UKIP who would gladly see the back of Farage.
Since he became leader he has been subjected to the most vicious character assassination imaginable. He has had death threats, his staff have been abused and threatened and journalists have received anonymous tipoffs about his drinking habits and alleged eye for the ladies. At times, his life has been made hell. Some of his colleagues are increasingly jealous of his high media profile and accuse him of operating a quasi autocracy and running roughshod over the party. Farage is unrepentant. “Some people have been a big disappointment – people I have given jobs to and when it doesn’t work out they behave badly. You just think, would I behave like that? God, I hope not.”
He readily admits that a good result on June 4th is a prerequisite for him carrying forward his own agenda. “I do need a mandate,” he says. “I will have the impetus to change it further.” But to do that he has a number of enemies to see off, both from within his own party and outside it, not least the British National Party. The BNP has tried, so far with little success, to infiltrate UKIP and take it over from the inside. They have a number of, what Farage calls, “useful idiots” who have adopted the tactics of the old Militant Tendency who tried to take over parts of the Labour Party in the 1980s. However unsuccessful they have been, Farage knows how bad it looks for the letters BNP and UKIP to appear in the same sentence. “The most damaging thing ever written about us was that we were the BNP in blazers,” he concedes, although he believes those days are behind them. When the BNP’s membership list was leaked recently, UKIP analysed it and found only two of their own members on it. The sighs of relief emanating from UKIP HQ were almost audible, but Farage is far from complacent.
“I wouldn’t compare myself to Cameron, but he tried to change the image of his party, to make it more acceptable to a broader range of people, and that’s the journey I’m on.” He cites the recruitment of an increasing number of ethnic minority members as evidence that the party is heading in the right direction. So, no longer the party of “fruitcakes and closet racists”, as David Cameron once memorably described them. “If we are successful in June, we’ll have a new slate of MEPs, they’ll be much younger, with a prominent woman, and we can go out into the media with a new image, without giving the impression that it’s just me doing it,” claims Farage. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of his current colleagues, but he’s a realist.
Since Farage became leader of UKIP in the autumn of 2006, he has tried to turn the party away from being a single issue, anti European Union pressure group and convert it into a normal political party, with a policy on virtually everything. He tasked his deputy, David Campbell-Bannerman, with coming up with populist policies on public service reform. A belief in selective education is possibly the most eye-catching of the policies announced so far, but again, it plays into the perception that UKIP really does represent ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ rather than Mr & Mrs Average whose two kids go to the local comp.
UKIP’s success in June may well be determined by to what extent the electorate wants to punish the two main parties. Traditionally the LibDems have been the main recipient of the so-called ‘dustbin’ vote, but in the 1989 Euro elections it was the Greens who surged forward, with 15% of the vote. Indeed, Nigel Farage himself was a rather unlikely Green voter in that year. “I was still a Tory Party member,” he recalls, “and it was my first rebellion against the Conservative Party.” Election campaigns are all about momentum, the so-called ‘Big Mo’. Last time UKIP had the temporary boost of Robert Kilroy-Silk joining them and giving them a huge amount of extra publicity. “It was a risk worth taking at the time,” says Farage. “I still believe that.” It proved to be a mixed blessing in the end, but it’s difficult to see where that kind of boost will emerge from this time. Farage is relying on Eurosceptic Conservatives to lend him their vote again, but he’s also keen to point out that internet campaigning will recruit new supporters from all over the political spectrum.
“If we do badly in June, and that means curtains for me. It won’t just be UKIP that has a problem. It will be the whole anti EU movement that has a problem.” He believes there is a clear and present danger that UKIP might then indeed be taken over by the authoritarian right, rendering less of a political party and more of a narrow political sect. “It could set us back by over a decade,” he warns. It’s hardly a war cry, but it demonstrates what’s at stake both for him personally and the Eurosceptic movement in general on June 4th.
Iain Dale's Diary Political DVD & CD Store
My GQ Interview With Nigel Farage
Iain Dale 8:25 PM
In the May issue of GQ Magazine I wrote a lengthy profile of UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Now that the issue is no longer on sale, I am posting it on the blog...
Being leader of a political party which stands a snowball’s chance in hell of ever achieving real power is not a very rewarding occupation. You need the patience of a saint, the hide of a wildebeest and the tenacity of a Duracell bunny. Luckily for his party, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party possesses all three, and if Oscars were awarded for optimism in the face of adversity, Nigel Farage would sweep the board.
In his two and a half years in the post, Farage has given UKIP a profile they had previously only attained during European election campaigns. He has aggressively courted the media and to some effect. He is the only recognizable face of a political party previously dominated by old fogies but now being dragged kicking and screaming into the new media age. Farage’s personal profile has engendered bitter jealousies from those who believe he is using UKIP for his own ends. His enemies accuse him of personal vanity and far worse. But he is unrepentant. He knows that any modern day politician’s success or failure is largely defined through the prism of the media.
So who is this man who his critics decry as a ‘Little Englander’ and his supporters believe could be the saviour of British sovereignty?
Nigel Farage was born 45 years ago in the village of Downe, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where he still lives. Down is famous as the birthplace of another famous man who rebelled against the conventional wisdom and believed in the survival of the fittest, Charles Darwin. But there, the similarities end. Farage is a chain smoking, hard drinking, pin-striped loving, Fedora wearing father of four with a German wife, and who bears an uncanny likeness to the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.
