Like many people of my generation (the over-50s), I have retired from work and will not be going back. This is why.
I could do non-executive director work. I have a good enough CV, with a wide variety of operational and executive experience gained in global firms, emerging companies and start-ups. I have line management experience in sales, marketing, project management, development, tech support and a good understanding of finance, administration and IT systems gained from selling them to global companies. I ran country and regional operations. I have been a founder, investor and working director in five tech companies that went on to four trade sales and one IPO. I am not Elon Musk but this is useful stuff.
Academically, I worked alongside Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman as a visiting fellow at KCL and Professor Tom Kirkwood (BBC Reith Lecturer) at Newcastle University. For both I brought bite, speed and determination from startups to bear on projects that delivered value from their world-leading academic efforts. U.K. universities massively underperform by comparison with the U.S. when attempting to ‘spin out’ academic knowledge into the economy. Someone with personal experience of fighting that battle (it’s mainly against internal enemies) would surely have something to contribute as a non-executive or adviser.
On projects, where the U.K. is world class at disaster, (can any country compete with our record for bringing them home late, over budget and failing to deliver their promised benefits?) I combined decades of industry experience of running successful projects with a postgraduate Masters at Oxford University that allowed me to see my career out by helping organisations take straightforward steps to avoid failure. I have been invited back to speak to Masters students at Oxford on this, and to organisations that turn to Oxford for help when they are about to start a high risk and strategically significant project.
I have published technical papers in serious journals and been invited to give lectures at conferences to real experts, including that most exclusive and intellectually superior audience – medical doctors – who I sucked up to by starting my lecture with “It’s not often I can say I am definitely the most stupid person in the room” before pistol whipping them with the social ‘science’ of why it is unethical to mandate compulsory prescription of statins to everyone over 60, even if it would increase average life expectancy across the herd.
Finally, I am socially okay. I am not arrogant, domineering, greedy, power-grabbing or any other toxic behaviour that we correctly associate with many ‘successful’ people. I know how to operate in a team. I don’t want the glory. I derive enormous satisfaction from helping other people achieve their potential. I actually care about people!
Put that lot together and it’s a useful bag of spanners that could be turned to the advantage of many an organisation, and I would love to do it, but I won’t.
The reason is the one that I feel is responsible for many of my generation choosing retirement and walking away with our knowledge and experience. To go back, we would have to conceal our views on a set of subjects that would cancel us. In fact, if I mentioned my views out-loud to HR they might arrest me on the spot. Here they are a perfectly legal and reasonable spread of beliefs.
• I believe there are some situations where women who do not have a penis are entitled to separate treatment.
• I don’t believe all migration is good.
• I don’t believe all white people are racist.
• I believe scientific based knowledge is superior to cultural belief systems.
• I don’t believe it is okay for activists to break the law.
And, to cap it all, I voted for Brexit, and would like to say so, without suffering the bigotry that flows from that. I am not a Daily Mail reader, little Englander, racist, xenophobe, populist, fascist, gammon, uneducated football hooligan etc. etc. My concerns about EU membership stood me alongside Frank Field, who in my judgement was the most principled ‘social and economic justice’ politician of the last 50 years.
Given a modicum of unemotional time and space I can explain and defend every one of these positions, while maintaining a pristine set of liberal democratic values. Unfortunately, that is not on offer. One word ‘off message’ and the response is swift and emotional. To use words such as “can we calm down and examine the evidence” is now seen as provocative and is dismissed as ‘tone policing’ by shouty people who believe they have a moral monopoly and a right to be angry and offended.
It’s a shame but I no longer want to sit silently in the presence of HR and PR culture guardians. Not only is it bad for my blood pressure but I risk internal injury from suppressing laughter. But somehow, DEI and ESG has captured CEOs and organisations. Dissent is career suicide. For me, as with most mature (both senses of the word) employees, survival is contingent on constant, vigilant self-censorship. I wouldn’t go back to that for all the tea in a global consumer goods company. Regaining the power of free speech is something I looked forward to in retirement and I don’t want to give it up.
