Opinion

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....

On the left of the political spectrum there has always been a deep distrust of "business". Business was seen to be the enemy of working men and women so politics was seen as a zero-sum game. Things that were good for business were assumed to be bad for workers and vice versa. Despite this view, there was general support for, and acceptance of the economic model that developed from the end of WW2. Increases in productivity fed through in to...

The US president is the most powerful person on Earth. Only America has a military capable of launching an invasion anywhere in the world. America's economic power lets it put huge pressure on countries that act against its interests. And the cluster of alliances with the US at the centre allows its president to shape the world in ways never before possible for one person. That's why we watch American presidential elections with a combination of fervent interest and stomach...

I want to start this by dispelling a common myth. Men don't shop. When we have a demand for an item we find the quickest route to get to the appropriate supplier. Shopping is the carnage that happens in between, and we don't have the patience for that! For anyone who has been unlucky enough to experience Oxford Street on a Saturday you will be well versed with the familiar cloakroom clusters and door lingerers that are the men of the shopping World. The...