Farage went to the local prep school and then attended his father’s alma mater Dulwich College. He was in his element there. “I loved the tradition of it all,” he explains. “I couldn’t have been more involved in the life of the school if I had tried.” He was in the Army Cadet Force, the politics society, the cricket club, the rugby club – everything. He loved to challenge what he was taught and delighted in being argumentative, especially with the kind of teachers who he refers to as the ‘Bob Dylan set’. He had far more time for the more traditional schoolmasters who had had a good war and drifted into teaching. “I adored them and responded well to them,” he reflects. “They thought nothing of doing nets with you three nights a week. It was a vocation for them.” But even at school, he was obsessed by the issue of Europe according to his then classmate Nick Owen. “He chuntered on about Europe and everyone thought he was barking mad. He’s still chuntering on about Europe…” Owen recalls that even at school, the young Nigel Farage was into making money. “He ran a shoe shining business. He paid the juniors to clean shoes and then skimmed a commission off the top.”
Farage determined very early on that he did not want to go to university, a decision which caused anguish among his family. “It was the early 1980s. Exchange controls had been abolished. The City was exciting and it was where I wanted to be. It was partly lifestyle and partly because I wanted to earn serious money.” Farage Senior was a successful stockbroker, but Farage Junior decided it was the London Metal Exchange that had more appeal, and it neatly avoided the risk of being permanently in his father’s shadow. “I loved it, I was good at it and was good with clients. I knew within six months it was the lifestyle I would enjoy,” he recalls. His first employer was the aggressive Wall Street investment bank, Drexel Burnham Lambert, which collapsed in 1990. Farage recalls that the company motto was “no guts, no glory”, an epithet which might equally be applied to his own political career.
But at the age of 21, things started to go wrong for Farage. He was seriously injured after being run over by a car and spent four months in hospital. But worse was to come. Less than six months later he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of testicular cancer. “It was an horrendous experience,” he recounts. “There was an overwhelming feeling of it being so unfair. I hadn’t done any of the things I had wanted to do.” After the operation he was told by doctors that the cancer had spread to his stomach and lungs, with the clear implication that there was no hope of recovery. Two days later he had a Cat Scan and was given the all clear. “Those two days were like torture,” he says, his voice riven with emotion. For the next six months he had to go to London Bridge hospital twice a week for blood tests to see if, as he puts it, he was “allowed to leave the building or not.” He describes it as “psychologically worse” than having chemotherapy. But he emerged from the experience with a determination to seize the day, rather than worry about the future. It explains a lot. He’s known as one of life’s bon viveurs and is quite open about his love for – and over indulgence in - good wine and good food. “No one who’s been through what I went through could ever say that it is out of their mind totally. I’m very much a fatalist. Life’s for the living. You’ve got to follow your heart and I won’t pretend that didn’t shape my decision to leave business and enter politics.”
In his late teens Farage joined the local Tory Party but took no active part apart from delivering a few leaflets at election time. But over the course of the next few years Farage fell out of love with the Conservatives, firstly over the Anglo Irish Agreement but later over Europe. His split with the party came over Britain’s entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism in October 1990. “That was the big moment,” he recalls. “I fulminated with rage against the economic idiocy and proceeded to bore everyone to death predicting disaster and gloom.” By chance he then saw a small advert in the London Evening Standard for a meeting held by the Campaign for an Independent Britain. He went along, and the rest is history. Within a year he had become a founding member of the Anti Federalist League which turned into UKIP in 1993. In early 1994 left his job to go self employed and set up his own business Farage Futures. This gave him the time to pursue a political career. He stood in various by-elections, at the 1994 European elections and the 1997 general election, but it was only in 1999 that he succeeded in getting elected to the European Parliament, after the government introduced proportional representation. Three years later, time constraints led to him closing down his business and concentrating on politics full time. Those who knew him well thought it was inevitable he would end up leading UKIP. “It was written in the stars,” says one ally. “Everyone knew Nigel could take the party to the next step; it was a matter of how long it would take the party to realise it.”
And in the autumn of 2006, his chance came when its somewhat charismatically-challenged leader Roger Knapman stood down. After a fairly bitter campaign, Farage emerged triumphant and immediately set out to transform UKIP into a major political force and enhance the fortunes of the Independence & Democracy Group in the European Parliament, which he now chairs.
In his thirty months in office, Farage has attempted to turn UKIP from a ramshackle, rather shambolic operation into an election fighting machine. He has been conscious that the Party has been easy to pigeonhole as predominantly male, old and of the ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ tendency. He’s recruited former EU whistleblower Marta Andreasson to be a candidate and attempted to ensure that some younger and female candidates appear on the ballot papers. Hehas also headhunted a professional campaign manager - ex Tory candidate and Adam Smith Institute policy wonk Kenneth Irvine - for the Euro elections and appointed an aficionado of the political blogosphere, Tim Worstall, as UKIP’s Head of Press. In January they opened a new campaign office in the heart of Westminster and have geared up for a real push with an eight strong campaign team. But the spectre of financial overstretch is constantly present. They face having to pay back a donation of more than £360,000 from Alan Bown, after it was found he wasn’t on the electoral roll. The dispute has been rumbling on for two years and is now awaiting an appeal date. If they do have to pay the money pack, the party faces financial ruin over an oversight not of its own making.
The European Elections on 4 June present Farage with the toughest challenge of his political career yet. In 2004, UKIP achieved a record 16% vote share (beating the LibDems into fourth place) and elected no fewer than 12 MEPs. This time it may be very different. Despite having a much more impressive line-up of candidates than five years ago, UKIP’s performance may well depend on how far they can attract two types of voters – those who wish a plague on all politicians from the three main parties and those Conservatives who feel so strongly about the European issue that they will continue to lend their vote to UKIP in European elections. This is a sizeable group, which continues to view David Cameron’s various Eurosceptic policy initiatives with increasing scepticism. It is this part of the electorate which may determine Nigel Farage’s fate.
