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Stella is hired in the BBC The Apprentice Final 2010
I have cried twice many times this year, but I was genuinely delighted when Alan Sugar hired Stella English this evening. A very astute choice, in my opinion.
Video : "9/12/10 Tuition Fee Protest – What The BBC Didn't Report" by Xanna Ward Dixon
“9/12/10 Tuition Fee Protest – What The BBC Didn’t Report” by Xanna Ward Dixon
The problems facing Lord Sugar in BBC The Apprentice Final 2010 by Shibley Rahman
I am not a successful businessman. This does not mean I am an unsuccessful businessman. I am a company director of my own e-learning business for law and medicine here in London. However, I will be starting a two year MBA (Master of Business Administration) degree at BPP Business School in London in January 2011, as I am genuinely interested in both the theory and practice of business, particularly leadership. My brief interaction with the legal world, which has been through a thus far successful Master of Law at the College of Law of England and Wales, has taught me that the business and legal worlds are incredibly closely-related, but it is important to me the impact of successful team-building as well as leadership; I see corporate law is being built by a plethora of highly effective managers, but with few leaders. The corporate mentality is undeniably potentially stifling unless in the right hands, fostering a rather stifling a suffocating anti-intellectual atmosphere, unless corporate law can encourage equality, diversity and inclusivity with some of the clients it is supposed to represent.
Lecture over. Here is the knub then of the problem faced by Lord Sugar on Sunday, in the final of the BBC series “The Apprentice”. Having blown out Stuart Baggs (the ‘Blagger’), one has to feel some genuine disappointment that Lord Sugar has chucked out Liz Locke through having been innocently taken in by the bullshit of Stuart Baggs. Baggs was outed as a confidence trickster, albeit a very technically-minded one, who would do anything to achieve his aims. I like Gordon the lawyer loathe the fact that he would be allegedly willing to break the law, defamation, in rubbishing a business partner to achieve his own ends. This is both illegal and unethical, and certainly would do not thing for Alan Sugar the Brand, let alone Stuart Baggs the Brand.
Stella English is impressive for very many reasons. She doesn’t do emotion as such professionally, and is meticulous in her organisation and discipline, hard work and genuine commitment. She has taken on board incessant criticisms about being ‘wooden’. She has been incredibly successful in the corporate management environment, and the question now for Lord Sugar is to find a suitable role for her in his organisation. Therefore, if she can pull off an inspiring demonstration on Sunday, that will go a long way. She needs to demonstrate that she is a potential entrepreneurial leader; she can have followers, has a set of responsible ideals, can take risks, can work in teams and demonstrate some emotional intelligence, and of course create a superb business plan. However, Christopher Bates has demonstrated entrepreneurial flair in the past in the course of the series, but his track record in not sticking at a job or a course has to be some cause for concern. It’s no good waiting for the quality of what Chris says if he drones on for hours in a pitch on behalf of Sugar’s organisation to a client, but I have no doubting that his skills are understated. For what it’s worth, I think both Stella and Chris would be a ‘safe pair of hands’ at board level, fulfilling the requirements of the Companies Act (2006) in both letter and spirit; in their duty to promote the success of the company, the duty to avoid conflicts of interest, and, especially given their high degree of sheer competence thus far in the competition, a duty to practise with due skill, care and diligence. The words of Peter Drucker continue to haunt me – leadership is doing the right things, management is about doing things right. Where Alan Sugar is superb is that he does both.
Lord Sugar said he didn’t want a ‘steady Eddie’, but this is ironically exactly what he might need in vast quantities in these turbulent economic times. A fairly close decision, and it could be tipped either way. Jamie’s poor interviewing came as a surprise to me yesterday, and definitely cost him a place in the Final. Sunday’s performance does matter therefore. I feel it go in anyone’s favour.
James Naughtie summed up what I feel about the BBC – here's the clip!
Relive the moment! It couldn’t have happened to two nicer blokes, Jeremy Hunt MP and James Naughtie, but it sums up exactly what I feel about the smeartastic BBC.
I am glad James Naughtie is doing his best to raise the happiness index of the UK. The slow car crash in full is here.
But lightning never strikes twice? Well…..!
Happy xmas.
Clegg and more broken promises on tax avoidance. The BBC won't cover it.
Aside from what is happening on broken promises in elsewhere, today (Saturday) is a coalition against tax avoidance.
