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Archive: Times

The failing economy of Kirkcaldy

5 August 2009 20:54

Categories: *, Current affairs, Economics, Famous Langtonians, Fife, General, Media, Newspapers, Personal, Politics, Scotland, Work

It was revealed yesterday that Gordon Brown will spend part of his summer doing voluntary work in Kirkcaldy, the town where he grew up which forms the major part of his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It is also my home town.

Some uncharitable people have suggested that his job may involve digging holes, something he has done quite enough of as Prime Minister. More cutting might be the observation that voluntary work is the only sort of work you’ll be able to find in Kirkcaldy.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times ran a piece about the economic woes which have hit Kirkcaldy which was a talking point among some of my friends. Aside from apparently inventing the demonym “Kirkcaldians” (I personally prefer “Langtonian”, named after the town’s old nickname, the Lang Toun), I think the article is largely a fair and accurate reflection of the town.

I have written before about the sorry state of the Mercat, the town’s main shopping centre which used to house my former workplace, Woolworths. Over the difficult Christmas period the Mercat went from bad to worse. But it gets just a passing mention in the Times piece, with its mere eight or more empty units.

Apparently there are thirty empty units in the High Street. There is a particularly dire section in the middle of the pedestrianised zone, where three shops in a row — which used to be the Link, Adams and Icon Clothing — now lie empty. What remains has been criticised for exhibiting the characteristics of a clone town (PDF link). Beyond that, particularly in the west end, what isn’t a chain store is most likely a pawn shop or a charity shop.

Perhaps this is not particularly unusual. The death of the High Street has been widely advertised, so this is not a problem unique to Kirkcaldy. The Times article briefly touches on the retail park. It sits on the north-western edge of the town, well away from the centre. But it is currently being expanded, a development which feels like a desperately-needed shot in the arm for Kirkcaldy.

The problem is that it just is not enough. Indeed, the clamour over the few new jobs that are available serve to bring into focus just how dire the situation is. I have lost count of the number of people that I know of applying for the same few jobs.

A new B&Q has opened, although the old one closed. A number of my former colleagues at Woolworths have ended up working there. PC World is another new store at the retail park. But so many people I know applied for jobs there. A friend who got an interview there was told that they had been bombarded with over 700 applications.

If you got rejected by PC World, you could always try applying for a job at the new Toys R Us. The only problem is that they apparently had 3,000 applications. Only a lucky 350 got an interview, with just 40 places going.

An Argos Extra has also opened up. They held an assessment day at the Jobcentre a couple of months ago. I saw it with my own eyes as I walked past it. There were two queues coming out of the Jobcentre, one in each direction. I have been told that the larger of the two queues stretched all the way to the police station, which sits at the opposite end of a street which is the best part of 200 yards long.

The store has been open for just over a week now. The good news on that front is that my friend, who transferred to work there from the existing High Street store, reports that sales have been very encouraging. Whether that is simply down to the excitement of something new opening in Kirkcaldy remains to be seen.

As for the Jobcentre itself, that continues to hire new people, including one of my friends. What they’ll do with the new staff when demand for the Jobecentre’s services is not so strong is unclear. But at the moment that feels like a distant possibility anyway. Whenever I went there I was often told they were short staffed.

In the Times article, there is a quote about the Jobcentre by a man called Tam Collins: “they expect you to stack shelves at Asda.” I got exactly that when I visited the Jobcentre. Going there is a fruitless task which I have now given up.

The Asda is a new store which has opened up in neighbouring Glenrothes. It is probably the most exciting thing in terms of employment to happen in Glenrothes for years. That is another place where a few of my former Woolworths colleagues have ended up. In a way they were lucky — Asda received over 7,000 applications for that one store.

Meanwhile, the town’s largest employer, a call centre called MGt, has recently shed 65 jobs as a result of the closure of Setanta. 65 looks like a small number compared to the amount that are already looking for work. But MGt has provided a lifeline to Kirkcaldy in terms of employment since it set up around a decade ago. Today it has around 1,000 people on its books. I dread to think what Kirkcaldy would be like if it wasn’t for MGt. That even MGt is downsizing is ominous.