It’s sad that even from the safety of retirement I hesitate in making these statements. It is sad that people who are old, white and male face so much hostility. If you talked to me at a bus stop you would find a nice, friendly, smiling, tolerant, supportive person who throughout his career has fought to open opportunities for people regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion or class.
Back in 2016 I nearly laughed when I passed the Oxford University training course on ‘unconscious bias’. It was funny because I had been invited to review the Oxford Admissions process after spending years criticising it for being biased against minorities. Ironic or what? The training (which was influenced by the White Fragility works of Robin DiAngelo) was as laughable as anything I have ever seen from sociology. A stupendous achievement. It’s not that bias or racism doesn’t exist. It does and there is something of value in Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. But the absolutism and malignant spite of this mob is unacceptable. Academic careerism and opportunism at its worst. It is too extreme. It goes too far. It is counterproductive. It reaches its peak of condescension and offensiveness in its treatment of black people. This isn’t the way to build on progress against (real) racism. if I went back to work, I would never be able to say such things.
As a part-time academic I devoted a lot of effort to applied work to reduce income inequality which I believe is tearing society apart and was the real cause of the Brexit protest vote. It exasperates me that the trendy Johnny-come-lately diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) activists are now in control with their mission to make organisations ‘look good’. Looking good is the game, not being good. I have sat in rooms with top lawyers and their global clients when I have proved we can track pay inequality even down to the most complex ‘intersectional’ comparison in an instant with modern tech and at this news they stop the meeting. For all their high talk about diversity and equity, they don’t want to risk a legal ‘discovery’ liability. In other words, they know they have skeletons in their cupboards and like to hide behind the defence that they haven’t heard it is possible to track them down. This is what ‘good’ looks like.
I have also heard of DEI execs, usually from HR, who petulantly demand pay and job equity data on ethnicity, and when technicians request tangible definitions of ethnicity, they are criticised for being obstructive. Sorry, for being white, male and old about this, but surely we need tight definitions to present reliable data. We can provide data if they can provide definitions. The trouble with ethnicity (as anyone who has done a DNA heritage test will know) is that it does not divide into sharply, biologically defined, objective, measurable and distinct buckets. Ethnicity, as presented by DiAngelo et al., is dependent on subjective generalisation. Most people have a view of what they are and what other people are, but this is not a scientific test to accurately divide individuals into white, black or any other ethnicity, and woe betide you if you get it wrong. The fact is everyone is a mix. Ethnicity definitions vary by culture, country and regulatory environments. Unfortunately, raising legitimate technicalities is “obstructive” in the Lewis Carrol world of HR – or is it Violet Elizabeth Bott, whose catchphrase when she can’t have what she wants is “I’ll scream and scream until I am sick”? Either way it’s impossible to have a grown-up conversation. Ask for a definition of ethnicity, and the reply will be “you know what I mean”. Six-year-olds argue like this.
To supply another example, now HR systems can record more than two genders you might think ‘job done’. Put your tick where you identify and away we go. But, as systems persons who have wider responsibilities than simply making activists happy, we must think of the consequences now that the data have changed. Gender data are used in many ways other than determining which toilet you can use. For example, actuaries refer to it to calculate life expectancy and health insurance risks, which must then be priced and budgeted for. Putting a tick in a new box based on your self-identification today (or even part way through today and back again tomorrow) undermines these calculations. That’s okay, but we need to discuss how we accommodate that in a calm, logical, rational, quantitative way. Except to suggest such a discussion will risk all the usual accusations of tone policing, micro-aggressions, gas lighting, X shaming etc. etc.
Anyway, you get the message. I am sorry but I prefer to watch daytime telly rather than suffer all this to make a lifetime of hard-earned experience available to help organisations who would benefit from it. And it’s not just me but all those other 50-plus middle managers, trade and craft professionals and scientists who no longer want to spend every day tying their tongue in knots to avoid revealing their perfectly sensible and legitimate but unfashionable views. To our tormenters in HR and PR, most of whom would struggle to wire a plug: you won, but you lost.
