I posted a thread on Friday about tips on moving into industry which seems to have been deleted. I’m assuming it was hijacked and the resulting punch-up meant Tony removed it?At the risk of starting another round of robot wars, does anyone have any suggestions as to good recruitment consultants who can help on moving into Industry? I’ve 8 years experience with a big-4 consultancy, work in IT Strategy, mainly for FS clients.

Bemused - I am also somewhat bemused. I recall looking at this at the time of posting and thinking I ought to give you a couple of steers. Then I ran out of time and never had the chance on Friday.Will look into what's happened our end and see if we can get this reinstated. Apologies for what looks like an error on our part, I'm pretty sure this wasn't a thread that got hijacked - and even if it was we'd usually delete the offending hijacking comments rather than the whole thread.Apologies again and give me 24 hours to see what we can turn upTony

Tony,That would be great. TIA,B

The soccer international between England and Wales last Saturday managed to display in an instant two of the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern Britain. A request by the authorities for a minute's silence in memory of Mr Ken Bigley, the news of whose murder by terrorists in Iraq had broken the previous day, was largely and ostentatiously ignored. Yet the fact that such a tribute was demanded in the first place emphasised the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood. There had been a two-minute silence for Mr Bigley that same morning in Liverpool, according him the same respect offered annually to the million and a half British servicemen who have died for their country since 1914. No one can make light of the appalling fate suffered by the hostage. His imprisonment, his witnessing of the shocking murders of his two fellow hostages and his own hideous decapitation by the psychopathic criminals who kidnapped him provide an object lesson in human depravity and barbarity. But we have lost our sense of proportion about such things. There have, as a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph pointed out this week, been no such outbreaks of national mourning whenever one of our brave soldiers is killed serving his country in Iraq. The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley's murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune - its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union - and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society. The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident. Now, part of the disproportionate convulsion of grief for Mr Bigley is prompted by the assertion that the Prime Minister has the hostage's 'blood on his hands'. That is nonsense. None of us can say with perfect confidence how we would behave in such circumstances, and facing such psychological pressures, but in so far as Mr Bigley chose to blame Tony Blair or the British government, he was wrong. Only those who killed him have blood on their hands. The truth is that Ken Bigley sought to make a living by undertaking work in one of the most dangerous areas on the planet. He went there against the express advice of the Foreign Office. He chose to live with a pair of Americans and seemed unconcerned about his personal security. His motives and misjudgments do not lessen the horror and injustice of his death; but they should, without lessening our sympathy for him and his family, temper the outpouring of sentimentality in which many have engaged for him. It is a form of behaviour that was kick-started in this country after the death of an even more ambiguous figure, the late Diana, Princess of Wales. As a manifestation of our apparently depleted intelligence and sense of rationality, it bodes extremely badly for this country. Mr Bigley might not have read the last entries in Captain Scott's journals, but they have a resonance for him: 'We took risks. We knew that we took them. Things have turned out against us. Therefore, we have no cause for complaint.' Captain Scott's mentality used to be the norm for chancers and adventurers. Now, after generations of peace and welfarism, and in a society where the blame and compensation cultures go hand in hand, our modem-day buccaneers seem determined to go about their activities not merely unprepared for the likely consequences, but indignant about them. It is time we recognised that, in such a situation, it is not a breach of natural justice that the Lone Ranger does not come galloping over the horizon; it is exactly how life is. In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of murder.

WTF???? Very bemused now...