But that sums up Kirkcaldy. It lost its way after the industrial decline of the previous fifty years. Now if you want a job in Kirkcaldy you need to either work in a call centre or in the precarious retail sector. And even then, good luck to you. After my previous experience of working in retail, I am avoiding it if at all possible.

Seven months since losing my job at Woolworths, and over a year since I graduated, I still haven’t found a full time job (although I’m lucky to have found bits and pieces of freelance work). I have well and truly hit the buffers, and I am now starting with a blank sheet of paper to decide on my next move.

One of my biggest mistakes was to focus my search too narrowly on a small geographical area. I certainly didn’t bet on finding a job in Kirkcaldy — it was bad enough before and clearly getting worse. But I planned on finding something in the eastern part of the central belt — somewhere within an area encompassing Fife, Dundee, Perth, Stirling or of course Edinburgh. No luck yet. I will have to broaden my search further and hope that something comes up, or hope that I will be able to rely on freelance work in the long term. I wouldn’t like to bet on relying on getting a job at a call centre in Kirkcaldy.

It is sad that Kirkcaldy is like this. This is the town of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics who looked out onto the bustling Firth of Forth, full of trade ships, and was thereby inspired to investigate sources of wealth. Today he would only be inspired to investigate the weed growth in the derelict former workplaces.

Sadder is the role of Gordon Brown. Surely, some people say, if there was one man who could save Kirkcaldy, it would be the Prime Minister and former Chancellor, who grew up here and depends on the residents’ votes. Some are truly furious about it.

Others, as the Times article notes, inexplicably give him and the government the benefit of the doubt. Talking to people, it is genuinely true that there are people in Kirkcaldy who believe that Gordon Brown is a competent leader who has somehow been stitched up. Even for failed leaders, the halo effect is still in evidence.

That is the irony. The people of Kirkcaldy are probably the one set of voters in the country that Gordon Brown can afford to take for granted. Could it be that having the local man as Prime Minister has exacerbated Kirkcaldy’s problems?

It would indeed be harsh to lay the blame wholly at Gordon Brown’s door. Kirkcaldy had problems before, and most of what has happened in the past year can be put down to the global recession.

But the Labour Party is supposed to look after the interests of people who live and work in towns just like Kirkcaldy — a former industrial town that slips ever-further into the mire, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. On the evidence I see with my own eyes, the Labour Party have failed us.

22 comments

Did Martin Whitmarsh know more?

4 April 2009 12:42

Categories: Opinion

A new set of newspapers came out this morning, and that means a new set of stories about the latest McLaren scandal. It looks like Lewis Hamilton has won some respect for his contrite apology, which was apparently met with some applause after it finished. Now the media is casting the spotlight on Martin Whitmarsh. It seems as though the journalists don’t believe the McLaren team principal’s protestations of innocence.

This morning, three stories by three of the media’s top F1 journalists have provided food for thought. Take, for instance, Kevin Garside in the Telegraph:

Not so poor Dave Ryan, the middle-ranking manager who left Sepang carrying a heavyweight can, the kind of load you might expect a senior executive to bear. Not at McLaren evidently. Well, not yet anyway.

McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh says he is considering his position. Given the knife protruding from Ryan’s back, it would appear that any imperative to walk the plank did not seriously trouble the conscience of the team’s high command.

Ryan is a time-served McLaren fixer, a no-nonsense Kiwi 35 years with the team who can find his way around the paddock blindfold. He is normally an enforcer of policy not the author of it.