Ken Charman is CEO of the Build-a-Plane CIC. He retired as CEO of uFlexReward, a Unilever tech startup. As a tech startup founder, he has experienced four successful trade sales and an IPO. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was a Visiting Senior Fellow in War Studies at KCL.
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And hodding bricks up a ladder at 60+ is equally difficult!
“for all the tea in a global consumer goods company”
Don’t watch daytime telly but bend all those skills and talents you have to the wheel, Ken. We’re not going to win this by shying away from it. If we allow this – and I’m aware it’s already far advanced and deeply enmeshed in our business culture – to carry on, our children will be inheritors of nothing but empty platitudes, meaningless slogans, ‘tone policing’ (must remember that one!) and ritual company humiliation if your deviate from what is allowed as it self-destructs (maybe that’s the goal…). A business world that has lost confidence in itself and what it does because it has to qualify everything it does do from the woke perspective is already hamstrung and will ultimately fail.
A nice plea but I suspect Ken will not return to the fray. Like many of us he has decided the contest is lost along with the security and prosperity of the country. I wonder if records of exchanges like these will survive the authoritarian left which is coming or will they be wiped so future generations cannot see who did this to us and just how much we lost.
Not sure about all being lost. Stalin airbrushed (literally and figuratively) people out of Russian life, but we know and we know ( at least the reasonably well known) who was airbrushed out because we can see the originals.
Great article. I was sitting with a friend last night who is just undergoing a DBR check for a voluntary post. They have trawled his social media and found evidence of the word gun and a photo of him and his wife in skimpy swimwear from years ago.
He has nothing to hide and would be an excellent volunteer but things you post in the past can now be used against you in this new and scary world.
Interesting that Mike Freer is stepping down because he is gay which is not looked upon with favour by the more extreme cultures and of course can never be mentioned.
That is so mad about your friend and his DBR check! I dread to think what they would think of my husband if he had ever done social media! He and his club mates (I darent put what sort of club!!) are totally un-PC!! As for me, I’ve often thought of becoming a volunteer at a hospital but have been put off by the hoops I’d have to jump through and also know that I’d be totally unable to keep a constant watch on my terminology and language.
I have also been put off becoming a volunteer simply because time was (yes yes I know) when you had the generosity or goodwill to offer your services it was accepted in the same spirit without motives being questioned. Now that just isn’t good enough, as illustrated by the previous post, your past and present life is invaded. Sorry, not playing.
I completely agree
This article is spot on. I am 76 but officially retired at 68 before becoming a planning consultant. I have been a dairy farmer, a politician and a planner – 3 entirely separate careers – and I have a lot of different skills and knowledge but I do not back off form getting involved now in retirement. I am involved in local community organisations, the church and politics and have chosen not to curtail my forthright views in a public forum even though people often say – “that is just Bruce”.
However, I am NOT on Social Media of any sort. Firstly, I think it is a dangerous morass of ill informed thoughts and secondly, my wife, of 55 years, will not let me as she thinks there will be a third World War!
Oh, I also threw my TV out on the first day of lockdown in March 2020
I am of similar age, have a completely different background, yet have reached an identical conclusion….save the daytime TV!
(The licence got ditched 5 years ago).
Sadly you’re quite likely to experience the same self-censorship in retirement at the local golf club, volunteering for charities, and so on.
However, get into the habit of chatting to the window cleaner, the tree surgeon or the Amazon driver and quite often free and intelligent speech returns in a way the academic world wots nothing of.
Absolutely! I have great chats with exactly these people: our postmen, Ocado delivery people, especially the bin men who are a great encouragement!! And just random people one meets on walks, on buses, in shops. I put out feelers all the time, everywhere!
It’s all the 65+ strippers and lap-dancers I feel sorry for. It can’t be easy wot wiv arfuritis and such …
Gender data are used in many ways other than determining which toilet you can use. For example, actuaries refer to it to calculate life expectancy and health insurance risks, which must then be priced and budgeted for.