Most political pundits think 2004 was a high watermark for UKIP and that they will be lucky to be left with enough MEPs to fill a telephone box in June. If that happens, Farage says he will walk the plank without having to be ordered to do so. “If we win fewer than ten seats, that’s a failure and I will resign,” he says with the refreshing candour which mainstream party politicians find so difficult to emulate. “Quite clearly, if we do badly, then I’ve tried my hardest, and that’s that. It will be time for someone else to do it.” By even talking that way in advance of the elections, a psychoanalyst might draw the conclusion that he’s had enough and may well quit anyway. There’s an air of resignation in his voice when he says, “I have tried to change the party, to modernize it, change the attitude and outlook,” but he knows also that the knives are out for him in his own party come what may. Even if they achieve a higher vote share and more MEPs than they currently have, there are plenty of people within UKIP who would gladly see the back of Farage.
Since he became leader he has been subjected to the most vicious character assassination imaginable. He has had death threats, his staff have been abused and threatened and journalists have received anonymous tipoffs about his drinking habits and alleged eye for the ladies. At times, his life has been made hell. Some of his colleagues are increasingly jealous of his high media profile and accuse him of operating a quasi autocracy and running roughshod over the party. Farage is unrepentant. “Some people have been a big disappointment – people I have given jobs to and when it doesn’t work out they behave badly. You just think, would I behave like that? God, I hope not.”
He readily admits that a good result on June 4th is a prerequisite for him carrying forward his own agenda. “I do need a mandate,” he says. “I will have the impetus to change it further.” But to do that he has a number of enemies to see off, both from within his own party and outside it, not least the British National Party. The BNP has tried, so far with little success, to infiltrate UKIP and take it over from the inside. They have a number of, what Farage calls, “useful idiots” who have adopted the tactics of the old Militant Tendency who tried to take over parts of the Labour Party in the 1980s. However unsuccessful they have been, Farage knows how bad it looks for the letters BNP and UKIP to appear in the same sentence. “The most damaging thing ever written about us was that we were the BNP in blazers,” he concedes, although he believes those days are behind them. When the BNP’s membership list was leaked recently, UKIP analysed it and found only two of their own members on it. The sighs of relief emanating from UKIP HQ were almost audible, but Farage is far from complacent.
“I wouldn’t compare myself to Cameron, but he tried to change the image of his party, to make it more acceptable to a broader range of people, and that’s the journey I’m on.” He cites the recruitment of an increasing number of ethnic minority members as evidence that the party is heading in the right direction. So, no longer the party of “fruitcakes and closet racists”, as David Cameron once memorably described them. “If we are successful in June, we’ll have a new slate of MEPs, they’ll be much younger, with a prominent woman, and we can go out into the media with a new image, without giving the impression that it’s just me doing it,” claims Farage. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of his current colleagues, but he’s a realist.
Since Farage became leader of UKIP in the autumn of 2006, he has tried to turn the party away from being a single issue, anti European Union pressure group and convert it into a normal political party, with a policy on virtually everything. He tasked his deputy, David Campbell-Bannerman, with coming up with populist policies on public service reform. A belief in selective education is possibly the most eye-catching of the policies announced so far, but again, it plays into the perception that UKIP really does represent ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ rather than Mr & Mrs Average whose two kids go to the local comp.
UKIP’s success in June may well be determined by to what extent the electorate wants to punish the two main parties. Traditionally the LibDems have been the main recipient of the so-called ‘dustbin’ vote, but in the 1989 Euro elections it was the Greens who surged forward, with 15% of the vote. Indeed, Nigel Farage himself was a rather unlikely Green voter in that year. “I was still a Tory Party member,” he recalls, “and it was my first rebellion against the Conservative Party.” Election campaigns are all about momentum, the so-called ‘Big Mo’. Last time UKIP had the temporary boost of Robert Kilroy-Silk joining them and giving them a huge amount of extra publicity. “It was a risk worth taking at the time,” says Farage. “I still believe that.” It proved to be a mixed blessing in the end, but it’s difficult to see where that kind of boost will emerge from this time. Farage is relying on Eurosceptic Conservatives to lend him their vote again, but he’s also keen to point out that internet campaigning will recruit new supporters from all over the political spectrum.
“If we do badly in June, and that means curtains for me. It won’t just be UKIP that has a problem. It will be the whole anti EU movement that has a problem.” He believes there is a clear and present danger that UKIP might then indeed be taken over by the authoritarian right, rendering less of a political party and more of a narrow political sect. “It could set us back by over a decade,” he warns. It’s hardly a war cry, but it demonstrates what’s at stake both for him personally and the Eurosceptic movement in general on June 4th.
Iain Dale's Diary Political DVD & CD Store
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
The Speaker
Young Duncan from Bristol has won BBC's The Speaker. Question is, will he be on the books of Specialist Speakers in the future?
Monday, 27 April 2009
BAFTA Television Awards - Arrivals
Leicester Square Television, who operate a "fan-cam", where in attendance yesterday for the BAFTA Television Awards. This video clip is one of a series which can be accessed here at You Tube.
Iain Dale Criticised By Cranmer
Top political blogger "Cranmer" has a few stern words to say about Iain Dale:
Cranmer would first like to say that he likes and admires Mr Dale a very great deal; he wishes him no ill and means him no offence by what follows. It is simply that His Grace is a little puzzled by the somewhat variable and inconsistent application of the Conservative Party’s rules and regulations, and observes an apparent hypocrisy in Mr Dale's political morality which is worthy of scrutiny.
The professorial, politically-astute, philanthropic and mild-mannered Stuart Wheeler was ejected from the Conservative Party for donating a paltry £100,000 to UKIP (which just about covers four MPs’ second homes for one year). He did not defect; he simply expressed a little modest (to him) support for UKIP because he considers the UK's relations with the EU to be of paramount importance. And no doubt thousands of Conservatives shall be doing exactly the same on June 4th as they 'lend' their votes on a point of political principle.