Ed Gorman in The Times:

It is easy to imagine Hamilton and Ryan making things up between themselves and going into the room and saying something they should never have done. But the part that stretches credibility to breaking point is the idea that after Melbourne and before the pair were summoned back before the stewards on Thursday in Kuala Lumpur, that no-one else in the team was made aware of what they had said and what was going on. It is important to appreciate that when Ryan and Hamilton went back to the stewards in Sepang they both continued to lie and to stick to their story from Melbourne. This has been confirmed both by McLaren and the FIA. It beggars belief that, in a team like McLaren which has been taught by Ron Dennis to think in a complex and often self-defeating way about even the most simple problems, that this critical issue would not have been more widely discussed by senior management before they went back in and approved by those people (or maybe not approved by some of them).

And Maurice Hamilton in The Guardian:

Is Ryan, who has been suspended by McLaren, being made the fall guy?
That would appear to be the case. Having known Ryan for more than 25 years, there is no one more honest or straightforward in formula one.

How much danger is the new team principal Martin Whitmarsh in?
He appears to have fallen at the first hurdle thanks to his lack of support for a man who has served the team faultlessly for 34 years. Ryan has widespread respect. On this basis Whitmarsh’s judgment is now being questioned.

This all leaves a serious question mark hanging over the McLaren team. Those that know Dave Ryan say he is an honest man who does what he is told by senior management. He has loyally served the team for 35 years. For me, that was one of the most staggering things about this story — that someone with so much experience could make such a serious error of judgement, and that someone would do anything to jeopardise the reputation of the team they have worked for since the 1970s.

I have to admit that last night as I reflected on McLaren’s latest foul-up, I was going through previous events in my head. All those times when McLaren’s version of events turned out not to be true. There have been plenty of them. I usually gave them the benefit of the doubt. But now, I am beginning to suspect foul play.

You may say that all teams and drivers lie and cheat in sport. This may be true, but it doesn’t make it any more palatable. What annoys me about the fact that McLaren are constantly caught with their pants down is the fact that this is the team that is constantly banging on about its honesty and integrity.

At least Jean Todt didn’t hide the fact that he was unsporting. He just shrugged his shoulders and said that’s what it takes to win. Ferrari have offended me a lot over the years. But they haven’t offended me as much as McLaren offend me today.

If there is even an ounce of truth in the hunch that the journalists have, McLaren are finished as a sports team. They will struggle to regain the trust of the fans unless there is a wholesale change at the top of the organisation.

It is bad enough to mislead the authorities. But it is a lot worse if the team then uses one of its most loyal workers as a scapegoat. Some have noticed the uncomfortable echoes of what happened to Mike Coughlan — so it would bring the events of Stepneygate into a new light as well.

2 comments

Why are newspapers hiding their niche content?

16 February 2009 16:53

Categories: *, Current affairs, Internet, Media, Newspapers, Sport, Technology

You may know that I run a Formula 1 blog called vee8. It’s just one of a number of websites I am now running. It’s a lot to have on my plate and recently I have been looking at ways to save time.

Last week I asked my readers if they thought I should continue with the daily roundup of F1 links. I was bowled over by the overwhelmingly positive response. But I was still unsure about constantly using the same few sources all the time.

Websites dedicated to Formula 1 tend to be very good for day-to-day gossip and news. They have a very good feel for what is going on generally in the F1 world. But occasionally a major media company, which doesn’t necessarily churn out a great deal of F1 content, will get a big scoop. In fact, I can’t think of a quality or mid-market newspaper which doesn’t, from time to time, have interesting stories that the dedicated F1 sites have missed.

In an attempt to try and catch these stories before reading them elsewhere, but without getting overwhelmed with boring, samey or irrelevant stories, I decided to try and construct a Yahoo! Pipe. My idea was to pull in the F1 feeds from a wide variety of media websites, but filtering out stories containing words like ‘Hamilton’ or ‘Button’ so that I didn’t get overloaded with nationalistic puff-pieces.

Unfortunately, this is proving difficult. Most media websites are simply unwilling to supply me with the content I want. Honourable exceptions are guardian.co.uk (which even has a feed dedicated to Lewis Hamilton, for all your stalker needs), the Telegraph and (amazingly) the Daily Express. Other websites’ approaches towards RSS are disappointing.

