Grombles

I was struck by the story of Maajid Nawaz , a British citizen growing up in Westcliff-on-Sea who is by any definition an Islamic fundamentalist. He spent four years being tortured in an Egyptian prison (ironically now run by the Muslim Brotherhood) and emerged to found a movement known as Quilliam opposed to radicalising Muslims (and anyone else for that matter). He wants Islam to return to being a religion rather than a political movement. To explain how radical Islam originally charmed him into its embrace, he tells the story of growing up on streets filled with white skinheads armed with baseball bats and razors, intent on driving brown skins out of their territory. These thugs were nihilists with no moral values and imperceptible intellects. Lethal bullies, blind-eyed by the local authorities defending free speech, a fear of violence spreading, and a concern for votes (the BNP and NF were and are strong in places like Westcliff). Nawaz relates an incident where he and his brot...

I have spent the past 35 years helping corporations, latterly my own, communicate with customers and prospects (people they want to become customers). When I first entered the world of marketing, we were known by other departments as the 'Gin and Tonic Brigade' due to the long lunch hours with suppliers and the frequent conferences and 'inspection' visits we felt we needed to make. Our work was broadly about creating the right message, in the right place, at the right time to attract the attention and persuade the right people, usually but not exclusively, to part with money. More significantly, our skills at the time focussed mainly on the message, rather than the targeting and timing. This was basically because in those days we only had blunt advertising and direct marketing tools at our disposal. Calculation of Return On Investment (ROI) was an obscure art, universally employed to justify retaining client contracts (if we were agencies) and to encourage bean-count...