Please look at this website post : WHY WE AND THE STUDENTS ARE FIGHTING THE SAME BATTLE
Tackling rich tax avoiders was one of the Lib Dems’ four key election pledges, right alongside opposing tuition fee hikes. Both have been broken. This coalition has let Vodafone off a £6bn tax bill and appointed serial tax avoider Sir Philip Green to advise the government on cuts. Sir Philip’s £285m tax dodge could pay the fees of 32,000 students. The money Vodafone were let off would cover every single cut to higher education many times over.
But this is not just an issue of fees, it’s an issue of solidarity. The students have done a damn good job of articulating their link to the wider anti-cuts movement. The issue of tax avoidance is a way that we can forge those links on the street. Pensioners, unemployed, those on incapacity benefit, public service workers, unionists and others have all joined UK Uncut actions around the country. Sitting together in shop doorways, blockading the high street stores of the tax avoiding rich, we can build the sort of networks necessary to build this movement beyond a single issue and bring down this government.
Whilst inflicting savage public spending cuts on the poor and indulging the rich, this government likes to claim that ‘we are all in this together.’ All we need to remember, is that if the government reclaimed the £25bn tax avoided by rich individuals and corporations every year, it could pay for all of the services the government is planning to cut.
This Saturday the students will be joining a growing coalition to take on tax avoiders. Let’s join together, let’s go on the offensive, let’s take this to the high streets.
NEWSFLASH – it’s going really well so far. Here’s Polly Toynbee and @pennyred
It looks as if some people have in super-glued themselves to Top Shop!
No doubt there’ll be another media whitewash by the BBC.
Dr Cable is right, but the LibDems don't smell of roses.
Could Ben Page’s IPSOS-MORI ‘worm’ could have predicted this?
Ed Miliband sitting on the picket line, whatever the hot-air discussions between Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, John McDonnell, Ed and Rosie Winterton amount to in the end, will achieve relatively little. It certainly won’t ‘topple’ Dave Cameron.
I have, on a matter of principle, not got carried away with the hysteria surrounding, for example, the ULU sit-in protests. More to the point, I think Vince Cable’s is possibly in fact correct, and we have a mechanism for voters to get what they want; they can chuck out members of the legislature at given opportunities, and also the legislature themselves can vote down legislature proposed by the Government. This is even the case if the Government is the major government in a Coalition.
So what can legal riots achieve? Well, actually, quite a lot actually, potentially. The UK Poll Tax Riots were a series of mass disturbances in British cities during protests against the Community Charge (commonly known as the Poll Tax), introduced by the Margaret Thatcher. By far the largest occurred in central London on Saturday March 31, 1990, shortly before the poll tax was due to come into force in England and Wales. The disorder in London arose from a demonstration which began at 11am. The rioting and looting ended at 3am the next morning Interestingly, at the time, response of the London police, the government, the Labour Party and the labour movement and some of the Marxist and Trotskyist left, notably The Militant Tendency, was to condemn the riot as senseless and to blame anarchists. Nonetheless, Thatcher went, and John Major announced in his first parliamentary speech as Prime Minister that the Community Charge was to be replaced by Council Tax, which, unlike Poll Tax, took account of ability to pay. Who can forget those iconic days?
The strength of campus students feeling currently is undoubtedly strong, as they’re the ones who helped to contribute to a Liberal Democrat vote the most. Students are taking part in a day of action in protest at government plans to raise university tuition fees. In my alma mater, Cambridge, around 1,,000 students from universities and sixth-form colleges took part in the protests. A number of students climbed over railings at the university’s Senate House, where onlookers described the scene as “crazy”. Only two students were arrested by Cambridgeshire Police for obstruction, and there were some reports from protesters of police violence. Students from Parkside Community College staged a walkout to show their support.
The demonstrations come ahead of an MPs’ debate later on the proposals and other plans to cut university teaching budgets and support allowances for low-income further education students.
More significantly is that Liberal Democrat MPs are due to decide next week how to vote on the move to cut higher education funding and force students to pay fees of up to £9,000 a year. Vince Cable, who has responsibility for universities, confirmed he would abide by the decision even if it meant he was blocked from voting for a system he supports and helped to create. Having all signed a pledge before the general election to scrap tuition fees altogether, the party’s MPs are under pressure to vote against the hike. This means that the Liberal Democrats, should they choose to use it, have a casting vote in their future, and, more importantly, in a key plank of their policy, which Tim Fallon MP himself admitted that he ‘hadn’t read properly’. Onwards and upwards, this will achieve much more than Ed Miliband sitting on the picket line, but there’s one man who doesn’t come out of this smelling of roses.