Times Online doesn’t appear to have a dedicated Formula 1 or motorsport feed. It has a Sport feed. Confusingly, rugby and tennis get their own feeds. But no other sport does — not even football. The rationale behind this isn’t very clear, and having seen that two sports do have their own feeds, I feel like going on the hunt for the others. But they aren’t there. Strangely, the rugby and tennis feeds are displayed completely separately, not as a sub-category of sport.

FT.com doesn’t have any sport feeds at all. I suppose that is understandable in a sense, as the FT is due to cut back its already rather scant sports coverage. But it does mean that I will miss out on the F1 stories it does have from time to time.

The Daily Mail website lumps Formula 1 content in the ‘other sports’ section. This has its own RSS feed, but unfortunately it is shared with tennis, horse racing and, er, yet more ‘other sports’. I somehow doubt that fans of any of these sports will find this RSS feed particularly useful, unless by some fluke they are a fan of all of them.

Daily Mail RSS feeds The paper is, however, happy to cater for the niche needs of football fans. 28 separate football clubs have their own RSS feed. More creepily, the Daily Mail offers dedicated RSS feeds containing the latest news on a number of different celebrities, for the stalker in you. Quite good for stained raincoats, but not so good for anoraks like me.

These websites are surely missing a trick. It shouldn’t be a problem to provide RSS feeds for any topic, no matter how niche. WordPress certainly offers this functionality, and every category and tag has its own RSS feed. But some websites’ approaches to RSS feeds seem arbitrary at best. It seems particularly inexcusable in this increasingly long tail-aware age.

Presumably newspapers want people to read their content. But some of their websites are sticking to the old model of content delivery — chucking it all in one place and making its readers browse through everything until they come across an article they’re interested in. That was all very well when the most efficient way of disseminating news was to print it on a dead tree. But that was last the case at least ten years ago.

Now we have more efficient and cost-effective ways to get to the information we want, but newspapers seem dead set on not offering them to us. Bandwidth isn’t an excuse. guardian.co.uk not only offers RSS feeds for a huge variety of topics, it offers full RSS feeds for them. Plus, with a nifty bit of URL hacking, you can access highly specialist RSS feeds that aren’t even advertised at all.

So why are some websites still asking me to subscribe to an “other sports” feed filled with a baffling mish-mash of unrelated stories? What makes the editors of these websites think that I am going to hunt down their F1 content by spending my time trawling through their badly designed website all the time, or read through a thousand RSS items that don’t interest me?

The thing is, someone looking for niche content is probably more likely to subscribe to an RSS feed. This is specifically because they don’t want to go through the entire site’s content. Yet these websites only supply RSS feeds containing a large range of the content. For the content consumer, this doesn’t save much more time than visiting the website.

If these websites offered an RSS feed for F1, they would be guaranteed at least one reader — and then more when I link to interesting articles from vee8. As it stands, I am tearing my hair out and finding it easier not to think about these websites at all.

6 comments

The role of the stewards

11 September 2008 10:20

Categories: Opinion

Ed Gorman — The Times journalist and a blogger normally known for his enthusiastic support for Lewis Hamilton (which got him into hot water from many Spanish fans in the past) — has been unusually erring towards taking the view of the stewards following the Belgian Grand Prix. He has written a couple of posts saying that he has found out a few things about the stewards’ decision. It makes for interesting reading and there are a few points I want to pick up on.

Here is the first post.

I have winkled out a few tiny extra details about the hearing. One thing I can tell you is this. The way the stewards approached it – quite correctly in my view – was to put out of their minds who the cars were being driven by and what stage, of which race, they were looking at. In other words they closed their minds to the sporting politics of the situation and focussed intently on the evidence presented to them. As one source put it: “They looked at it as if it was a GP2 incident, not Kimi vs Lewis at the climax of the Belgian Grand Prix.” By this means, as he pointed out, they came, in their view, “to a fair sporting conclusion even if that was also a PR disaster for Formula One.”