Yet Iain Dale was among the first (if not the first) to call for the expulsion of Mr Wheeler despite his having previously donated £5 million to Conservative coffers, and despite his continuing to urge the electorate to vote Conservative at the next general election. Few would doubt that Mr Wheeler has done more cumulative good than harm to the Conservative cause. But he had to go, Mr Dale insisted, because he was a ‘menace’ and ‘needed a regular fix of publicity’ and ‘delights popping up on the Today programme’ to spread ‘his unique brand of political mischief’ (transgressions of which Mr Dale has doubtless not infrequently been accused by some of his own detractors).
Mr Dale explained: ‘You can't have people like (Stuart Wheeler) recommending people to vote for another party on 4 June, and then proceed to welcome him back on the 5th. If I now wrote a blogpost urging Tories to vote UKIP, do you have any doubt that I would be expelled? And I'd deserve to be.’
But an advertisement is worth a thousand blog posts: the effects and impact of the visual media are far greater than the written. It is, after all, how Mr Dale is able to earn money from his blog.
The Conservative Party membership card quotes from the Party’s constitution: "Membership of the Conservative Party is not compatible with membership of, or association with, any other registered political party."
If Stuart Wheeler's actions constitute ‘association with’ another registered political party, and thus a breach of the conditions of Party membership, then so must Mr Dale’s promotion of other registered political parties upon his blog.
Consider the screen-print above. Mr Dale is clearly using his blog - his private property in exactly the same fashion as Mr Wheeler's £100,000 - to urge his readers, which are legion, to vote for another party - a party which has the potential to do damage to the Conservative Party, and from which Cranmer has exhorted his readers and communicants to resile. Further, Cranmer has also recently seen advertisements for ‘Jury Team’ upon Mr Dale’s influential blog, and also recalls some months ago seeing advertisements which sold the wares or promoted the personalities of New Labour.
But Cranmer has no problem with the selling of books or the promoting of political biography: the issue here is one of political campaigning. Iain Dale's Diary reaches more ‘unique visitors’ in a single month than Stuart Wheeler has met in his entire lifetime. In terms of campaigning influence and the potential to affect an electoral outcome, it is a political colossus. Mr Wheeler was an obscure back-room operator whose donation to UKIP will have a negligible (if any) effect on people’s voting intentions.
Shedule 7, article 3.5 of the Conservative Party’s constitution states: ‘The Officers of the Association may move before the Executive Council the suspension or termination of membership of the Association of any member whose declared opinions or conduct shall, in their judgement, be inconsistent with the objects or financial well-being of the Association or be likely to bring the Party into disrepute. Similarly, the Officers may move the refusal of membership of the Association for the same reasons. Following such a motion, the Executive Council may by a majority vote suspend, terminate or refuse membership for the same reason.’
Mr Dale can probably not censor or control these political advertisements, for they are either part-and-parcel of his contract with GoogleAds or are fed uncontrollably by the ubiquitous MessageSpace. But Mr Wheeler's donation to UKIP was on a point of political principle; Mr Dale has sold the political soul of his blog to (inter alia) Libertas simply to profit by a couple of hundred (?) pounds. He thereby promotes the Conservative Party’s political opponents for personal financial gain and is consequently manifestly (if indirectly) ‘in association with’ those whose objectives are ‘inconsistent with the objects or financial well-being’ of the Conservative Party.
Consider what fate might befall an ordinary Conservative Party member who erected a ‘Vote LibDem’ sign in his front garden, or sported a ‘Vote Labour’ sticker on his car, or a ‘Vote UKIP’ pin in his lapel. As Mr Dale suggests would be the case were he to write a blog post urging people to vote UKIP, such treachery would be 'inconsistent with the objects' of the Party and would not be tolerated. CCHQ or a local Association would have grounds for expulsion.
The Libertas advertisement is not merely urging people to vote Libertas (which would be bad enough); Mr Dale is permitting his private property to be used to urge his readers to join a rival political party, which is a rather more long-term commitment. Declan Ganley is manifestly in this for the long haul.
Iain Dale has effectively erected a flashing neon ‘Vote Libertas’ sign very prominently in his front garden, through which a quarter of a million voters pass every month. This may be interspersed with villas in Andalucia, and it may not matter so much during the course of an apolitical year, but we are in the middle of a very important campaign and elections to the European Parliament are a mere month away. These elections have the potential to reduce Labour to a humiliating fourth poll position, thereby euthanising New Labour or terminating Gordon Brown's premiership altogether. The Conservative Party needs every vote it can get.
Would Mr Dale be content to urge his readers to 'Vote Labour' on the run-up to a general election? Would he accept advertisements which said 'Gordon Brown for Prime Minister'? This, surely, would be anathema to him (and, indeed, anathematise him from the Conservative Party). Yet if it be, why are these Libertas advertisements acceptable now?
Donating £100,000 to UKIP is quite possibly worth a good deal less (politically) to that party than an advertisement on Iain Dale’s Diary is worth to Libertas. It is inconceivable that Stephan Shakespeare would agree to such advertisements on ConservativeHome.
Perhaps CCHQ or the local Executive in Tunbridge Wells might look into Mr Dale’s ‘association’ with this group.
Or perhaps Cranmer might humbly request that Mr Dale might explain why the sauce which cooked Stuart Wheeler’s goose is not good enough for the gander?
UPDATE:
Cranmer has received a missive from the renowned Guido Fawkes, who points out that Mr Dale has in the past carried advertisements for Ken Livingstone's mayoral campaign (while Mr Dale naturally supported Boris) and also for the Liberal Democrats. Mr Fawkes suggested that His Grace was unable to distinguish between an advertisement and an endorsement.