Now THAT’S interesting. Higher insurance premiums for non-biologically determined pronouns might be one way of chipping away at the DEI leviathan…
Eddy Izzard’s life assurance or any health insurance must be interesting because his, I meant her, risk of Prostrate Cancer is not possible now, also because of her age she has skipped the menopause. Cervical Cancer and Breast Cancer are still a risk though.
Thanks for the supportive comments. For anyone interested, what I did next was set up and funded a Community Interest Company to build a plane at our local FE college. Retired engineers and teenage apprentices but no generation gap on a shared project. It was a massive eye opener to the challenges faced by the average teenage boy. http://Www.buildaplane.co.uk. I’ve documented it as a project that could be “parachuted” in to any FE college. Great detox.
Hats off to you sir; looks like a really fine enterprise.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work in a no-bull firm which will see me to retirement, but I worry about the hoops my kids will be having to jump through during their working lives.
Perhaps when aeroplanes start falling out of the sky people will wake up to the fact that the loonies have taken over and that this isn’t what they want.
Fantastic! I’d love to get our eldest (22) grandson involved in something like that. He’s just been released early from prison. His friends and the guys he met in prison don’t conform in any way but what in earth hope have they of keeping on the straight and narrow in the world as it is now? Our 15-year-old grandson would love something like your course. His education was totally scuppered by lockdowns etc. New at secondary school at the outset, he refused to wear a mask etc and has ultimately dropped out of school. But while having to do home education during lockdowns, he taught himself to play the piano, grow veg, make complicated origami, etc!! I wish there were more people like you out there!
The lack of debate, reasoned discussion and allowing the views of others to be heard is terribly destructive. We will see terrible outcomes.
My golden rule is anything you are told cannot be discussed (Climate, Lockdowns, masks, vax, Russia/Putin evil etc.) we are being lied to about. Of course some opinions can be offensive, destructive or dangerous, but the response is reasonable and evidence-based debate.
If you can question it, hypothesize about it, research it, test it, analyze it, and share your conclusions, its science.
If you’re not allowed to question, it’s propaganda, or a Cult.
Academia is the problem. Professor Bronowski provides his perspective on the end of the West in his 1973 series ‘Ascent of Man’.
Just before this clip, he discusses how his friend – renown game theorist Jon Von Neumann – squandered his final years in government and enterprise, abandoning the marriage between art and knowledge. Bronowski makes the case that the same divorce is happening in wider society and that this is likely to spell the end of Western civilisation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkC-Yhxlybk
The End of Western Civilisation – Jacob Bronowski
The UK’s apprenticeships trained young men and women profound deep skills while developing their social skills. All that changed when apprenticeships (meritocracy) were abandoned and replaced with qualifications. It was then possible to state that the UK workforce was lacking in ‘skills’ and we needed qualified people from outside the UK. My father (working class background) had no degree, but had an electrical apprenticeship and was self taught in maths. He assisted in sorting out the wiring on the Concorde. Today he would not be given any opportunity to work on aircraft and probably not just because he had no degree but because he was white, male and would vehemently disagree with any of the racist and degrading ideology that comes from HR or external activists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fx1BYwCwCI
Yuri Bezmenov: The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion
“The fact is everyone is a mix. Ethnicity definitions vary by culture, country and regulatory environments.”
I understand the intent of this assertion but this is part of the problem. It implies that it is difficult for someone to claim they are indigenous to the UK and therefore we are all immigrants. Therefore all migrants can come here. This is cultural relativism.
I am referring to supplying data for Critical Race Theorists. They want race data. Being indigenous to the UK should be defined in other ways. Surely, that is a mix of where you were born, where your parents were born and things like conforming to a core set of national rules, values and beliefs (which the UK has been way too lax about). Iit’s too late (hundreds of years too late) to think of race as a criteria for being indigenous to the UK. But my work challenge was to supply clear data dividing people into racial (ethnic) groups to support statistical analysis on inequalities between races in a global firm. That is impossible unless you accept subjective methods for defining race and ethnicity.