It should go without saying that this is what the stewards ought to be doing anyway. The fact that it is news that “they closed their minds to the sporting politics of the situation” implies that in previous decisions the stewards have not. Is it normal for the stewards to take into account politics when making a decision? That is pretty shocking stuff if this is the case.

Incidentally, given the run of odd penalties that GP2 has also seen in the past couple of meetings, I suppose that the stewards would come up with a controversial result by approaching it “as if it was a GP2 incident”.

Another point here is that many of you seem outraged that a race result had been changed, that the sanctity of the sport had been contaminated by the cold legalise of bureaucrats in a courtroom afterwards. But again what is the alternative? If a sport has rules, they must be upheld. People cannot be adjudged to have won just because a race has finished – that would be a recipe for anarchy.

Here I do sympathise with the stewards. A lot of people were outrage by the fact that the race result was changed. But I learnt very early on in my F1-viewing days that you can never be fully sure of a race result until later on in the evening (and sometimes even after that). Sometimes, that is just the way F1 is.

However, there is no doubt that it leaves a sour taste in the mouth to see a driver cross the finish line then spray the champagne from the top step of the podium, only for that victory to be taken away from a smoke-filled room behind the scenes. I certainly took it pretty badly, and judging by the Belgian GP video on Formula1.com, so did Bernie’s people! Sometimes, however, this is what has to happen.

Is there a way the process can be tightened up though? In my mind, there are plenty of ways in which the process could be improved. For one thing, if the stewards think that something dodgy happened on the track, they should let it be known immediately that they plan to investigate it.

I don’t mind about the stewards taking a long time to make a decision. I would rather have the correct decision made slowly than the wrong decision made quickly. What is a problem, though, is the perception that the stewards have made the wrong decision slowly. Nevertheless, the stewards have access to a lot more data than we do and I don’t blame them for wanting to plough through it.

However, I would like viewers to be told more clearly and quickly when a driver is under investigation. If the stewards thought the Hamilton–Räikkönen incident was marginal, they should have notified the relevant people as soon as they came to that conclusion, which you would think was not long after the incident actually happened.

If the stewards are umming and aahing about whether or not they should investigate, I think that is still an investigation! That it can take so long for the viewers to be informed of an investigation is not on. A lot of the problem I had with the situation was that it wasn’t even announced that there was an investigation until after the podium ceremony. I can understand that for a technical infringement — but for a sporting infringement?

As for why the stewards only decided to investigate after the race had finished, that is a whole other story. And this, for me, is the most damning part of it all. Here is what Ed Gorman said in his second post:

The McLaren press release of yesterday which many of you have clearly read, makes much of the fact that, according to Martin Whitmarsh, the pitwall team contacted the race director – Charlie Whiting – and were told twice, before the race ended, that Lewis’s conduct in respect of Kimi was “okay”.

This appears to lend great weight to McLaren’s case. However, I understand there is no reference to the race director in the regulations on this point and it seems likely that, whether Whiting told McLaren everything was “okay” once or twice or 10 times, this may have no bearing on the outcome of this case.

What is more, I have established that, despite having appeared to convey to McLaren that Lewis had done nothing wrong, Whiting himself then played a key role in instigating the formal investigation of the incident by the stewards.

After every race it is normal procedure, apparently, for the stewards to enquire of the race director if there is anything that should be looked at. Whiting is thought to have said to them that, although he had been in touch with McLaren about the exchange between Lewis and Kimi on lap 42, the stewards may still want to have a look at it themselves.

If this is true, then the accusations of conspiracy begin to look a whole lot more convincing. Ed Gorman plays down the fact that Charlie Whiting said that Lewis Hamilton’s actions were “okay”. But I don’t think it is unreasonable for McLaren to expect that Whiting, having given it the “okay”, would not include the incident in his report to the stewards. If Whiting thought it was okay, and the stewards themselves didn’t choose to investigate it while the race was still going on, why on earth would Whiting then bring it up to the stewards after the race was finished?

