Boycott Virgin Media

This post marks a departure from the usual policy of only targeting the companies of the 35 business people who made their support of the cuts known in an open letter.

No one at Virgin Media signed that letter, so why am I now asking for people to boycott their services? Quite simply because they are absolutely useless.

Virgin Media provided my broadband until the end of January but the story begins in December

On December 16th the phone service stopped working. This was reported to Virgin Media via their online forum as I had no other way to contact them. The broadband was still online.

This forum is full of complaints from hundreds of Virgin Media customers who are not getting the service they have paid for.

Subsequently 4 separate appointments were made for engineers to attend to fix the problem before one finally turned up on 3rd January and fixed the problem which was in their control box a couple of street away.

All of the previous 3 appointments were cancelled on the day they were supposed to take place and notification of cancellation on two of them was only received after the time of the appointment. Two of those days involved me taking time off work to make the appointments. The reason given for one of the cancellations was the weather. It is true to say that we had some snow over that period, but I do not live in an isolated cottage in the middle of Dartmoor, I live in an out London suburb where the roads were gritted, the buses kept running and binmen collected the rubbish on schedule all through the winter.

I was without a phone service, which I had paid for, over Christmas and New Year during one of the coldest spells we have had in years. With two children in the house, one of whom is registered disabled, this was a situation that involved more risk than I found acceptable.

Within 5 minutes of the phone being re-connected I had a phone call from someone claiming to be from Virgin Media demanding my account password. This was not given of course.

These phone calls continued daily , and sometimes up to 5 times a day until I posted a notice on the forum telling Virgin Media that if they wasted any more of my time I would charge them. During one of these phones I was threatened by an employee of Virgin Media and demanded to speak to his supervisor. On this occasion that occurred and he agreed to end the calls. The calls continued but petered out shortly after.

During the time the phone was out of action I hadn't paid my December bill as that was my only leverage to ensure that a repair would eventually be completed.

After the third appointment was cancelled on the day it was supposed to take place I contacted Virgin Media from work and cancelled all my services with a switchover date of 31st January.

During that call, or a subsequent one around that time a closing balance on the account was agreed between myself and someone at Virgin Media that would cover my alleged services oup to 31st January.

Since then I have had threatening letters saying that I owe them a small balance.

The fact is that they owe me.

Their customer service is appaulling.

I phoned them on receipt of the most recent letter to try to resolve the issue by referring them to the previous agreement on the closing amount. The person I spoke to was abusive, rude and was unable to provide me with the Register Office address of Virgin Media so that I could formerly issue legal proceedings of my own. All Limited Companies have to have a registered office address. She also refused repeated requests to pass the call on to someone who could answer the question.

It took me one Google query to find out that Virgin Media's Register Office is Virgin Media Limited 160 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5QA.

One thing you should know about Virgin Media is that if you use the service you pay for they will cut back of your bandwidth. They advertise 'Speeds of up to 20MB' but as anyone with some technical knowledge of broadband knows this is rarely achievable and in Virgin's case is never reached. If you use your broadband a lot, by say letting the kids watch programs on the BBC iPlayer they will throttle back your bandwidth to a half or a quarter of what you pay for. They will not of course reduce your bill when they do this.

So basically, with Virgin Media we have a company that sell services, prevent you from fully utilising them, cannot fix faults within a reasonable period of time, threaten their customers and provide totally crap customer service.

They may not have signed the offending letter but those are enough reasons for me to advise anyone to steer clear of them.

There are other cable broadband provider if you wish to avoid paying BT phone line rentals charges. let me know if your experience with any of the others is similar to mine with Virgin, or if you would positively recommend someone.

Tomorrow is Pay Day

Tomorrow, Saturday 18th December, the last Saturday of Christmas shopping should be a big day for High Street retailers. There premises should be full of hopeful shoppers trying to pick up a present for a friend or family member and the cash registers should be filling up with other people's hard earned cash.

However tomorrow is PayDay, the culmination of UKuncut's campaign against the corporate tax dodgers Vodafone and Arcadia, owned by Philip Green.

Let's not forget also the tax avoided by Mothercare and Boots.

Ukuncut have organised, and more importantly inspired, peaceful protests across the country, usually taking the form of a group of protestors appearing outside a store and attempting to temporarily shut it down. If they can do this to sufficient sites tomorrow they will seruously dent the profits of the tax dodgers.

Pay up Phil, it'll be cheaper in the end !!!

