If you want to make yourself look a mug, try to be an expert
on the geopolitics of Afghanistan. Unless you have months of spare time, you
will never really understand it. The moment you think you have untangled the web;
another complexity throws a spanner into the workings of your brain.
What we do know, is America and its allies invaded it 20
years ago in revenge for the 9/11 attacks. The idea being to overthrow the
Taliban and install ...
Most people who are reading this post will be paying tax and
national insurance or would have done, in the past. Most of us pay our tax willingly enough.
However, for high earners or those with businesses subject to corporation tax
on top of income tax, it sometimes feels like a perpetual dishing out of money
to the HMRC.
Personally, I don’t pay huge amounts of tax because I don’t
really work hard enough these days. However, as a ...
Through my business, I have been hearing various tales of
pandemic fraud. These have generally come from sources close to contractors or
businesses taking advantage of self-employed grants and government backed
loans.
Some of these tales have a whiff of bar stool bullshit about
them, whilst others get me feeling agitated. A pandemic, you might hope, would
be a collective effort, not a moment of opportunism where hastily put together
rescue ...
I was speaking to a chap who carries out work for my company, the other day. We got onto the subject of racism and the recent abuse of England’s black footballers.
I have known him a long time, so he admitted to me that
until he started running projects in London, he had always carried inherent
racist attitudes. It was when he started working in London that he realised to
himself that he had a head full of stereotypes. These had been ...
As I looked around the dejected faces of the cricket club on Sunday night, I felt sad for the young people feeling what I did 31 years ago after a dramatic night in Turin. The sick part of me also felt glad that these people should be subjected to the misery I once endured. But mostly, I felt empathy.
I felt miserable too, but like many of my age group, I am
battle hardened, so it didn’t last more than an hour. I have witnessed no fewer
...
