Corona

It's not all bad...

I think Freelancer is taking the piss now...

Our client wants us to conduct drug testings in the UK, specifically at Fareham. We will train you on how to do it and provide necessary supplies and tools. You will have to either go to the client place to collect the provided urine sample or rent a meeting room to host the session. Thereafter I will guide you on how to perform the testing hygienically and you will scan and email us the result report. We will compensate you for every test done.

Ipso facto

Dear Anthony,

Caroline Flack’s death has thrown relentless newspaper harassment into the spotlight. [1] But it’s not just famous people, ordinary people are targets of harassment and intrusive bullying from the press too. [2] And right now, nothing is being done to stop it.

IPSO - the official regulator of newspapers - has the power to hold these papers to account. [3] But they rarely do. So the press gets away with harassing and bullying whoever they like - from the survivors of Grenfell to Caroline Flack. [4]

Together, we can make sure it doesn't happen again. Here’s the plan: we'll submit a mass complaint to IPSO. A couple of stories alone won’t catch their attention. But hundreds of stories, backed by a huge open letter calling on them to take these complaints seriously, will be impossible to ignore.

There's two ways you can get involved Anthony. If you’ve experienced press harassment will you share your experience with us to include in the complaint? Just hit the button to fill out a quick survey. If not, will you sign an open letter to IPSO, demanding they take these complaints seriously?

If you’ve not experienced it yourself, it can be surprising how intensely many people end up targeted by the press. Like the survivors of Grenfell tower - who were hounded relentlessly by the tabloid papers, so much so that the police suggested one family enter witness protection. [5] Or the families of the victims of the Manchester bombings , who were harrassed by sections of the press in the wake of the attack. [6] And these are just a few examples.

If you're experiencing press harassment, it can feel like you're going through the ordeal alone. Like nobody understands what you're going through. But since last week hundreds of us have been sharing stories of newspaper harassment with the government. And nearly a million people have spoken up in the wake of Caroline’s death. [7] Together we're powerful - and we can take the press on.

So Anthony, will you help make this the most powerful complaint yet? If you’ve experienced harassment from the papers will you share your experience with us so we can submit it to IPSO along with hundreds of others? And if not, will you sign an open letter to IPSO to take these complaints seriously?

38 Degrees


Dear 38 Degrees

Thank you for your invitation to waste IPSO's time and public money by submitting false and politically motivated complaints.  However, looking into the gounds one can complain under I fear I would not get very far as I am not the subject of an article and I have not been affected by a journalist’s behaviour.

This leaves only one avenue of complaint open to me - complaints on the grounds of significant failures in press accuracy and I feel press inaccuracy is such a wide ranging phenomenon that picking one particular inaccuracy to focus on would be too much of an invidious decision.  However, I feel that your letter while it deludes people into the belief that anyone can complain on behalf of anyone else when it has to be the individual affected is its self a source of inaccuracy.

Therefore I have chosen this letter as an example of press inaccuracy to complain to IPSO about.

Unfortunately of course I can't actually complain about it to IPSO because despite being an internet publisher you haven't signed up to the regulator.

Thank you

Anthony

Liam writes...

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Dear Liam, 

Thank you for your email.

I have immediately changed my personality and expect to become an astronaut imminently

Yours sincerely 

Anthony 

The great plan to pull down the Whitgift shopping Centre to build a new shopping centre has failed…

For over a decade Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has been in negotiations with the local Tories and then the local Labour Council administrations to pull down the Whitgift Centre – owned by the titular Whitgift foundation- and build a new shopping centre.   

This grand plan did not involve a phased demolition and re-build but a wholesale demolition and the compulsory purchase of large chunks of surrounding real estate such as the failed Allders department store building in order to make one huge shopping mall.

This was always a terrible plan.  

When CPOs - which are an extreme tool of the state and should be a method of last resort - were invented they were for things like building motorways and widening bypasses. The use of them to buy small shops in order to build bigger shops is wrong and anti-competitive.

The Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield scheme to have the whole of the town centre owned by one property developer (who keeps being subject to corporate takeovers and getting ever longer hyphenated names) who bought large chunks at cheap CPO prices always represented something like one of Stalin’s five year plans.  Like Stalin’s 5 year plans by the time it was going to come to fruition it was going to be outdated.  The plan is so huge and its gestation period so long and protracted that every time it moves forward in development it has to be moved backwards towards a redesign because the “retail landscape has changed”.

In the meantime by allowing one company to have such power over such a large area the Council has displaced a huge number of small businesses. 

The reason the Whitgift Centre is so empty is because the Council constantly threaten to knock it down. Thus many large retailers such as Sports Direct long ago decamped to the Purley Way. Its the George’s Walk farce all over again when all the units there were emptied for a development that wasn’t going to happen for a decade. As soon as that was aborted they filled up again.  Of course by forcing its tenants towards failure the Whitgift Foundation and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield increase the political urgency on the Council to break through the political and logistical impass and give them what they want – an excuse to turn the whole site into a huge high rise housing estate – and yet the Council can never give in to their spiralling demands so it has all gone pear shaped because though a small fortune has been spent on architects plans and simulations …in the meantime Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield have simply run out of money and got Brexit/Internetiseverything jitters.

By CPOing such a large area of the town centre and gluing it onto the Whitgift Centre the Council has also become totally beholden to Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield putting its self in a terrible negotiating position …whereby having no fallback plan leaves them at the mercy of the developers whims and caprices to ramp up the number of housing vs retail units.  Every time the project passes the planning permission hurdle it seems to need more planning permissions because it has been redesigned again.

The problem with the Whitgift Centre wasn’t that it didn’t not make a profit.  It is that it doesn’t make a large enough profit for the Whitgift Foundation. They have decided that retail does not make them as much money as housing would.  Of course it might have made more money if a previous Labour administration hadn’t privatised the car parks leading to ever spiralling car parking charges as NCP get richer and richer and the shop owners poorer and poorer…

The whole weneedtobulldozeashoppingcentretobuildashoppingcentre explanation originally offered for the plan was clearly a layer or sugar on the bitter pill that the Whitgift Foundation regards its Centre as a failure that should be housing. Nevertheless politicians of both sides swallowed this pill whole and we are now suffering the side effects.

Crucial questions remain unanswered. Such as why does the Whitgift Foundation’s desire to rebuild the Whitgift Centre require the forced purchase of other sites? 

While, for example, Croydon Village Outlet resembled a department store that was being run by Trotters Independent Trading the fact that anyone tried at all flies in the face of what Tory MP (now Lord) Gavin Barwell said to me a decade ago that no other retailer would move into this old site because it was too old hat. The truth is that these people represent the real entrepreneurship in retail the government should be encouraging but for some reason it seems to despise small businesses… Being obsessed instead with Business Investment Districts and other Blairite schemes to increase business rates.

Still it could be worse. They could have demolished the whole centre to a pile of rubble and CPOed lots of land as well only to run out of money. At least they ran out of money before starting. Perhaps it would be prudent if Councils want to undertake such schemes in the future to at least insist on cash upfront in return for the CPOs so that companies like Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield wouldnt waste everyone’s time. Then again if they’d had to make concrete commitments maybe the plans they drew up wouldn’t have been so grandiose.

This scheme is the very worst of public private partnerships…