This is not so. The erection of a sign in one's front garden is a de facto endorsement. Would Mr Dale be content to host an advertisement from the democratic and legally-constituted B**? Presumably not. But if not, why not? If this advertisement for Libertas is a straightforward exchange of goods, surely the B**'s money is as good as that of Libertas? Cranmer's objection is simply that he happens to believe that politics is (frequently quite literally) a matter of life and death in the temporal realm. A Conservative blog should therefore no more carry an advertisement for one's political opponents any more than one would expect The Catholic Herald, being concerned with issues of salvation in the spiritual realm, to carry an advertisement from 'bigoted Protestant extremists' whose erroneous soteriology leads unsuspecting souls to eternal damnation.
Cranmer would first like to say that he likes and admires Mr Dale a very great deal; he wishes him no ill and means him no offence by what follows. It is simply that His Grace is a little puzzled by the somewhat variable and inconsistent application of the Conservative Party’s rules and regulations, and observes an apparent hypocrisy in Mr Dale's political morality which is worthy of scrutiny.
The professorial, politically-astute, philanthropic and mild-mannered Stuart Wheeler was ejected from the Conservative Party for donating a paltry £100,000 to UKIP (which just about covers four MPs’ second homes for one year). He did not defect; he simply expressed a little modest (to him) support for UKIP because he considers the UK's relations with the EU to be of paramount importance. And no doubt thousands of Conservatives shall be doing exactly the same on June 4th as they 'lend' their votes on a point of political principle.
Yet Iain Dale was among the first (if not the first) to call for the expulsion of Mr Wheeler despite his having previously donated £5 million to Conservative coffers, and despite his continuing to urge the electorate to vote Conservative at the next general election. Few would doubt that Mr Wheeler has done more cumulative good than harm to the Conservative cause. But he had to go, Mr Dale insisted, because he was a ‘menace’ and ‘needed a regular fix of publicity’ and ‘delights popping up on the Today programme’ to spread ‘his unique brand of political mischief’ (transgressions of which Mr Dale has doubtless not infrequently been accused by some of his own detractors).
Mr Dale explained: ‘You can't have people like (Stuart Wheeler) recommending people to vote for another party on 4 June, and then proceed to welcome him back on the 5th. If I now wrote a blogpost urging Tories to vote UKIP, do you have any doubt that I would be expelled? And I'd deserve to be.’
But an advertisement is worth a thousand blog posts: the effects and impact of the visual media are far greater than the written. It is, after all, how Mr Dale is able to earn money from his blog.
The Conservative Party membership card quotes from the Party’s constitution: "Membership of the Conservative Party is not compatible with membership of, or association with, any other registered political party."
If Stuart Wheeler's actions constitute ‘association with’ another registered political party, and thus a breach of the conditions of Party membership, then so must Mr Dale’s promotion of other registered political parties upon his blog.
Consider the screen-print above. Mr Dale is clearly using his blog - his private property in exactly the same fashion as Mr Wheeler's £100,000 - to urge his readers, which are legion, to vote for another party - a party which has the potential to do damage to the Conservative Party, and from which Cranmer has exhorted his readers and communicants to resile. Further, Cranmer has also recently seen advertisements for ‘Jury Team’ upon Mr Dale’s influential blog, and also recalls some months ago seeing advertisements which sold the wares or promoted the personalities of New Labour.
But Cranmer has no problem with the selling of books or the promoting of political biography: the issue here is one of political campaigning. Iain Dale's Diary reaches more ‘unique visitors’ in a single month than Stuart Wheeler has met in his entire lifetime. In terms of campaigning influence and the potential to affect an electoral outcome, it is a political colossus. Mr Wheeler was an obscure back-room operator whose donation to UKIP will have a negligible (if any) effect on people’s voting intentions.
Shedule 7, article 3.5 of the Conservative Party’s constitution states: ‘The Officers of the Association may move before the Executive Council the suspension or termination of membership of the Association of any member whose declared opinions or conduct shall, in their judgement, be inconsistent with the objects or financial well-being of the Association or be likely to bring the Party into disrepute. Similarly, the Officers may move the refusal of membership of the Association for the same reasons. Following such a motion, the Executive Council may by a majority vote suspend, terminate or refuse membership for the same reason.’
Mr Dale can probably not censor or control these political advertisements, for they are either part-and-parcel of his contract with GoogleAds or are fed uncontrollably by the ubiquitous MessageSpace. But Mr Wheeler's donation to UKIP was on a point of political principle; Mr Dale has sold the political soul of his blog to (inter alia) Libertas simply to profit by a couple of hundred (?) pounds. He thereby promotes the Conservative Party’s political opponents for personal financial gain and is consequently manifestly (if indirectly) ‘in association with’ those whose objectives are ‘inconsistent with the objects or financial well-being’ of the Conservative Party.
Consider what fate might befall an ordinary Conservative Party member who erected a ‘Vote LibDem’ sign in his front garden, or sported a ‘Vote Labour’ sticker on his car, or a ‘Vote UKIP’ pin in his lapel. As Mr Dale suggests would be the case were he to write a blog post urging people to vote UKIP, such treachery would be 'inconsistent with the objects' of the Party and would not be tolerated. CCHQ or a local Association would have grounds for expulsion.
The Libertas advertisement is not merely urging people to vote Libertas (which would be bad enough); Mr Dale is permitting his private property to be used to urge his readers to join a rival political party, which is a rather more long-term commitment. Declan Ganley is manifestly in this for the long haul.
Iain Dale has effectively erected a flashing neon ‘Vote Libertas’ sign very prominently in his front garden, through which a quarter of a million voters pass every month. This may be interspersed with villas in Andalucia, and it may not matter so much during the course of an apolitical year, but we are in the middle of a very important campaign and elections to the European Parliament are a mere month away. These elections have the potential to reduce Labour to a humiliating fourth poll position, thereby euthanising New Labour or terminating Gordon Brown's premiership altogether. The Conservative Party needs every vote it can get.