OK then, let's have a good snigger. Let's all look at the list of these so-called degrees, and sneer at the pathetic delusions of the students who are taking them. In the saloon bars of England, it is by now a settled conviction that the university system is riddled with a kind of intellectual dry rot, and it is called the Mickey Mouse degree.Up and down the country - so we are told - there are hundreds of thousands of dur-brained kids sitting for three years in an alcoholic or cannabis-fuelled stupor while theoretically attending a former technical college that is so pretentious as to call itself a university.After three years of taxpayer-funded debauch, these young people will graduate, and then the poor saps will enter the workplace with an academic qualification that is about as valuable as membership of the Desperate Dan Pie Eaters' Club, and about as intellectually distinguished as a third-place rosette in a terrier show. It is called a Degree, and in the view of saloon bar man, it is a con, a scam, and a disgrace.Kids these days! says our man with the pint of Stella, slapping The Daily Telegraph on the bar. Look at the rubbish they study! 'Ere, he says, finding an account of the recent investigation by the Taxpayers' Alliance, which has compiled a list of the 401 "non-courses" being offered by our universities.In a satirically portentous tone he reads out the brochure of Marjon College in Plymouth, which really is offering a three-year BA (Hons) degree in Outdoor Adventure With Philosophy.Yes, he says with incredulous sarcasm, the dons at Marjon College give instruction in the ancient discipline of Outdoor Adventure by examining its "underpinning philosophy, historical antecedents, significant influences, environmental and sustainable aspects and current trends"; and just in case you thought that wasn't quite rigorous enough, they guarantee that "the modules will include elements such as journeys, environmental management, creative indoor study and spirituality".Absurd! cries saloon bar man, and then jabs his finger at yet greater absurdities: a course at the University of Glamorgan in "Science: Fiction and Culture"; and get this - the Welsh College of Horticulture is offering anyone with four Cs at GCSE the chance to study for an Honours degree in "Equestrian Psychology"! It's a degree in horse whispering! he says. It's bonkers.Why, he asks rhetorically, are we paying for students to waste their time on these Mickey Mouse courses, when it is perfectly obvious what they should be doing. Trades! Skills! Craft! This country doesn't need more bleeding degrees in media studies and whispering into horses' ears! What we need is people who can fix my septic tank! We need more plumbers," he raves, and it's not just because he resents paying so much for his Polish plumber; it's because the whole university business is - in his view - such a cruel deception on so many young people. They rack up an average of £13,000 of debt for some noddy qualification, when they would have been far better off getting stuck into a job after leaving school and engaging in an old-fashioned apprenticeship.That's what he thinks; and that, I bet, is not a million miles from the view of many eminent readers.And yet I have to say that this view of higher education - pandemic in Middle Britain - is hypocritical, patronising and wrong. I say boo to the Taxpayers' Alliance, and up with Mickey Mouse courses, and here's why.The saloon bar view is hypocritical, in the sense that it is always worth interrogating the saloon bar critics about their aspirations for their own children or grandchildren. Would they like them to have degrees? Or would they like them to have some kind of explicitly vocational training?It is notable how often a critic of university expansion is still keen for his or her own children to go there, while a vocational qualification is viewed as an excellent option for someone else's children.It is patronising, in that you really can't tell, just by reading a course title, whether it is any good or not, and whether it will be of any intellectual or financial benefit to the student.The other day my normally humane and reasonable colleague Andrew O'Hagan paraded the idea of a degree in "Artificial Intelligence", as though it were intrinsically risible, and for 20 years we have all been scoffing at degrees in "media studies".But AI is one of the most potentially interesting growth areas in computer science; and the truth about Media Studies is that its graduates have very high rates of employment and remuneration.Of course there are mistakes, and of course there are a great many students who drop out, get depressed, or feel they have done the wrong thing with their lives.But the final judge of the value of a degree is the market, and in spite of all the expansion it is still the case that university graduates have a big salary premium over non-graduates. The market is working more efficiently now that students have a direct financial stake in the matter, a financial risk, and an incentive not to waste their time on a course that no employer will value.It is ridiculous for these saloon-bar critics to denounce "Mickey Mouse" degrees, and say that the students would be better off doing vocational courses - when the whole point is that these degrees are very largely vocational.We can laugh at degrees in Aromatherapy and Equine Science, but they are just as vocational as degrees in Law or Medicine, except that they are tailored to the enormous expansion of the service economy.It is rubbish to claim that these odd-sounding courses are somehow devaluing the Great British Degree. Everyone knows that a First Class degree in Physics from Cambridge is not the same as a First in Equine Management from the University of Lincoln, and the real scandal is that they both cost the student the same.There again, who is to say where a Mickey Mouse course may lead?The last time I looked, Disney had revenues of 33 billion dollars a year - and if any university offered a course in the Life and Works of Mickey Mouse, I wouldn't blame them in the least.

WTF * 2!!!!

Ironically this vitriolic monologue is EXACTLY the kind of thing we are subjected to by 'man with the pint of Stella, slapping The Daily Telegraph on the bar' himself!

anon - will you help me with an article I need to write?

This forum gets better and better!