That’s actually pretty simple and it’s a principle that’s so old that there’s even a Latin term for it: Ius sanguinis, law of the blood. To this date, that’s formally written into the German constitution although almost a quarter century of left, lefter and leftest – each seeking to outdo the previous one in this respect – governments have created enough additional nationality legislation on top of that so that their propagandists have meanwhile starting claiming it didn’t ever exist.
I’m a German because my parents are Germans because their parents were Germans. Nevertheless, my surname is Lithuanian which means that – at some point in time in the past – there was either a German – Lituhanian marriage or someone being granted Prussian citizenship by the king. So-called race is not the key here — it’s known that black Prussians existed, although only in very small number. It’s about being part of the family by birth or because of an adoption the family desired.
Highly divisive and intended to be. I am mostly Irish and then Scottish and then Saxon but with some Welsh and North German/Alsace. Overall being Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Saxon makes me overwhelmingly British, but stepping back a bit I’m North European. It also doesn’t require the pre-fix ‘white’.
Race obviously exists, but the trickier thing is how relevant it is- what do you do about it, how do you use race related data to inform decisions. My preference is to stop talking about it, just forget the whole thing. But the racism industry keeps pointing to unequal outcomes as evidence of racism so it’s really hard to stop – decades of indoctrination mean that unequal outcomes must be evidence of racism because the alternative is that some differences at a racial grouping level are down to nature not nurture, and that is an unacceptable opinion to have in polite society.
Whenever you divide some population into groups based on some superficial criterion like skin colour, the outcome will be unequal outcomes because these groups are composed of different people. They could as well create their groups based on hair colour. This whole ‘industry’ is based on a pretty transparent fraud created by itself.
The trouble is you know that and so do I but somehow people have been conned into believing otherwise.
I despair.
I am of a similar corporate background, I loved work, I had a lot of fun and was at the leading point of major changes in a Customer facing Industry which imoroved the working lives of employees and the customer. However; I would not last half a day in Corporate world today, I could probably do much to help a business in terms of profitability, quality and innovation in my field of discipline, but that is no longer important. Also I don’t feel that working long hours for a Government to not only hold my nose into the dirt because I am the wrong race, sex, age, education profile, and then to have to hand over the majority of my pay to that Government so it can utilise that to further discriminate against me, and too further ruin the country.
What is an IPO?
Initial public offering, company starts selling shares to the general public.
Ken, you are cowardly to run. You’re senior enough to make an appropriate stink, stand your ground and perhaps win a legal case or two.
Instead you’ll potter in the garden, gorge yourself on episodes of “Loose Women”, sit through endless repeats of Friends and, slowly but surely, slide into senescence.
Oh, by the way. Not one woman on this planet has a penis.
I wonder what part of your short post provoked the 5 ‘thumbs down’?
The Crusaders destroyed the Byzantine Empire.
Turn your freedom to good advantage and continue to fight this nasty woke nonsense that is drowning our society. If you’re retired like I am, then you’re much freer to ridicule the idiots that worship this garbage of conformity.
I have chosen to be a member of a political party that rejects all the woke dogma and calls it out as a scam. It’s doing rather well.
Sorry, comes across as a bit arrogant to me, all jobs have a value, no matter hew menial.
Thank you Daily Sceptic for continuing to publish interesting, high quality articles such as these.
Ken, I have some sympathy with the below-the-line comments urging you to stay and fight, but I understand your decision to step back. It is the path I too have chosen!
Excellent article!
Like Ken, I love openly mocking people still gullible enough to pay £159 to listen to the BBC propagandists. Watch their faces, when you say, I support Donald Trump and that he will save the western world. I urge people to watch yesterday’s brilliant expose of the establishment by Neil Oliver. A expose of our times
I retired from construction project management at 58 and set up a small business that I shut down when it was getting too busy for me to manage alone and stopped being fun.
I have offered to do a few jobs including first responder for the ambulance service, but the DIE courses and the rest of the time-wasting nonsense has always driven me away, I could not keep quiet when some kid tells me I have unconscious bias. I am consciously bias, and proud to be, but it would not stop me helping someone if they needed it.