Would Mr Dale be content to urge his readers to 'Vote Labour' on the run-up to a general election? Would he accept advertisements which said 'Gordon Brown for Prime Minister'? This, surely, would be anathema to him (and, indeed, anathematise him from the Conservative Party). Yet if it be, why are these Libertas advertisements acceptable now?
Donating £100,000 to UKIP is quite possibly worth a good deal less (politically) to that party than an advertisement on Iain Dale’s Diary is worth to Libertas. It is inconceivable that Stephan Shakespeare would agree to such advertisements on ConservativeHome.
Perhaps CCHQ or the local Executive in Tunbridge Wells might look into Mr Dale’s ‘association’ with this group.
Or perhaps Cranmer might humbly request that Mr Dale might explain why the sauce which cooked Stuart Wheeler’s goose is not good enough for the gander?
UPDATE:
Cranmer has received a missive from the renowned Guido Fawkes, who points out that Mr Dale has in the past carried advertisements for Ken Livingstone's mayoral campaign (while Mr Dale naturally supported Boris) and also for the Liberal Democrats. Mr Fawkes suggested that His Grace was unable to distinguish between an advertisement and an endorsement.
This is not so. The erection of a sign in one's front garden is a de facto endorsement. Would Mr Dale be content to host an advertisement from the democratic and legally-constituted B**? Presumably not. But if not, why not? If this advertisement for Libertas is a straightforward exchange of goods, surely the B**'s money is as good as that of Libertas? Cranmer's objection is simply that he happens to believe that politics is (frequently quite literally) a matter of life and death in the temporal realm. A Conservative blog should therefore no more carry an advertisement for one's political opponents any more than one would expect The Catholic Herald, being concerned with issues of salvation in the spiritual realm, to carry an advertisement from 'bigoted Protestant extremists' whose erroneous soteriology leads unsuspecting souls to eternal damnation.
Twitter For Business
Many would now agree that the social networking tool, Twitter is very useful for business. Here's an article from the on-line Chicago Tribune which youmay find interesting.
Thursday, 23 April 2009
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
Norwich Union to Aviva
Jonathan Gabay outlines his views on the recent name change of insurance giant, Norwich Union to Aviva.
The Iain Dale Radio Show
is coming soon, according to Iain Dale's latest post. If it's anything like 18 Doughty Street, it'll be very worthwhile listening to.
Wednesday, 15 April 2009
More On "Smeargate" By Iain Dale
The "Smeargate" scandal is continuing to fill the UK headlines thanks to the Blogosphere with Iain Dale being quite busy over the past few days. Here's one of his latest posts on the affair that's got the British government on it's knees.
Saturday, 11 April 2009
Iain Dale On The Warpath
With numerous television and radio appearances this weekend, Iain Dale is on the warpath with regards to the latest scandal dubbed "Smeargate"
Friday, 10 April 2009
Public Speaking Tips
What do you do if you are late for a public speaking appointment? Each week, there'll be public speaking tips from around the blogosphere and internet. This week, public speaker Nick R Thomas explains how you can dig yourself out of trouble when arriving late for a function.
Monday, 6 April 2009
BBC stars "breaking rules"
Certain BBC celebrities maybe breaking the rules when speaking in public, according to this report from the Daily Mail.
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Making Public Speaking Popular
This coming Sunday on BBC 2 TV, there's a new programme called The Lost Art Of Oratory. It's looks to be a very interesting programme.
Monday, 30 March 2009
Thursday, 26 March 2009
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Internet Specialist Speaker
One of the most respected speakers on matters concerning the Internet, is Graham Jones. His blog is one of the best resources you can find anywhere on the Blogosphere on matters relating to social networking, e-commerce, etc.
In his latest article, he refers to the explosion in social networking sites including Twitter.
In his latest article, he refers to the explosion in social networking sites including Twitter.
Monday, 16 March 2009
Have You Been Found Out?
Writing stuff on the internet and blogosphere can expose certain things about you as speaker Kare Anderson explains here.
Thursday, 12 March 2009
Geoff Burch Writes About The Economy
This is a fun story from Geoff Burch:
LIVING ON THE EDGE
THE STORY OF A CREDIT CRUNCH
By Geoff Burch
There was a land that was on the edge of the highest of high cliffs. The people of this land toiled and worked and struggled to make a living. They made things and they grew things. They lived by the strength of their backs and the sweat of their brows.
This life made them strong and resilient and they were proud to tell outsiders that they lived on the edge. They were very competitive with each other and always tried to better one another. Despite this they considered themselves close-knit, probably because they were united by their dislike and suspicion of outsiders.
So, you can imagine their consternation when a strange, silent young stranger occupied a deserted cabin in their land. They decided to check this guy out and it didn’t exactly put their minds at rest to discover that he was exiled from his previous land for treason and sedition. Apparently when he was a young boy, the king of his land had ordered a fabulous magical suit from some internationally renowned tailors. The enchantment of this fabulously expensive bejeweled garment was that if you were stupid, the suit became invisible to you. The king subsequently appeared naked to this boy who was therefore clearly stupid and instead of quietly admitting his disability, went around shouting that the king was “in the altogether!” Fortunately, despite rumours and fairy stories to the contrary, this disgraceful behaviour ceased when the heartbroken tailors gave him a good kicking and the king exiled him. Everyone watching acknowledged their own intelligence and admired the fine suit.
Now, this boy – older and somewhat wiser – lived among the people on the edge and they weren’t happy. Sometimes they would challenge him to say anything critical about them, but he had learned his lesson and said nothing – which gave them no excuse to get rid of him.