Good luck to anyone involved in aprotest tomorrow. Remember, keep it loud but keep it peaceful.

Captain SKA for Christmas Number One

This is Captain SKA with Liar Liar. Enjoy.




Let's get it to Number One.

Yes2AV or No2AV that is the question

I'm posting on a subject other than the Boycott of the business of the 35 cuts-supporting fat cats today for a couple of reasons.

1. I'm so angry at the scenes I witnessed yesterday outside the home of our 'democracy' where violent thugs wearing police uniforms were assaulting people trying to protect their livelihoods and education that if I think about it any longer longer I'm liable to do myself an injury, and

2. I've been 'tweeting' with people from the YES2AV campaign as I'm genuinely unsure how I will vote, or even if I will vote now that the LibDems have made a virtue of abstentianism, in next May's referendum on changing the voting system. I said I would post up my ideas, as I can't fit them into a 140 character tweet so here they are.

A bit of personal history on the subject.

When I first got involved in party politics in the 80's I opposed PR in all its forms. This was largely because I suspected it was simply a ruse to improve the political fortunes of the LibDems and would do little to improve people's lives.

My position on this changed however when I saw the tories retain control of our local council, of which I was a member, despite having the same number of councillors elected as the combined opposition parties and elected on many fewer votes. The tories then launched an all out offensive against public services cutting everything they could find. Had that council been elected by PR there would have been some kind of coalition formed and extreme behaviour prevented.

So I was turned into a PR convert, but each system of PR I looked at seemed to be devised with the aim of helping one political party or the other. I could not see one that seemed to regard the wishes of the electorate as paramount. I then started to devise my own systems, but more of that later.

The referendum in May does not propose PR, which is the first reason I hesitate to vote Yes. It proposes changing the voting sytem from First Past the Post to the Alternative Vote.

Another reason to hesitate is that it is supported by the LibDems who have shown themselves to be totally untrustworthy. You rarely buy a wreck from the same car dealer twice.

First Past the Post (FPTP) is the system we are all familar with. Whoever gets more votes than any other individual candidate wins. It was devised back in the days when there were rarely two candidates let alone more than two and all the electors could meet in one room. In those days only male landowners could vote. In that context FPTP worked. However we are no longer living in the early 1800's.

The Alternative Vote is where each elector indicated there preference for candidates by listing them as choice 1,2,3 etc. If no candidate receives of 50% of the votes cast the lowest polling candidate is eliminated and the second preferences of their voters added to votes of the other candidates. The process is repeated until one candidate has over 50% support.

Sounds fairer doesn't it, but look at it in the context of UK politics and it sounds like a scam.

The first thing I noticed about AV that I did not like was that this first group of people to have their second vote counted are those who supported the candidate who polled the least. That means those who support the least popular set of policies have their second say before those who come 3rd, 4th or 5th. That seems to favour extremists.

UK Politics is highly tribal. People tend to grow up with a political identity based on social status. For example David Cameron's conservatism was inevitable given his privileged background. He didn't just read Adam Smith and Milton Friendman and decide he agreed with them. He instinctively identified with the politics of his class and rationalised accordingly. The thing is, he is not alone in this, we all do that. We know who is 'on our side' and who is not. Professor Dawkins could probably explain the reasons for this much better than I could as I suspect it's an evolutionary thing linked to the protection of identiable tribal groupings.

Whatever the reason, political allegiance and the perception of others' political allegiance seems fixed. People may change parties, but they rarely change their motives or their principles, if they have any.

So in this context it is easy to see that in a three way contest fought under AV a Tory supporter would put the Labour Party, his historical class enemy, as his bottom choice, and a Labour supporter would do the same with the Tories.

This means the LibDems would pick up the majority of second preferences of whichever other party polled third. It is therefore a simple calculation to see that the LibDems would be favoured to take any seat where a, the winning candidate polled less than 50% and b, they are currently in second place.

(This analysis does not take into account the current suicidal behaviour of the LibDems in breaking pledges and voting against the interests of aspirational parents who want to see their kids go to university.)

This is why I have doubts as to how to vote on the referendum. FPTP is bad and AV is just as bad.

Were this a conversation at this point someone would shout out 'Ok, then what's you're idea' and it would be a fair call.

Ok, I have two mutually exclusive solutions.

My First system. d'Hondt Plus.

This is not completely my own idea but does have a twist I've added myself.