For some years I’ve worked a couple of days a week for a small conservation organisation that doesn’t ask stupid questions or force DIE on to people.
I could do more but refuse to work with it means signing up to DIE.
It’s not just straight males Ken. I’m a gay female with 40 odd years of achievement and endeavour who did manage to work to over sixty by some grinning and bearing then ultimately saying what I thought which was put up with as I was by the exit door. They’d never let me return!
I try to influence from retirement haven.
I love the “… I risk internal injury from suppressing laughter”!
What is sad is how everyone plays along, from the highest to the lowest paid, whereby the latter group has little choice.
It is really up to top management to determinedly say in a very loud voice, “No, this is all nonsense!”
I imagine this all started with the ISO standards, when suddenly any ‘respected’ company had to comply with ISO number so-and-so. This meant that every step in every process a company used was supposed to be documented (an impossible task). Everybody knew the whole business was just a money generator for the group who initiated the idea and for those companies handing out the certificates. But everyone played along …
I retired from the Fire and Rescue Service after 33 years of serving all ‘communities’ fairly so I was rather perplexed to see this insignia on the rank markings of a Deputy Fire Chief (Humberside). It is nothing more than social engineering at its worst.
What complete and utter *ollock*
“It’s not that bias or racism doesn’t exist. It does and there is something of value in Critical Race Theory and intersectionality.”
Where is the value in Critical Race Theory?
What is “Intersectionality”?
“This isn’t the way to build on progress against (real) racism.”
Please define real racism and how you would build on progress against it.
“As a part-time academic I devoted a lot of effort to applied work to reduce income inequality which I believe is tearing society apart and was the real cause of the Brexit protest vote.”
How can your applied work reduce income inequality?
“It exasperates me that the trendy Johnny-come-lately diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) activists are now in control with their mission to make organisations ‘look good’. Looking good is the game, not being good. I have sat in rooms with top lawyers and their global clients when I have proved we can track pay inequality even down to the most complex ‘intersectional’ comparison in an instant with modern tech and at this news they stop the meeting. For all their high talk about diversity and equity, they don’t want to risk a legal ‘discovery’ liability. In other words, they know they have skeletons in their cupboards and like to hide behind the defence that they haven’t heard it is possible to track them down. This is what ‘good’ looks like.”
ie. A big scam amongst the rest of the current scams plaguing society.
What factors have enabled this situation?
“Anyway, you get the message. I am sorry but I prefer to watch daytime telly rather than suffer all this to make a lifetime of hard-earned experience available to help organisations who would benefit from it. And it’s not just me but all those other 50-plus middle managers, trade and craft professionals and scientists who no longer want to spend every day tying their tongue in knots to avoid revealing their perfectly sensible and legitimate but unfashionable views. To our tormenters in HR and PR, most of whom would struggle to wire a plug: you won, but you lost.”
It is sentiment like this that has doomed the freedom loving members of my generation and the generations to come.
I am a Millennial.
We lack the resources and the know how to tame these exercises in illogical and unproductive pursuits at Utopia.
How could any self-respecting person be comfortable with being hired primarily due to their ethnicity or minority status?
How could anyone running/managing a company afford to employ anyone other than someone that is competent and productive?
Is most of this WOKE, DEI, EQUALITY OF OUTCOME ideology prevalent just in the public sector?
I can’t logically fathom how this has seemingly risen to a high level in the private sector.
Can someone offer insight?
I really relate to this article. I too have elected to retire from the workforce.I liked my colleagues, but the woke culture of academia meant that I had to bit my tongue. If I ever said what I really thought, well I think my colleagues would have choked on their lattes. I felt a bit like some sort of secret agent for common sense – surrounded by people who could not, in their wildest imaginings, have guessed that my views did not coincide with theirs.
As time goes on, I encounter more people who think like me – from the guy serving at Toolstation who spoke, coherently, about his concerns about digital currencies and the loss of cash, to the head of security firms with serious concerns about the the overpowering wokeness of the DEI agenda. I’m optimistic that common sense will eventually prevail as the wokerati may be loud and domineering, but they really do represent the majority.
