So, this is ‘helpsomeone week’ – you may have seen some of the tweets, hashtags and so on- the help someone week is just about helping somebody in the smallest of ways – great idea. I thought I would apply this to the creative world too – let’s face it,we all need our friends to support us – so how about going to listen to your friend’s band playing, give them a hand by carrying their camera gear around,help them set up a photo, go watch them in that play they are in or read their book – trying to be creative takes a lot of work and all of these things take up a lot of time to practise, revise and produce so why not have a creative friends focus this week and support them in their endeavours – and they might support you in yours.
Look out for the smaller names rather than follow those who have already made it and give new starters a helping hand. This is also the week leading up to the launch of my second book, Rose’s Story – it would be great if you would spare a few minutes to give me a little help by following my work here – check out the first book, The Horse Lord – if you haven’t already read it and make a note to look out for Rose’s Story.
In ‘The Week’ this week I thought I would take a further look at the budget and any impact on business. As an owner of a small business I wondered if there would be anything remotely helpful to me in the budget. For big business the corporate tax will drop, just before the next election to 17% of profits over £300,000, which is nice if you’re earning that amount but apart from that there wasn’t anything helpful for start ups or small businesses, just a load of ‘future help’ and ‘areas of growth’ and new ‘authority’ and so on, yardy-yard, boring.
There was more about increasing the devolved powers to Scotland, giving them the noose to hang themselves with as far as I can see. The government plans to isolate Scotland into a prison of their own making, the rhetoric Continue reading The Week 19th July, 2015 #28→
Hello and welcome to the week again my rather sporadic, mainly political area, sorry there wasn’t one last week. I had a helicopter assessment thing I had to do that gobbled up the time: any who here we go the big news for me this week – it has to be the budget, the first Conservative in 17 years and what it will do for the country, so let get to it.
First of all let’s look at the budget itself, so I pop over to the government site to peruse it, as you may have read in the headlines that the budget really hammered the poor and the young so I went to see for myself what it says. Continue reading The Week #28 12th July, 2015→
Hello and welcome to The Week. I could talk about the atrocious attacks in Tunisia, France and Kuwait but after the USA Church atrocity last week, and the mass death of migrants the weeks before I don’t think Isis need any more publicity, even if it is from my small blog. Isis as an issue can only be sorted by a combined strike of all western countries but after Afghanistan and Iraq we don’t have the stomach for it any more. I thought I would concentrate this week on accounts of rich kids on Instagram and such like. As an avid non user of most social media I don’t have Instagram but it’s not hard to find evidence of these rich kids everywhere else. The fact that there are so many of them makes my face screw up even more, who views these and why? I directly attribute the peacock Continue reading The Week #27 28th June, 2015→
Hello and welcome to The Week. I didn’t have time to do one last week as I was away at a conference. This week the main news everyone will have seen by now is the killing of nine people in the Charlestown Church shooting. I’m not going to talk about that specific event as it is far too raw for some guy from Britain to be looking through it and what possessed that man to do such an evil thing. What I am going to talk about is the race issue in America, as a neutral outsider I believe I can see past the patriotism and political manoeuvring by Americans, as John Stewart pointed out this week, there are deep roots sunk in America’s short bloody history and devastating Continue reading The Week #26 21st June, 2015→
So, this week I am going to be talking about the immigration epidemic going on around Europe on all fronts, and what can be done about it. If you are European you probably know or have heard about the disaster off the Mediterranean coast at the moment – if you haven’t or if you are from further afield then let me bring you up to speed. There been a boom of immigration via Turkey and all along the north African coast into Europe as a result of war in North Africa and because of hardship in drought areas – coupled with war in the Middle East pushing millions from their homes, all in search of a better life – and so they are seeking this by getting across the med to start a new life in the greener fields of Europe, who can blame them? The dark side of
So this week we have big, big stories in the world all to do with corruption so let’s get onto it. This week, the whole saga that is Fifa crumbled in front of us with almost all the high ranking officials being arrested for bribery, racketeering and laundering money, similar to the raids on the mafia in the 90s. A quick summary for those who have missed it; FIFA, which is a charity, has been taking massive kickbacks from business cartels and so on in South America to fix matches in the South America league, so that is fairly bad but not a complete shock as Fifa has been called out since the mid 1990s for corruption from people within the set up and from without. However, recently they have become over confident, bold, by giving the next two world cups to two countries that don’t deserve it and calls that Rio paid a truckload of money for it – all alluded to but now this has become a big deal as it looks like there is hard evidence. Russia and Continue reading The Week #24 31st May, 2015→
So back to chatting about what’s going on around the world at the moment now the election is over with. Gay marriage – now legalised in Ireland after a high number of news outlets claimed it wouldn’t pass due to the huge catholic population living outside the urban areas and this got me thinking about gay marriage in general. There is a lot of legal moves going on around the world at the moment; in the USA around 70% of the population live in a state where it is legal; in the UK it has been legal for a while, except in Northern Ireland – so why this change in the past few years and why has it taken so long? Continue reading The Week #23 24th May, 2015→
So this is the last one in my two week project on British politics – the round up, what happened and want might happen.
So, in a stunning turn of events an election that looked as if it would be a close run thing, turned out not to be with the Conservatives smashing home with a small majority – something they not had in 20 odd years, with Labour being complete wiped out in Scotland at the hands of the SNP so what does this mean for us now in Britain? Well here are six policies the conservatives will most likely get through parliament now, all six of these policies were ones they either tried to get through in the last five years but were blocked or are in their manifesto – so here we are, this is what 36% of the British population voted for.
NUMBER ONE: benefits will be capped at £23,000 a year per household which will affect millions of people struggling at the bottom part of our society, whilst Continue reading The Week #22 10th May, 2015→
Having looked at the political parties it is time to take a look at how Britain works, and the fundamental problems that all parties fail to address. A successful nation needs a motivated workforce but in the U.K. today business is all about the CEO and their big fat bonus, low costs, big profits – that is why so many people are on zero hour contracts. The trade unions have lost most of their power and since the crash people have put their faith in a Tory government (God only knows why) that has systematically worked to take as much money from you as it can without actually tackling the deficit at all. The shame is that none of the parties are strong, but at least morally speaking labour has some ground to stand on. So let’s consider the vote. If you vote UKIP you are Continue reading The Week #22 And they’re off!!!→
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Books and Social Commentary by Tomos. A. Roberts 