The Herald

Does Your Team Measure Up to the Challenge?; Benchmarking has Fast Become a Corporate Catchphrase and If You Get the Strategy Right You Gain the Edge

The famous Dilbert cartoon strip once memorably lampooned the cut- throat corporation's attitude to staff. It depicted a team meeting at which the chief executive reveals the results of a benchmarking exercise to bewildered staff. According to the report staff are not, after all, the company's greatest asset. In fact, he says, they come ninth after paper-clips. Since that cartoon was published benchmarking has become one of the favourite buzz phrases in human resources in recent years. It sim...

Dangling the Carrot of Better Benefits; Providing a Range of Salary and Perks Options Is Crucial When It Comes to Attracting and Retaining Skilled Staff

Get your remuneration packages right and you will attract reliable employees with the skills your business needs for success. Get them wrong, and you will be unable to hold on to the best people, or even hire them in the first place. Just as high street banks survived for decades with just three products - the current account, the interest account and the overdraft - so employers went for years with nothing more than basic salary, overtime and bonus.

How to End Political Apathy Making Voting Easier Would Enthuse Electorate

A Big Brother for politicians, compulsory voting, reducing the voting age to 16: all have been suggested as possible solutions to the biggest problem facing democracy in Britain today: apathy. They all assume that the majority of people do not exercise their democratic right because they are bored by politics. The casual use of the term apathy makes that abundantly clear. That assumption may well be wrong. An experiment by The Herald, the full results of which will be revealed tomorrow, has s...

Example to Blair

THE German football coach, Rudi Voller, explained his resignation as follows: "I had a lot of credit when I started four years ago . . . In this business you need to be egotistical to claim success, but in this case, egotism would be wrong. It would be fatal to stick like glue to your job." Can we possibly arrange an audience for Tony Blair with this man?

Briefing: Boi-Bumba

The festival of folklore has begun in the town of Parintins, Brazil. Q: Boi-Bumba? Is this rude?

How Can Innocent People Get Convicted?

YOU recently published some letters on court verdicts, particularly not proven. On June 26, there was a longer article on the conviction and subsequent quashing of the verdict on Sally Clark [pictured]. Her husband was fingered by a paediatrician as being the real killer of the children. Then there is the case of Ian Huntley, who was a serious suspect in Humberside but still got employment from which the well-founded suspicions should have barred him. Well- founded suspicions had no effect in...

Realistic Research Shows Faults of Streaming

William Logan (Letters, June 26) makes little attempt to hide his own prejudices when responding to my concerns about streaming. He also reveals staggering ignorance of the real world of teaching. He talks of Mr O'Donnell's "real-life experiment" as more meaningful than "theoretical academic research". The research I quoted was not purely theoretical. It was rooted in real schools; it reported on the real experiences of real pupils and real teachers. It questioned them, and listened to them. ...

Ferry Challenge

THE decision by the transport minister, Nicol Stephen, to put the Clyde and Hebrides ferry services out to tender is seriously misguided and a challenge must be raised by the Scottish Executive with the European Court of Justice. While the European Commission has insisted that these CalMac-run services go to tender, senior legal opinion holds that tendering is no longer necessary due to the Altmark ruling. Last year the court issued a landmark ruling in the case of the Altmark bus company in ...

Frozen Embryos

THE case of Natalie Evans, the woman at the centre of the frozen embryos case dealt with in the Court of Appeal in England last week, has excited a degree of controversy and misunderstanding. Sadly, your coverage of the case (June 26) appears to have added to the confusion. Your story refers to a court ruling that "she cannot use her own frozen embryos to try to have a child". In fact, the embryos do not belong to Ms Evans. The basis of the ruling appears to be that the embryos, comprising th...

Willie Hunter

Willie Hunter was a one-off, and my appreciation for his obituary to Morrison Halcrow and Hugh MacDonald (June 28). With Willie lay the origination of the phrase Clockwork Orange for the Glasgow subway. It occurred around 1977 when Sir Peter Parker, then chairman of the British Rail Board and on a visit to Glasgow, was invited by the late Andrew McKay, then director- general of Greater Glasgow Passenger Transport Executive, to inspect a mock-up of a proposed subway carriage on site in Partick...