The UK uses the d'Hondt system to elect its Euro MPs. Every voter chooses the party of their choice and the number of seats awarded to each party is roughly proportional to the number of votes cast. There is a complex mathematical formula used to determine who gets which seat which can be found here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method .

The problem I see with the d'Hondt system is that although voters decide which parties get each number of seats it is the party managers, through a listing system, who decide which of their candidates are actually elected.

I would propose that we change this so that each elector has the opportunity to also vote for each candidate.

Under the system I would propose there would be two ballot papers. The first would be the existing ballot paper where you decide which party receives your vote. The second would list all the candidates individually and you could vote for up to the number of seats available. All Euro seats are multi-member and all Westminster seats would become likewise.

This way voters could express their dis-satisfaction with a candidate without having to change their party allegiance. In the light of the recent expenses scandal people could vote for their party of choice and unelect a perceived crook without voting for another party.

Equally if a voter had a particularly strong view on an issue on which all parties were split, such as say, membership of the Euro, they could vote for pro or anti candidates in all parties and so have their view better represented.

If you supported a minority party and knew your favoured party were unlikely to win any seats you could use your vote to determine which candidates of other parties were elected.

As you can probably imagine party managers would hate this system as it places the power to elect firmly in the hands of the electorate and eliminates safe seats, as no seat would be safe as you could lose it to someone in your own party.

This system requires multi-member seats representing 5 - 8 current constituencies to work.

My second system is more radical, more representative in its results and is a bigger change from the current system. I call this 'All In'

Under the 'All In' system the number of MPs elected becomes less relevant than the number of votes they gained.

The basic idea is that instead of a MP with a majority of 1 being the equal of a MP with a majority of 50,000 votes cast in the House of Commons by MPs are weighted to reflect the number of votes each candidate received.

This changes our democracy from being a 'representational' system to being a 'delegatory' system where each voter decides which candidate to delegate their vote to during the next parliament.

The way it would work would be that every candidate polling more than a threshold figure would be elected, but governments would form on polling strength rather than number of MPs as no party would have a majority in terms of number of MPs but may do so in terms of popular vote.

Votes in the House would be more like shareholders meeting where the voting strength of each MP would be different and would be the number of votes they received in the election.

The downside to this is that unless we combine constituencies into larger blocks we could end up with a lot more MPs, and that might not go down very well. We could of course change their system of remuneration to one of performance pay linked to their number of votes so the power to pay them lies in the hands of the only people whose opinion matters, the electors.

The upside is that if all MPs vote on a piece of legislation it will succeed only if a majority of those whom the electorate cast their votes for vote for it, making parliament more representative of the country.

Both my systems envisage larger multi-member constituencies because I believe this would work better than the current system. I know from experience that someone looking for assistance from an elected representative will rarely go to his or own if they are from a party the elector does not trust. They would rather go to someone from the party they do support even if that means dealing with an MP or councillor from another area. With multi-member seats we are all more likely to end up with someone we voted for.

Let me know your views in the comments.

Boycott Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge

Philip Green is a retail billionaire who advises the Conservative led government on 'efficiency', that called 'sacking people' outside board rooms and conservative circles.

He is Britain's ninth-richest person with assets worth around £4.43bn in 2008.

Taveta Investments, the company used to acquire Arcadia in 2002, is in the name of Green's wife, Cristina Green, a Monaco resident, avoiding £285 million in tax that would be payable if a UK resident owned the company. When Green paid his family £1.2bn in 2005, it was paid for by a loan taken out by Arcadia, cutting Arcadia's corporation tax as interest charges on the loan were offset against profits. In comparison, staff at Arcadia were told in 2005 that members of its final salary pension scheme must increase contributions by half and work five years longer to qualify for the same payout.

UKuncut are currently campaigning against Philip Green and his unpaid taxes http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/philip-green-protest-alleged-tax-avoidance?CMP=twt_gu

Let's show some solidarity and support UKuncut.

Boycott Expansys, Stonehaven Associates, Yell Group

Bob Wigley is another businessman for whom the corporate boardroom appears to be a natural habitat.

He is Chairman of Expansys, Stonehaven Associates and Yell Group. Between 2008 and 2009 Bob was Chairman of Sovereign Reversions plc.

Expansys is an online electronics store selling mobile phones, sat navs, laptop tvs etc.

Yell Group own and produce Yellow Pages and the yell.com web site.

Stonehaven LLP is a recruitment and personnel advisory firm. They are focused on boardroom and senior level recruiting and management assessment in the Corporate, Institutional and Financial Services sectors.