Then one day there was a miraculous event. The people awoke one morning to discover that from the top of the cliff, a small bridge had grown. At the other end of the bridge was a small pink fluffy cloud. For weeks people came and viewed the bridge but no one dared set foot on it, but the one day two intrepid young men crossed the bridge into the pink cloud. In there they found a sunlit land with blue birds, rabbits, and trees laden with luscious fruit. On the ground were a scattering of precious gems and metals. The young men picked fruit and treasure and returned across the bridge a lot wealthier than they had been before. Soon more people crossed the bridge to harvest the bounty of the pink cloud. The people celebrated their luck and the only sour note was that the path to the bridge had to pass the strange young man’s cabin – and when he stood outside and watched them, they felt he knew something they didn’t. Sometimes folk would challenge him to tell them.
“OK, what? Go on, what? What’s your problem?”
He would pull a face, shrug his sad shoulders and disappear back behind his front door.
A strange thing about the bridge and the cloud was that the more they were used, the bigger they grew. The bridge became a magnificent sight to see and the cloud was huge and so was the land inside it. In the land was a very beautiful kind of tree that had been in blossom ever since the place had been discovered. The people had wondered what fabulous fruit it would bear. Finally the tree produced large pods which before anyone could pick them erupted into coloured fans. On closer inspection it was clear that these fans were wads of money! Everyone laughed. Their parents had always said, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” Well now it did. People surged across the bridge with barrow loads of cash, treasure and fruits. Again the only downside was that young man just watching.
With so much wealth literally falling from the trees, why break your back in the fields, wear your fingers to the bone at the lathe, or sweat your life away in a kitchen. People in far-off lands who mainly survived by growing stuff and eating it wanted a share of this wealth. So they either sold their crops to the people on the edge or they started making things for them or they moved to the edge themselves and did the toiling for a handful of the cash.
The people on the edge realized that all this success could be attributed to their superior intellect and that physical effort was far beneath them. They also knew that they never wanted their children to toil with their hands. Intellect brings better rewards. So they built schools and colleges where the young could get intellect from the people who had chosen themselves to be professors.
One of these mighty brains prepared mathematical formula which would show birds how to fly. He crossed the bridge and as the young bluebirds hatched from their eggs, he strutted about holding his lapels reciting this formula to them.
A few weeks later, amazingly, the bluebirds flew. He was carried shoulder-high back across the bridge and given a big gold cup and his own university to be in charge of. Another professor watched the bridge grow and could predict its size each day. The people would gather under his balcony at his university and he would say things like,
“I predict bridge growth to be between 12 and 16%”
And the next day, when it was clearly 15% bigger, he got a cup too!
Another amazing event happened. One day a man harvesting money in the fluffy cloud-land, dropped a bundle down a rabbit hole. He didn’t notice until he got home and realized that he was short a bundle of money. He went back the next day and searched about the tree. Putting his hand down the rabbit hole, he realized that not only was the bundle of money there, but it had doubled in size. For a while he tried putting the odd wad of cash in the rabbit holes and overnight they always doubled. He shared this secret with a very few friends and out of those few friends, this phenomenon only worked for some of them but that didn’t matter because those with the gift could double anyone’s’ money. These men declared themselves bankers or barons of the bridge. Soon the traffic had reversed and everyone was bringing home loads of cash back over the bridge to the cloud.
The young man just watched with that funny annoying puzzled look on his face.
The people from the foreign land were soon handing their cash to the bridge barons to have it doubled. The money doubled, the bridge doubled, and the pink fluffy cloud just grew huge. The more cash they piled into the rabbit holes, the bigger the cloud grew.
Then the people woke up one morning and the bridge had completely collapsed. It had cracked and crumbled and hundreds of pieces had tumbled into the gorge below. The people watched as the pink cloud, now not anchored to anything, started to drift with the wind, which tugged and blew as little wisps and tendrils like candy floss disappeared into the turbulent air. Before their very eyes it was pulled into smaller bits until it was gone as if it had never existed.
“We are ruined!” the horrified crowd cried.
“All our wealth was in that cloud”.
“And so was ours” the people from the foreign land cried angrily, “We will have to go back to growing stuff again.”
The cry went up, “Why did the bridge collapse?”
The professors didn’t know despite their intellect. Then someone said,
“I bet that sly kid knows why the bridge collapsed”
A huge mob went to the young man’s cabin. When he came out they cried,
“Alright smartarse. Why did the bridge collapse?”
The young man sadly replied, “You foolish people. You are asking the wrong question. The question I have been asking myself every day, and what you should have asked yourselves is not why it collapsed, but why it stayed up. What was holding it up in the first place?”
LIVING ON THE EDGE
THE STORY OF A CREDIT CRUNCH
By Geoff Burch
There was a land that was on the edge of the highest of high cliffs. The people of this land toiled and worked and struggled to make a living. They made things and they grew things. They lived by the strength of their backs and the sweat of their brows.
This life made them strong and resilient and they were proud to tell outsiders that they lived on the edge. They were very competitive with each other and always tried to better one another. Despite this they considered themselves close-knit, probably because they were united by their dislike and suspicion of outsiders.
So, you can imagine their consternation when a strange, silent young stranger occupied a deserted cabin in their land. They decided to check this guy out and it didn’t exactly put their minds at rest to discover that he was exiled from his previous land for treason and sedition. Apparently when he was a young boy, the king of his land had ordered a fabulous magical suit from some internationally renowned tailors. The enchantment of this fabulously expensive bejeweled garment was that if you were stupid, the suit became invisible to you. The king subsequently appeared naked to this boy who was therefore clearly stupid and instead of quietly admitting his disability, went around shouting that the king was “in the altogether!” Fortunately, despite rumours and fairy stories to the contrary, this disgraceful behaviour ceased when the heartbroken tailors gave him a good kicking and the king exiled him. Everyone watching acknowledged their own intelligence and admired the fine suit.
