Work has been busy as I help to prepare the Warm Welcome Campaign for winter when demand is high for community spaces that give people places of connection and warmth. We’re readying our comms for the coming busy season and in January we will run our third Warm Welcome Week.
Essentially, this is a week-long awareness exercise in raising the profile of Warm Welcome Spaces at the coldest, most depressing time of year (the third week of January).
I’ll be here to tell you more in due course. And we were delighted to land two pieces of PR for Warm Welcome Spaces, just as household and business energy prices increased on 1 October: one on Channel 4 News for a Warm Welcome Space in Bristol and another quoting our Campaign Director David Barclay in the Express.
In other news
No sooner had I posted September’s blog, than a story emerged through the fog of a post-festival cold that I had thankfully missed. AI experts were warning of a 10% chance that humanity could be wiped out by artificial superintelligence “within the decade”.
Then there was this from Nvidia’s boss. Phew. Then this from Trump. Not so phew.
Is this just another example of our human obsession with the coming apocalypse? Or is this the warning we needed to put the brakes on AI? Time will decide. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual. And I agree with Fi Glover on Off Air who concluded that – as a reasonably busy 50-something year old woman – this is a problem that other people are going to have to solve.
Also last month, I read one of the most useful summaries of the BBC Charter Renewal debate – which happens every 10 years, although in reality and because the BBC is publicly funded, its role is always up for debate here in the UK.
It was this piece by Guardian deputy head of opinion Barbara Speed. My attention span and the many other calls on my time meant it took me several hours of disjointed reading to get through this ‘long read’ but it really is worth it, especially to anyone who is either young or who works outside the media industry and might wonder why all this fuss is made about the BBC.
My regular reader will know I have a small obsession with the working from home/working from an office debate, having been a home worker myself from 2003-2012 and from 2020 to the present day.
Barclays is revising its ‘work from the office three or four days a week’ mandate, after a staff backlash. There’s lots of learning in this story for the rest of us who are fortunate enough not to work in banking. This is also good, about professionalism culture and its biases.
Back in September, I made some notes about leftwing politics in this country, before Andy Burnham’s impressive Labour Party conference speech, but some of it still holds.
The left wing in this country is too weak, too hand wringing and hasn’t properly made the case for progressive socialism. The right-wing press is too strong and the right wingers I know can appear ridiculously entitled. They’re obviously privileged and don’t seem to lie awake at night fretting about the state of the planet or of people less fortunate than themselves.
Some people have literally got fat on their own successes and don’t want to share the benefits of that success with people who are less well off.
Labour must be given time to do things for the general good of the majority in this country. We know what the answers are. Public services for the public. Plastic only if necessary and we must get better at recycling, in this country, not shipping it across the globe. Could we be desalinating sea water for agriculture? We could be cleaning, storing and using water more effectively and not rinsing water for profit.
People are angry and not feeling well off. Public services and transport can be rubbish, but they can also be great and we take them for granted. Migration is a fact of life and always has been. The tech bros are not helping with algorithms that promote hate and resentment. Russia and/or China may be trying to upset our fragile status quo.
But we can do positive things together. Let’s agree some ways forward that promote the general good, not just the good of those who have a lot already.
As an aside, I was shocked this summer by pictures from Reading festival – privileged little white kids leaving all their camping paraphernalia behind, even the perfectly good stuff.
Elsewhere, the triple lock pension has been in the news, with this helpful explainer from The Guardian. As I toy with the idea of working less in a few years’ time (spoiler: I can’t afford to), I am increasingly interested in the state pension. This paragraph of the Guardian piece hit home: “Supporters [of the triple lock] say it is vital for maintaining the value of the state pension – particularly for future pensioners, many of whom do not have access to the generous workplace schemes that many older people were able to join and are not saving enough for their retirement…”
I am one of those saddos who does not have a generous workplace pension, never have (apart from seven years when I was too young to appreciate it), and I have not had the money to save for my future, having always needed it in the present.
I’ll end with a good news story, I hope, in the report that the annual Dorset arts festival b-side is standing up to Airbnb and asserting its right to call a B&B a bnb. The bed and breakfast business bnb-side is reportedly covering half of the b-side festival’s £250,000 annual turnover. The negative PR implications for Airbnb are not good, in a part of the world where its brand is already mud for doing people out of an ability to buy homes where they grew up.
In more joy, do you remember how good Armstrong & Miller were? I’m still looking for the sketch of a children’s entertainer who gets strangled by a stressed parent with the classic line: “Not so funny now, are you?”
That’s it for another month. See you after Halloween.
Photo credit: Barbara Leatham Photography