BBC R4 Today and the squeezed hard-working non-upper class
Friday morning with John Humphrys is not going to be an occasion Ed is going to forget in a hurry, because of an extraordinarily tough interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Ed Miliband’s opening gambit was talking about aspiration, which has indeed been an enduring theme for Labour, certainly during Tony Blair’s time in the 1990s. John wished to pin down Ed on where he precisely he wishes to lead the country, and specific issues, such as the graduate tax and the inequality gap, were discussed, with regards to deficit reduction and fairness. It may seem like quite a sexy concept, “the squeezed middle” like a tube of toothpaste, but actually even the simplest of analyses provides that it is fraught with problems. For example, what are these pressures “squeezing” the middle? Surely not the State, which the Coalition feels is too big anyway.
The interview can be heard here.
John Humphrys – not Ed Miliband – brought up the discussion topic of the “squeezed middle” on the basis of the article he had written in the Telegraph that morning. However, Ed Miliband clearly ran into trouble in defining the “squeezed middle”, which was very heavily reliant on the definition of the middle class. It was nonsense attempting a definition of the “squeezed middle” without defining the middle class, which was a mistake of Ed, thus giving John Humphrys to give the impression that Ed was on an errant fishing expedition. Even his brother David has alluded to the “squeezed middle”, for example in the the 2010 Keir Hardie memorial lecture tonight in Mountain Ash, South Wales. He provided that,
“To reconceive our notion of fairness. In our concern with meeting peoples’ needs we seemed to sever welfare from desert and this led people to think that their taxes were being wasted, that they were being used. When we said fairness, people thought it was anything but. What emerged as a tribute to solidarity, the welfare state, turned into a bitter division. Many of the ‘hard working families’ we wished to appeal to did not view us as their party. We achieved great things but we did not bring people with us, and our motivation appeared abstract and remote.”
The problem was that the definition that Ed (sort of) provided seemed to be 90% of the general public, but when Labour has previously talked about “progressive universalism”, it really has been talking about the aspiration of non-upper class voters who are hard-working; the word ‘middle’ is far too large, but, then again a group of ‘of non-upper class voters who are hard-working ‘ is equally large. It might be better, once Ed has conducted his review, to outline solutions for select groups of the public, such as students who are disenfranchised from Nick Clegg or elderly voters who are worried about the provision of elderly and social care (for example). Like the II.1 class at Universities, this is too large as to provide an idea which voters can address. The criticism of this is that Ed wishes to be ‘all things to all men’, but it would have been helpful had Ed identified which groups of society he was particularly worried about. Maybe, it’s that Ed Miliband feels he doesn’t wish to dash the aspirations of nearly all of the country. I have blogged before on how Labour has been giving the image of protecting the super-rich, and this is dangerous. Obviously, Ed has to give the definition of the “squeezed middle”, having spoken about it so, and even if he alienates some of the “super rich”, I’m afraid.
At first, the “squeezed middle” started off as a fairly innocent parliamentary joke. The Comprehensive George Review saw George Osborne appearing to be perched on William Hague’s knee. The incident gave Ed a good line about Ken being part of the “squeezed middle”. But Cameron responded well by saying that unlike the Labour leader, Clarke has “bottom”. More seriously, making his debut at the Dispatch Box as Labour leader, Ed asked how it was fair for parents with one salary of £44,000 to lose out while those with two salaries totalling more than £80,000 could keep the benefit. Mr Cameron hit back by accusing Ed of expressing concern for the “squeezed middle” to cover the fact that he had been elected with the support of the trade unions. As it happens, however which you define the “squeezed middle” precisely, the benefit changes, which will affect those paying 40 per cent tax from 2013, mean that a three-child family with a single income of £33,000 after tax will lose £2,500 a year, the equivalent of 6p on the basic rate of income tax.
Ed is right in that the “squeezed middle” has become an emergent theme already in his opposition. Ed has has been leader of Britain’s Labour opposition for about a month now, but already he is identified with a cliché: ‘the squeezed middle’, to whom he promised his party’s support. The phrase has enjoyed several years’ currency on both sides of the Atlantic. But its use by Mr Miliband was followed by chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne’s commitment to remove child benefit from the better paid, and then last week by a report from Lord Browne recommending the uncapping of university tuition fees. Politically, one of the key questions about Lord Browne’s suggestion that tuition fees should be raised is how the middle classes react. Will a rise in fees be seen as another burden on those who work hard, play by the rules and are already bearing more than their fair share of the costs of the state? Both measures, together with looming tax rises, are bound to hurt the middle class, and have prompted a surge of debate about its plight. Rightwing commentators argue that prime minister David Cameron is breaching a cardinal principle of Margaret Thatcher by failing to protect “our people”, the aspirational Tory voters. Ministers respond that there is no chance of reconciling those at the bottom of the pile to spending cuts unless pain is seen to be shared across the social spectrum. They were by no means dismayed by cries of suburban anguish about child benefit curbs.
