Opinion

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...

By Dan Cundy For many of us – and particularly those of us working in education – September is always associated with a new school year and fresh starts. Perhaps starting a new school, wearing a new uniform or just having a new pencil case, the autumn term always seems to offer new possibilities. This new term is particularly exciting for me as the new University Technical College (UTC) of which I am Principal officially opens this week. For those unfamiliar with the ethos of...

Our Northern Correspondent John Locke on the closure of Fabric and the beginning of end of the fabric of our night time economy... The closure of Fabric by revoking its licence is a bullshit decision - an Arab millionaire just died at The Dorchester hotel after a huge cocaine binge... Will that be closed down too? Utter institutional hypocrisy. It stinks of the gentrification and segregation occurring between the haves and have nots and the rich, powerful and corruptible in London....