It will be interesting to see if the current travel misery deliberately being inflicted on London and its commuters, and the leaving of the union-friendly EU, triggers long overdue union reform., and perhaps some sensible new laws making the striking employees liable to compensation claims.

A proposed compensation claim against Southern Rail by a group of commuters would seem to have no merit at all, save for the unions who are doubtless delighted to see more pressure being put on their member’s employer, and the solicitor paid for bringing the claim.

Transport staff are eight times more likely to go on strike than the rest of the UK workforce, whether encouraged by their paid sponsor Jeremy Corbyn or not, official figures show.

Our press have brought their current woes on themselves, though sections such as Rupert Murdoch’s empire have arguably done more than most to bring newspapers down to their current level of disrepute.

Accordingly it has recently been revealed, following the 2011 scandal of phone-hacking, that only 18% of us trust our national press to tell the truth, half of the 37% recorded ten years ago in 2006. Calls for the press to be better regulated have been tempered by revelations that only 3% of us would trust the press to regulate itself, and only 8% would trust a regulator set up by the government, with 73% being in favour of a regulator with no connections to either, to avoid newspapers pronouncing themselves innocent when guilty or our government using its regulator to cover up its own misdeeds and failures. Continue reading →

Meanwhile Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York has launched a legal claim against News Group International for £25 million, losses she claimed she suffered as a result of being caught offering access for £500,000 cash to her then husband, the Duke of York.

Ferguson was caught in a 2010 sting operation mounted by the now defunct News of The World and fronted by its “Fake Sheikh” reporter Mazher Mahmood, currently serving time for tampering with evidence in a court case. She was filmed accepting money for the access and the newspaper broke the story. Continue reading →

Retailers Marks and Spencer are using technology to secretly track people’s movements via their mobile phones.

Devices installed in the ceilings of M&S stores pick up the signals sent out by shopper’s mobile phones as they search for Wi-Fi connections, signals that can be used to pinpoint a shopper’s position. This information can then be used to count the number of people who visit a store, and what parts they visited, so that store layout can be altered to sell more M&S goods. The technology can also be used to bombard phone users with advertisements. Shoppers who don’t want this are being advised by privacy campaigners to turn off their phone’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capacity when shopping. Continue reading →

One organisation that earns instant deletion from us is one that purports to offer opportunities to earn substantial income from working from home.

Emails urging victims to visit their website – and experience a loud, hectoring presentation that is impossible to turn off – are sent as though they have come from the victim’s own email address, to ensure that they are not put on automatic deletion by spam filters. The emails come in, commonly five or more a day, under a variety of headings that they hope victims will take seriously and carrying a variety of names of individuals all claiming to be the “personnel manager of a large, international company” Our own experience with logging names over a three week period is that this company, if it exists, has 158 different “personnel managers”. Continue reading →

Alterations in consumer behaviour at Christmas time, and featured in national press reports, have been noted by those who market in the sector.

Apparently we are drinking more fizz, such as Prosecco, in favour of port/sherry, goose is replacing the turkey, and pannetonne the Christmas pud We are dumping Christmas cards in favour of a much cheaper email message, or posting on social media, using real fir trees in place of the artificial and listening to seasonally themed chart hits, even if recycled, rather than Christmas carols.

Now you know.

The rise of internet reviews, that apparently more than 80% of us look at before buying, has seen a corresponding rise in the number of “Online Reputation Management” (ORM) firms that offer to get rid of those tedious negative reviews from disgruntled customers.

Quite how this is done is not stated, although one tried and tested way is to just swamp them with positive reviews, like staff working for disgraced foreign aid firm Adam Smith International were instructed to do by their director of strategy Peter Young.

Some of the ORM firms offer to supply testimonials form satisfied clients, which of course will not be falsified, oh no…

Uplifting to read that Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has big-heartedly agreed to put aside, for the time being, her party’s plan to hold another referendum on Scottish Independence from the Union, if the UK cancels its Brexit plans and stays in the EU.

It seems from the first referendum there that most canny Scots want to stay in the Union, where they enjoy large subsidies from England’s taxpayers, and that a majority want to stay in the EU, where they also enjoy large subsidies, both of which they would very much like to carry on receiving.

Perhaps a constructive way forward would be for a binding referendum on Scotland’s membership of the Union held with the whole of the UK entitled to vote?