It is possible that Gavin Kelly at the Resolution Foundation has done a much better job. His broad definition is anyone who is “too poor to be able to benefit from the full range of opportunities provided by private markets, but too rich to qualify for substantial state support.” Even something this vague would have helped Ed. Kelly’s analysis shows what a genuinely important political problem the squeezed middle will be in the years ahead. Earnings are flat, and likely to remain so in real terms, while cost inflation is steep especially for healthcare, energy and insurance. House prices have fallen and interest rates are low, but in Britain a mortgage of three times earnings will not buy a home on the edge of a provincial city for even a relatively high-income family on say, £60,000 a year. Kelly calculates that stagnating pay and the rising cost of living will leave these households losing an average of £720 in 2012. That is even before the impact of cuts to tax credits are taken into account. Those who aren’t in the “squeezed middle” – who aren’t “super-rich” – appear to be doing well, and maybe it’s the case that Ed doesn’t want to alienate them either. More and more companies are opting out of offering employees healthcare or final salary pensions. Britain’s average individual earnings are just over £22,000, a pathetically low figure from which to demand that a citizen pays more bills from his own pocket. But that is how things are going to be
However, Ed is in good company in failing to provide a definition of the “squeezed middle”. David Cameron is faring no better than Barack Obama in the vastly difficult task of explaining to his nation, and especially to the “squeezed middle”, where they are going and what is in it for them. He must reconcile people reared in the belief that hard work and prudence will yield comfortable rewards to the new reality of our societies’ diminishing share of global wealth. Finally, Ed must show that he hasn’t forgotten the working classes. Whilst Labour seems to be engaging people in the middle classes, it is dangerous if it writes off the working class in having a share in Labour’s policy.
Anybody who doesn't understand the brilliance of Mandelson clearly doesn't 'do' irony
BBC4 aired a programme last night with the title, “Mandelson – The Real PM?”
It was enormously revealing about Lord Peter Mandelson as a person, in his extremely professional working style as a politician, as well as general demeanour as a person.
You can still watch this documentary which is about 75 minutes long here on the BBC website.
Anybody who doesn’t understand the brilliance of Mandelson clearly doesn’t ‘do’ irony. Lord Mandelson seems to embue inherent contradictions from the word go – a very guarded person privately, but a branding expert. Indeed, he is clearly very enthusiastic about marketing and branding, given his lifelong commitment to reversing the rot in Labour pre-(Blair and Campbell); he is also deeply passionate about his credentials as a professional politician, being the grandson of Herbert Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth, who held the offices of Home Secretary, Foreign Security, and Deputy Prime Minister, and so he should be.
He is clearly intensely funny. The way that he makes mincemeat of low-quality journalists, especially at the BBC, was something which had me in total hysterics. He blatantly does not suffer fools gladly, and, while personally I feel he might have done better in his Prelims at the University of Oxford, he is clearly an intellectual: he has focus, enthusiasm and highly-structured analytical thoughts.
He was very driven in working for Gordon Brown, and he should indeed be proud that he was acknowledged as being the chief troubleshooter for Brown in the election campaign. He has also been remarkably full of praise for Tony Blair, about whom he is clear that he does not blame for his departure over the infamous Robinson debacle. He points his wrath very heavily in the direction of Alastair Campbell, making an extremely clever remark that he can co-exist with certain people, without liking them or being friends with me. I too am very specific regarding myself, on this point.
Mandelson shows ambition, enthusiasm and focus, with wit and extreme hard work, and he deserves to be successful. As for the ‘Prince of Darkness’ label, he has branded himself extremely successful, but Mandelson is a parody. Not being able to go beyond the depth of what he is getting at will make many people fall at the first fence. Like Andrew Gibson from the Telegraph says, he is like a supreme figure-skating champion who delights in skating over the thinnest of ice, and, like me, I suspect he enjoys fighting the most when most attacked. He does not need to worry about what people think of him – because he has won, and he knows, I hope, that he is better than his sharpest of critics.
I have been deeply cynical about Lord Mandelson previously. But not anymore – I feel honoured to give him my unfettered respect, even though I do not happen to agree with him on some issues, especially Ed Miliband.