But why do we still do it? Why do we put ourselves through the agony of commuting? It is one of the great mysteries of the modern world, and a rebuke to the futurologists. Do you remember all those people - about five or 10 years ago - who said we were going to be working from home?They had every reason to be confident of their predictions. We have the gizmos to make it so simple, if we choose. We have computers and broadband and high-speed access to Skype and all the technology a man could need if he chose to stick at home with his wifi. They said that, in a few years' time, we would all be tele-cottaging and distance-working and generally interfacing from afar, and what utter tripe they talked.Almost every day we see an increase in the tide of humanity that washes over the landscape. Last year alone, the numbers of passengers travelling by train grew by 6.7 per cent - double the rate predicted by Government.The number of Tube journeys is set to rise from one billion to 1.5 billion a year. The number of car passenger journeys rises inexorably, we endure longer and longer traffic jams, and in an effort to escape the congestion, more and more of us enjoy the Palio of cycling in London - and all for what?So that we can get into an office, and have a meeting in which the prime topic of conversation will be when to have another meeting; and in spite of all the opportunities to put our feet up chez nous and take it easy, surrounded by our own half-drunk cups of coffee, and refreshed by raids on our own fridge, the number of women working from home is still a piffling two per cent of the workforce, and the number of men working from home is still one per cent - and hasn't even gone up in the past few years.Why do we do it? Why do we chivvy ourselves out of the house and plunge into the mad Limpopo of the transport system, roaring with blocked hippos and fuming crocs? Well, as a keen student of human nature, I would say there are two broad reasons.The first is that we may not like work very much, but we do like our offices. The office is the natural habitat of Homo sapiens. It is the place we like to go during the day, just as baboons choose to congregate on some special kop or crag.Like baboons, we go there to groom and to socialise. We find that we need the tension and the jokes, not to mention the acrimony and the rivalry and the tears, and frankly no amount of electronic interchange is a substitute for that ability to gossip and plot. We need to henpeck and to be henpecked; we need to read our fortunes in the eyes of others, and we need to feel ourselves physically inserted into a hierarchy because otherwise - alas - we have this floaty feeling that we don't really exist; and no matter how bad it is being a cog in the machine, it's better than being a discarded cog at the side of the road.Which brings me to the second big reason why we all commute, when modern technology would easily permit us to stay at home, and that is that working at home is so supremely dispiriting.You know what happens. You get up, slightly later than normal, with that languorous feeling that you are going to be "working from home". Instead of crashing into the shower and getting on with the day, you find that you linger, unshaven, for too long over the newspapers; and you find yourself so sunk in consequent gloom that you decide to fortify yourself with another cup of coffee, and a quick squint at BBC News 24, and then you conclude that you really must hit the desk. And as you drift towards your workstation, your eye is caught by some title in your bookshelf and you settle down to read and - bang - by the time you look up, the morning has gone.Deprived of that vital stimulus of competition, your mental flywheel is hardly turning, and why should it? There is no one to impress, no one to intrigue against, no one to worry about; and that is the real problem with working from home. The beauty of an office is that it creates terrors of one kind or another, while at home you are obliged to cudgel your own flanks, to create your own fear - and, in the stupor of your domestic surroundings, you fail to make the leap of imagination.You polish off that bottle of wine at lunch, and then you have a snooze, and then you find the afternoon has gone as fast as the morning, and the children are back from school, and you have managed to spend a whole day "working from home" in which you have achieved two thirds of diddly squat.Working at work may be unproductive, my friends, but working from home is simply a euphemism for sloth, apathy, staring out of the window and random surfing of the internet: and that is why it is so imperative that we get the transport system of this country moving. What with all those trips to the kettle and the television, and keeping the central heating on, I am not even sure that staying at home is the eco-friendly option.That is why we need a bigger and more generous vision for transport in this country than the measly effort announced by the Government this week. Where is the dynamism? Where is the hope? Why can't the Government go out to the capital markets and raise the cash for the kind of high-speed rail links that are now commonplace in other European countries?When are we going to end the fantastically expensive ideological warfare between Gordon Brown and the present Mayor of London about how to repair the Tube? Judging by this week's announcement, the Government seems to hope that, if it charges enough for rail travel, people will just give up and stay at home.Labour must understand that this is going against human nature. Our species yearns for the office, and the job of government is to help it get there.

wow... I could read a whole novel of this stuffanon, can you write a piece about charities in the UK?

I'll see what I can pull togetheranon...

I don't know about you lot, but I'm at lest twice as productive when working from home. And, it seems, more likely to come up with innovative solutions - which I think is slightly weird...

If you google all these articles they are all found on http://www.boris-johnson.com/ Wonder if Anon is Boris?

wow... boris is a superhero... i want this guy to be the mayor

the stuff written about Hillsborough earlier was incorrect

my in-laws are from Liverpool and pretty much prove the point made in our dear friend's original rant.

I agree people from liverpool dol ike to moan and whinge. They think there is some kind of witch hunt on them.If there city is soo cool, why is it that it is responsible for producing monsters who go around shooting 11 year old boys. Come on please...I bet there ae parts of Liverpool comparable to Baghdad

Top quality reasoned analysis, mate.Is that burning I smell? You'd better get back to your burgers!