Now It Is Up to Iraqis; Allawi Can Persuade Insurgents to End the Violence

THE US won a significant victory yesterday. The low-key handover of power marked a turning point in the fight to secure the peace in Iraq which has, so far, proved so much more difficult than winning the war against Saddam Hussein. The task now is to ensure it is a lasting victory and prove to the Iraqis, and to the rest of the world, that the handover is more than a empty gesture. Yet even on its day of victory, America suffered a defeat. The Supreme Court's ruling that hundreds of prisoners...

Lives Have Been Ruined by Lawyers

AS A member of Scotland Against Crooked Lawyers, I take exception to being called a crackpot by a member of the Law Society of Scotland (Letters, June 23). The people I have met in this organisation have genuine reasons to complain about their solicitors' actions or, in many cases, inactions, as it has ruined their lives. Our membership is growing as more people become aware of our existence. I'm certain there is more to the "closed for lunch" story than Mike Dailly claims. The Law Society cl...

Improving a Main Introduction to Scotland

I HAVE not been surprised by the absence from your columns of any comments from the minister for tourism, the tourist boards or ScotRail about the dire conditions on the train from Prestwick International Airport described by Sally Watson in her letter of June 18. When I wrote to you in similar vein two years ago and followed up with letters to each of these worthies, the replies amounted to buck-passing only. "This is not in our remit" was the message from each one in turn. I was pleasantly ...

How to Tackle Failings in Our Public Services

THE findings of the Bichard report have brought into sharp focus the sorry state of our public services. Two major failings are evident. The first is the lack of accountability as in the failure of the Humberside Council to recognise the dismal performance of its chief constable, and the failure of the chief constable to admit honestly that he is unfit for his post. Is it not time that we made it perfectly clear, by way of a general enactment, what is expected of our public services chiefs? A...

Time to Resign

Surely it is time for Frank McAveety to resign. The debacle over Scottish Opera is bad enough; his criticism by a sheriff after giving "over-egged" evidence creates further doubts about his fitness to hold ministerial office and misleading parliament should be unforgivable. However, the clincher must be his lack of knowledge of his ministerial brief: Scottish culture. Pie, beans and roast potatoes? Come on, Frank: every proper Scotsman knows that it's chips with pie and beans (with optional c...

From the Herald Archives

25 YEARS AGO PRESSURE was building last night to end the Post Office monopoly as the public ignored appeals to stop posting letters. Sir William Barlow, the Post Office chairman, said the past five months had been "unprecedented" with staff shortages and letter bombs damaging mail services and waves of strikes hitting telecommunications. He said the postal backlog was around 40,000,000 letters and appealed to the public for tolerance and patience.

Anthony Buckeridge; Author and Creator of Schoolboy Hero J C T Jennings

Author Anthony Buckeridge was the creator of that ever-popular madcap schoolboy hero, J C T Jennings. The exploits of the accident-prone and eternally 11-year- old boy at Linbury Court School have enthralled countless readers over four decades. And the Jennings books have sold six million copies worldwide, in more than a dozen languages.

Getting Their Act Together; Three Theatre Companies Are Uniting to Explore the Changing Face of Europe. By Neil Cooper

IF you go down to the woods, not today but next weekend, you might be in for a surprise. Because, far from a cuddly-toys picnic, over at Tramway there's an international exchange which, in bringing together theatre companies from Scotland, Lithuania and Ireland, attempts to cut through the hit and myth of an often dense and murky path to find some common ground on the other side. The tellingly named Collusion Theatre Company's The Lost Forest takes on the changing face of modern Europe via th...

Small yet so Perfectly Formed

I haven't thought about my old history teacher for 20 years. Her liberally-powdered and gently creased face. The oversized pearls balanced by the twin arches of her eyebrows, painted on each morning in an attitude of renewed surprise. Her endearing habit of sending talkative pupils not to the back of the class but to "Siberia". I'm thinking about her now, though. I've just seen her, peering out from beneath her powder and paint, in one of Moyna Flannigan's new works at the Scottish National P...

Pornography Propaganda Shows That All Is Fair in Sex and War; Review

Secret History: Sex Bomb Channel 4, 9.00pm The World in Art BBC Four, 9.00pm