Please read : "Shibley, Shibley – Problem, Problem"
I went to see my father with my mother to Ward 6W at the Royal Free Hospital. Instantaneously, he looked pleased to see, recognized me as ‘Shibley’, and then appeared to be very agitated and restless. He moved on to say, ‘Shibley, Shibley, Problem, Problem’. I went to the toilet, and when I came back, I found that the arrest team were there. He had lost output, and he had had a heart attack. I knew his blood pressure had dropped, and at that point did not understand the severity of the event. I had only minutes’ earlier been clutching his Lucozade, forced him to take a sip or two, but left the biscuits and chocolates, as well as his ‘Get well soon’ and ‘Thank you’ card in the bag.
I will bury these items with him. I will wear his shoes though, which he had bought the previous week from Oxford Street in Marks and Spencer.
What followed as the worst day of my life. I never saw him again until bed 3 in the ITU. In between, the Consultant Cardiologist, who used to be my SpR at the Hammersmith, caught up with my progress since my recovery and since I went feet-first into my legal studies and promoting awareness of dementia. He explained fully that it was likely that my father would not survive. Actually, his normal echocardiogram was a false positive pre-operatively; we both knew pre-operatively that he was having severe episodes of chest pain at rest but the anomaly was such that his coronary arteries were delivering a normal result because the whole cardiac body was underperfused. The Consultant explained he was lucky to be alive, with all the arteries apart from one being intensely calcific, implying that he was a very high risk patient for a procedure. However, we both knew that if he had had this angiogram beforehand, he might have actually died, not had his operation, and be awaiting perhaps a by-pass graft which might not have worked anyway.
He had his operation because we both saw him decline over several years to almost wheelchair bound. He would wake up at 3 am, say his Islamic prayers, watch BBC News 24 like a zombie all morning, and then cook for me and my mother with whom he lived in Primrose Hill. He would then go to bed at 8 pm, but have nightmares, and not sleep well every night because of intense leg pain, which I now know was intense peripheral vascular disease. Dad, please forgive me – I am not a practising Doctor any more.
I have loads of regrets that he came to see me after alcoholic withdrawal fits in hospital, some requiring emergency intubation, and to see me after my various drunk-and-disorderlies. That’s the thing I’ll never forgive myself for – my selfishness and his selflessness. He knew he was critically ill, but said nothing. He looked after me and my mum, and was wonderful. Everyone who has messaged to me have used consistent words such as ‘a gentleman’, ‘wonderful’ and ‘kind’. That was him – he always wore a suit (and a tie). He did not grumble that he failed the diploma of the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians exam (which I passed in 2005), because of his undiagnosed colour blindness in large part. Also, as for the famous BBC articles which call me a stalker, although I have never received an offence, caution, reprimand or warning from the Police for stalking, he told me to ‘Forget about it. The BBC is a big institution, and its smears does not matter any more to me’.
I will continue to apply to the GMC and the SRA for my entries to the legal and medical professions. I dearly uphold each of the professions. I will regret massively that my father will never see my reputations salvaged, but everyone has told me he will ‘get to know’, I should lead each day to the full, and (my Consultant Psychiatrist particularly said it), I had turned the corner. I cried when I told my Psychiatrist yesterday outside Regents Park Mosque that my blood results were normal. He told me, “Well of course, this is no surprise. He knew you’d be cured, believe me”.
This song is for my Dad, Dr Muhammed Khalilur Rahman, who last week said he was ‘sailing home, again across trouble waters’ and always cried when he reminded himself of his elder brother who died in Bangladesh 2 months ago. “I am dying, forever crying”. “Can you hear me through the darkness of the waves?”
My Dad graphically describes the boat as he left his home village of Bangladesh as the trouble waters, and often used to recount when he was bleeped in England to inform him his own father had died. He worked really hard for the NHS for 30 years, and it will come as a shock to his patients in Burgess Hill that he’s passed away.
And, finally, this is him breaking his fast in Ramadan this year. At the back of my mind, I knew he wouldn’t be with me for long, so I took this video against his will. I said to him last Friday when his operation had been cancelled for the second time, “I’m glad, as you can stay with me for a few more days more”. He smiled. Somehow I knew what he knew what exactly I meant…
An extremely difficult time for me, and I wish to thank the enormous amount of messages I’ve had on Twitter and Facebook. I feel like a dead man walking, but I am determined not to relapse for the rest of my life, for the sake of my father’s reputation and my mother, for long I don’t know will be alive.
My father’s funeral will take place in Islington next Wednesday afternoon. I am looking forward to it. He was an amazing man to me. My best friend (and carer as I am disabled). I will always miss his company, and he’s far more wise and intelligent than I’ll ever be.
Allah bless.
