The details of British MPs’ expenses reads like a plot from a Carry On Film: Gordon Brown played by Sidney James, Hazel Blears by Barbara Windsor, Peter Mandelson by Kenneth Williams and John Prescott by Hattie Jacques. Still, the most important thing is to pay MPs more, and then move on. Read on ›

If we want a glimpse of where PR might go over the next ten years, we should examine Japan. The world’s second-largest economy’s property bubble burst 20 years ago. Since then deflation, recession and reality have broken the country’s commitment to consensus building, as Leo Lewis argues in “Japan’s harsh new reality” in today’s Times. Read on ›

Clay Shirky argues in his controversial article “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” that because the barriers to entry in the industry have fallen close to zero, the future of newspaper-type journalism looks bleak in the internet age. I beg to differ. Read on ›

The British National Party (BNP) is thrashing the mainstream parties – but only online. This says as much about the internet as it does about politics, and I don’t think the mainstream should overdo its response. Read on ›

Richard Edelman argues on his blog 6 AM that we are entering a new era of Mutual Social Responsibility, in which companies will operate differently, partner differently and market differently. Really? Read on ›

This is when I miss London. It stages the debates we need. Last night Polis, the London School of Economics media think tank organised: Why Did Nobody See It Coming? Reporting The Crash – The Debate. The panel was distinguished and Charlie Beckett thankfully gives a good account of it today on his blog. Read on ›

The Financial Times’ management columnist Stefan Stern and others have been assessing the point and meaning of this year’s Davos. Much of it comes to the need for capitalism to express itself differently. Read on ›

I’m sitting at home on Zurich Lake. The world’s elite are overhead in helicopters on their way to the World Economic Forum in Davos. They will hear from PR supremo Richard Edelman that trust in banks and other corporations has collapsed while Government is back in favour. For this, they disturb my afternoon nap? Read on ›

PR Week reports that the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) executive director of communications Lesley McLeod says the banks are getting a bum rap because of “inexperienced’” reporters who “fail to understand the crisis” or the “issues” it presents. What, and the BBA has to sit idly by? Why doesn’t it get stuck in? Read on ›

Barclay’s Chief Executive, John Varley, has been brilliant on Sky TV, the BBC Radio 4′s Today programme (and later this week on Panorama). Not a moment before time, we have a senior current banking figure not only talking (that’s very rare) but talking like a human being. Read on ›