Now, this boy – older and somewhat wiser – lived among the people on the edge and they weren’t happy. Sometimes they would challenge him to say anything critical about them, but he had learned his lesson and said nothing – which gave them no excuse to get rid of him.
Then one day there was a miraculous event. The people awoke one morning to discover that from the top of the cliff, a small bridge had grown. At the other end of the bridge was a small pink fluffy cloud. For weeks people came and viewed the bridge but no one dared set foot on it, but the one day two intrepid young men crossed the bridge into the pink cloud. In there they found a sunlit land with blue birds, rabbits, and trees laden with luscious fruit. On the ground were a scattering of precious gems and metals. The young men picked fruit and treasure and returned across the bridge a lot wealthier than they had been before. Soon more people crossed the bridge to harvest the bounty of the pink cloud. The people celebrated their luck and the only sour note was that the path to the bridge had to pass the strange young man’s cabin – and when he stood outside and watched them, they felt he knew something they didn’t. Sometimes folk would challenge him to tell them.
“OK, what? Go on, what? What’s your problem?”
He would pull a face, shrug his sad shoulders and disappear back behind his front door.
A strange thing about the bridge and the cloud was that the more they were used, the bigger they grew. The bridge became a magnificent sight to see and the cloud was huge and so was the land inside it. In the land was a very beautiful kind of tree that had been in blossom ever since the place had been discovered. The people had wondered what fabulous fruit it would bear. Finally the tree produced large pods which before anyone could pick them erupted into coloured fans. On closer inspection it was clear that these fans were wads of money! Everyone laughed. Their parents had always said, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” Well now it did. People surged across the bridge with barrow loads of cash, treasure and fruits. Again the only downside was that young man just watching.
With so much wealth literally falling from the trees, why break your back in the fields, wear your fingers to the bone at the lathe, or sweat your life away in a kitchen. People in far-off lands who mainly survived by growing stuff and eating it wanted a share of this wealth. So they either sold their crops to the people on the edge or they started making things for them or they moved to the edge themselves and did the toiling for a handful of the cash.
The people on the edge realized that all this success could be attributed to their superior intellect and that physical effort was far beneath them. They also knew that they never wanted their children to toil with their hands. Intellect brings better rewards. So they built schools and colleges where the young could get intellect from the people who had chosen themselves to be professors.
One of these mighty brains prepared mathematical formula which would show birds how to fly. He crossed the bridge and as the young bluebirds hatched from their eggs, he strutted about holding his lapels reciting this formula to them.
A few weeks later, amazingly, the bluebirds flew. He was carried shoulder-high back across the bridge and given a big gold cup and his own university to be in charge of. Another professor watched the bridge grow and could predict its size each day. The people would gather under his balcony at his university and he would say things like,
“I predict bridge growth to be between 12 and 16%”
And the next day, when it was clearly 15% bigger, he got a cup too!
Another amazing event happened. One day a man harvesting money in the fluffy cloud-land, dropped a bundle down a rabbit hole. He didn’t notice until he got home and realized that he was short a bundle of money. He went back the next day and searched about the tree. Putting his hand down the rabbit hole, he realized that not only was the bundle of money there, but it had doubled in size. For a while he tried putting the odd wad of cash in the rabbit holes and overnight they always doubled. He shared this secret with a very few friends and out of those few friends, this phenomenon only worked for some of them but that didn’t matter because those with the gift could double anyone’s’ money. These men declared themselves bankers or barons of the bridge. Soon the traffic had reversed and everyone was bringing home loads of cash back over the bridge to the cloud.
The young man just watched with that funny annoying puzzled look on his face.
The people from the foreign land were soon handing their cash to the bridge barons to have it doubled. The money doubled, the bridge doubled, and the pink fluffy cloud just grew huge. The more cash they piled into the rabbit holes, the bigger the cloud grew.
Then the people woke up one morning and the bridge had completely collapsed. It had cracked and crumbled and hundreds of pieces had tumbled into the gorge below. The people watched as the pink cloud, now not anchored to anything, started to drift with the wind, which tugged and blew as little wisps and tendrils like candy floss disappeared into the turbulent air. Before their very eyes it was pulled into smaller bits until it was gone as if it had never existed.
“We are ruined!” the horrified crowd cried.
“All our wealth was in that cloud”.
“And so was ours” the people from the foreign land cried angrily, “We will have to go back to growing stuff again.”
The cry went up, “Why did the bridge collapse?”
The professors didn’t know despite their intellect. Then someone said,
“I bet that sly kid knows why the bridge collapsed”
A huge mob went to the young man’s cabin. When he came out they cried,
“Alright smartarse. Why did the bridge collapse?”
The young man sadly replied, “You foolish people. You are asking the wrong question. The question I have been asking myself every day, and what you should have asked yourselves is not why it collapsed, but why it stayed up. What was holding it up in the first place?”
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
Jonathan Gabay On Barbie's 50th Birthday
Jonathan Gabay was on CNN earlier this week talking about the brand that is Barbie:
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Jennifer Aniston At Film Premiere
If you're into celeb spotting this clip which features Jennifer Aniston will interest you:
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Jennifer Aniston In Leicester Square
Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson were in London's Leicester Square on Monday evening for the UK Premiere of Marley & Me.
Photos courtesy of Leicester Square Television
Photos courtesy of Leicester Square Television
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
Top Political Blogs Of The Week
From the USA, Alan Caruba asks whether it's all a conspiracy.
Harry's Place on Chavez
Guido on Wall Street going below 7000.
and finally.............
Shane Greer on those "City types"
Harry's Place on Chavez
Guido on Wall Street going below 7000.
and finally.............
Shane Greer on those "City types"
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