Sovereign Reversions operate in the equity release market, convincing retired people to borrow money using the equity in their property as collateral. This means that Sovereign can pick up the property cheap later.

This is how this practice is described on Sovereign's web site.

Sovereign Reversions buys property assets at a discount to vacant possession value. It benefits from the elimination of this discount when the homeowners leave their home or die, and from the long term appreciation of property values.

They actually boast about the 'discount' and 'benefits' they get when people move into care or die. I thought I had found a sick one when I wrote about Nick Prest's arms dealing through Cohort PLC but I think this may be worse.

Bob Wigley was appointed as Ambassador for UK business by the Prime Minister in 2010.

Bob is on the Advisory Board of the venture capital firm Bluegem LLP and is the European Financial Services Operating partner of the venture capital firm Advent International. Bob is the former chairman of Merrill Lynch EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). He held a number of management positions at Merrill Lynch, serving from 2003 to 2004 as chairman of EMEA Corporate Banking, global co-head of Telecom and Media Investment Banking in 2002, co-head of U.K. Investment Banking in 2001 and co-head of Corporate Broking in 2000. He was educated at Exeter School and the University of Bath. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

He is Chairman of the National Education Employer Partnership Taskforce. He is Chairman of the Green Investment Bank Commission and on the International Advisory Council of the International Centre for Financial Regulation. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Cranfield School of Management’s Doughty Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, the Advisory Council of Business for New Europe and is a Visiting Fellow of Oxford University and Chairman of Oxford University’s Centre for Corporate Reputation. In 2008, he chaired a panel of leading London financial services company CEO’s for the incoming Mayor of London, Boris Johnson producing a major report on how to maintain London’s competitiveness in global terms for the decade ahead and as a reward now sits on the Mayor’s Panel of Economic Advisers and the Advisory Council of TheCityUK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and is Master of the Court of the Worshipful Company of International Bankers. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and has a business degree and an honorary doctorate from Bath University.

On 18th October, Bob Wigley signed an open letter calling on the Chancellor to continue the coalition government's plans to reduce the public finance deficit in one term, plans which included swingeing cuts on the poorest members of society and which risk pushing this country into a double-dip recession, the likes of which has not been seen since the last time the tories took power and tanked the economy in the early 80's.

For this reason Bob Wigley is considered a fully signed up member of the Big Business Society and we urge people to boycott Expansys, Stonehaven Associates, Yell Group. There are lots of recruitment agencies out there, just steer your personnel people in other directions.






This post marks the completion of the entries on each of the companies represented on The Offending Letter of 18th October. These posts will now be revised, improved, clarified, have sources added and linked to, kept up to date with any new information that comes to light on the companies and the signatories and generally made easier to find and index by search engines on the web using what knowledge of SEO I have picked up over the last decade of working in the online search and affiliate marketing industry.

Please let me know if anything on this site is or becomes out of date or wrong.

Boycott Robert Walters PLC

Robert Walters plc is a professional recruitment consultancy that focuses on placing high calibre professionals into permanent, contract and temporary positions. Established in 1985 by current Chief Executive Officer, Robert Walters, Robert Walters plc today has 41 offices in 20 countries. Robert Walters PLC acquired Dunhill Management Services in 2001, and launched Walters Interim, its junior professional contract recruitment business into France in 2005, Belgium in 2006 and the Netherlands in 2008. In February 2008, the Group acquired Talent Spotter, a specialist recruitment business headquartered in China with offices in Shanghai and Suzhou.

They opened an office in Seoul this year. That must be a hairy placed to work with tension building again between North and South Korea, and with Sarah Palin unable to identify friend from foe.
Robert Walters is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Robert Walters PLC

After graduating with a degree in economics and politics in 1975, Robert joined Touche Ross. In 1978 he joined Michael Page International plc, initially working in its commerce division and subsequently set up and ran its public practice unit. In 1982 he set up and managed its New York office. He resigned in 1984 and founded the business of Robert Walters in 1985.

On 18th October, Robert Walters signed an open letter calling on the Chancellor to continue the coalition government's plans to reduce the public finance deficit in one term, plans which included swingeing cuts on the poorest members of society and which risk pushing this country into a double-dip recession, the likes of which has not been seen since the last time the tories took power and tanked the economy in the early 80's.

For this reason Robert Walters is considered a fully signed up member of the Big Business Society and we urge people to boycott Robert Walters PLC. THere are lots of recruitment agencies out there, just steer your personnel people in other directions.