recently resurrected pro-bono life coach and mentor. Pompey, Christ and Thatcher #enthusiast
Joined December 2023
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Michael retweeted
There’s nothing the man can’t do.
King Kenny is seen leaving Maya Jama's £1.5million London flat the morning after Celebrity Traitors final trib.al/0gW1S23
Michael retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Michael retweeted
Nothing highlights the fiscal failure of this government more starkly than the plight of Poundland. The chain's 600 stores and 12,000 workers sit on the verge of collapse, not because its customers have walked away - Poundland's sales grew by 6.7% in September - but because of this government's unaffordable tax rises, which makes it impossible to run a business that works on slim profit margins to keep its prices down for its customers. How ironic that a government preaching about helping the least well-off is forcing a company out of business that does just that.
Michael retweeted
Because of Labour, a single employee is now £4,460 more expensive to employ.
For a business like Poundland - operating on ultra thin margins - you’ve added £49million to their wage bill a year.
Poundland has filed to enter administration, putting 11,000 jobs at risk just weeks before Christmas, including here in Brixton.
I stand with Poundland workers and @UsdawUnion.
The owners must engage with workers and ministers, exploring every option to save jobs and shops.
The sound on that first slap. You do not mess with the Eastern Europeans.
In America, a group of Black students harassed a 6-foot-7-inch (2-meter-tall) Russian man on the subway; when one of them slapped him, the Russian man retaliated by beating up the entire group, which included both young men and women.🇷🇺😎🔥
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The video shows a 2014 New York City F train incident with Jorge Peña from the Dominican Republic, not a Russian man. He was hit first with a shoe, slapped back, and cleared after authorities ruled self-defense.
nypost.com/2014/11/13/man…
theguardian.com/us-news/2014/n…
Michael retweeted
If every Traitor outed themselves as a Traitor at the roundtable while under suspicion there literally wouldn’t be a show. That’s why people don’t like what James A did and that’s totally fair 🤷 #TheCelebrityTraitors #CelebrityTraitors
The comments on this post are insane
Prince Naseem Hamed says his trainer Brendan Ingle, the man Pierce Brosnan plays in the film Giant, held him to a deal made when he was 11: £10 million once he had made £40 million. That is exactly the 25% Ingle took from his fighters' purses. They split in 1998, when Naseem was 24, and never made up before Ingle died in 2018.
In the video below, on talkSPORT as the film came out in January, Naseem says Ingle was "so money orientated, money motivated." Then the line he has carried since childhood: "You did a deal with me at 11 years old that you give me 10 million once you make 40 million." He adds that Ingle was "the highest paid trainer in the world."
Ingle told his side on camera years earlier, at 60, and it is the second half of the video. "I'm on 25% of whatever they get." When a fighter earns £400 and he takes £100, he says, nobody minds. "Then when I start getting them 40 grand," the mates start asking, "what are you giving him 10 grand for?"
He found Naseem at 7 in his gym in Wincobank, Sheffield, and walked him round the streets every Sunday night for 2 hours or more, talking about how he would become world champion. By the late 1990s Naseem was headlining Madison Square Garden, and the same quarter still came off every purse.
Ingle's camp says it was never greed. His sons advised on Giant, and Johnny Nelson, one of his world champions, says the old man had a van, wore no jewellery and never lived like a rich man. Naseem's only defeat came in 2001 against Marco Antonio Barrera, 3 years after he left the gym.
I think Ingle's own numbers explain the whole thing. 40 and 10 in his story, 40 and 10 in Naseem's, only the zeros changed. If anyone takes a percentage of what you earn, write down a ceiling or a review date while the sums are small, because that is the only time both sides find it easy to agree.
Pierce Brosnan's Ingle gets the last scene of the film, and Naseem says he only wishes it had been true. Was a quarter of a world champion's purses a fair price for 18 years of Sunday walks, or too much to hold a boy to for something he agreed at 11?
I post one story like this every day: a famous name, the money they made, and who ended up with it.