Well, I can think of one good reason why he might do that — to screw McLaren over. I’m not saying that’s what his plan was. But if the FIA really want to put a halt to the “Ferrari International Assistance” perception, they are not exactly helping themselves by behaving in this sort of way.

8 comments

Where are the Scottish media blogs?

30 August 2008 15:08

Categories: Blogging, Current affairs, Internet, Media, Newspapers, Politics, Scotland, Technology

I don’t like to dwell on Iain Dale’s poll. As Longrider pointed out in the comments, it is of no real importance anyway. However, the first of Iain Dale’s category lists — media blogs — got me thinking. Why are there so few Scottish media blogs?

As far as I can make out, the list contains two blogs based on Scottish politics run by mainstream media organisations. One is the rather good Blether with Brian from the BBC’s Brian Taylor. The other is The Herald‘s politics blog (though going by Iain Dale’s list it is only Douglas Fraser’s entries that meet with approval). I have to say that while I was very aware of Brian Taylor’s blog, I was only vaguely aware that The Herald had a political blog.

You might think that two entries in the top 30 of Iain Dale’s poll is not too bad. But when you look more closely at some of the other entries, things don’t look so good for the Scottish media. Wales has no fewer than four blogs in the list: David Cornock, Betsan Powys, Vaughan Roderick and 07:25 to Paddington.

Three of those come from the BBC Wales politics department. In Scotland, Brian Taylor is the only BBC political journalist that I know of that has a blog. Even then, I suspect that Brian Taylor was asked by BBC News Online to start his blog. Blogs by the political editors of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all started within a very short period of time of each other, as I recall.

What interests me more though is the poor showing of commercial media outlets. Wales is represented by a blog from WalesOnline. Also on Iain Dale’s list is a local blog run by David Ottewell of the Manchester Evening News.

So where are the Scottish media blogs? I don’t think I would be alone in saying that I think The Herald‘s blogs are rather limp and half-hearted. Of late, Douglas Fraser has only updated once every fortnight or so (although, yes, I know it’s the summer — but there have been a lot of Scottish political stories too). Robbie Dinwoodie is much the same.

Scotsman.com is even worse. It has no proper blogs. It does, from time to time, call articles blogs, but they have no permalinks and no comments — just a normal page with some date headings. Worse still, many opinion pieces are behind a paywall, which means that bloggers — even if they can be bothered to fork out to read it in the first place — will seldom link to them and engage in the debate.

I doubt things will improve in this area. Ever since Johnston Press took it over, they have seemed determined to treat Scotsman.com like it is the website for a tiny local newspaper. The perfectly good website was replaced with Johnston Press’s own template which is used for all of their local papers, just with content from The Scotsman shoehorned in. This kind of approach to the web, which will be an increasingly important part of The Scotsman‘s business in the future, does not bode well.

I am sure the Sunday Herald used to have a separate site for blogging and comments. I don’t think I imagined it, but I can’t find any sign of it now. Mind you, I’m not surprised — it wasn’t very good.

It needn’t be like this. Despite claims from some that bloggers and the MSM are competing, this is simply not true. Blogs and the MSM are complementing. There are plenty of excellent, high-profile blogs run by media outlets based in London. The Spectator‘s Coffee House, The Times‘s Comment Central, The Telegraph‘s suite of politics blogs, The Guardian‘s politics blog and Comment is free, Nick Robinson and many other blogs from the BBC.

And Iain Dale’s list shows that they don’t have to be based in London, with respected blogs coming from other parts of the country. Why is there not more coming from Scotland?

It has to be said that the honourable exception is Brian Taylor. He seems to enjoy blogging and it is certainly a great place to catch up with recent political shenanigans. But what about everyone else?

11 comments

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