I retired “early” in 2008, following an injury. I now have a well-balanced life, with a busy multi-generational household and time to consider why our systems of governance are corrupted, “woke messaging” being a key indicator. I’ve been exploring a common method used to conceal interests from auditors, due diligence software, clients, and HMRC. This method stems from the use of multiple “Unique identifiers” in Companies House, which I refer to as “identities.” Companies House establishes an “identity” for an individual based on their name, date of birth, or usual residential address, and appointments for that director are associated with it. Since it’s a “unique identifier,” a person is supposed to have only one of these (Section 1082 Companies Act 2006). If a person varies one of these attributes, then a second identity is established. Interests appointed to this identity are concealed from the appointments in the first identity. The widespread use of multiple identities by individuals in control of governance in the UK is very concerning.
Reading your article, I began to think you might be interested in assisting me. However, I checked your credentials in Companies House and was dismayed to find that it appears that you too have made use of this method for concealing interests, by varying your name and date of birth to create two identities, as if you were two individuals.
Identity 1 Kenneth Albert CHARMAN
Total number of appointments 1Date of birth September 1955
BUILD-A-PLANE COMMUNITY INTEREST COMPANY (14399792)Company status Active
Correspondence address
Rodsworthy House, Ash Mill, South Molton, England, EX36 4QD
Role ACTIVE Director Appointed on 5 October 2022
Identity 2 Kenneth CHARMANTotal number of appointments 1Date of birth September 1956
UFLEXREWARD HOLDINGS LIMITED (11954010)Company status Active
Correspondence address
Unilever House, 100 Victoria Embankment, London, United Kingdom, EC4Y 0DY
Role RESIGNED Director Appointed on 18 April 2019 Resigned on 1 December 2022
This causes Companies House to publish two materials misstatements “Total number of appointments 1”. Each interest is concealed from the other, compromising due diligence for Anti-Money Laundering legislation, amongst others.
Might you explain why you varied your date of birth and created two identities? How did you came across the idea?
The widespread use of multiple identities by people in key positions in Government is what really worries me, eg Rishi Sunak, AG Victoria Prentis, HMRC Chair Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia, Jeremy Hunt, and many others. Would you be interested in addressing this issue with me so that the larger abuses might be uncovered?
Thanks for pointing this out Alison. It’s an honest mistake that I will correct. The Buildaplane CIC shows my date of birth as 1955 when it should be 1956. I can also add my middle name. It’s a non profit funded entirely by me for students at our local FE college to build a plane. I see the value in your reseach but TBH the burden and cost of governance and compliance has put me off ever doing it again!
Dear Ken – I hope you get to read this comment that is possibly at the bottom of a pile of other comments.
While I agree with your diagnosis of the problems, now is not the time to walk away. If you won’t stick your neck out when you have retirement on offer, what hope is there for your children and grandchildren?
I have two young dependents and have managed to remain vocal on many of these matters. Not everyone can do the same, but with your experience and clout you could become a signficant speck of grit in the DEI juggernaut. Many reversals are being achieved due to brave pushback, and you could make a massive difference by taking on a few NED roles… or, if you don’t want the fiduciary liability, work as a paid advisor to the board, and help stiffen a few spines:
Get up, stand up
Stand up for your right
Get up, stand up
Don’t give up the fight
Get up, stand up
Stand up for your right
Get up, stand up
Don’t give up the fight
Most people think
Great God will come from the sky
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high
But if you know what life is worth
You would look for yours on earth
And now a you see the light
You stand up for your right
Best wishes,
Alex
They don’t need you back at work. Society is being flattened, gaslit, deskilled, homogenised all in preparation for world government with a few plutocratic leaders and the people happy to sit watching Netflix, being spoon fed into subservience. Brave New World will follow the current transition to 1984. And you will be happy…..until it all goes wrong. Our current institutions and governments are either mad or evil, fortunatley the people aren’t and the worm will turn. Don’t let it get you down it’s only castles burning.
Largely ok article but I still get the undertone of the ‘unconstrained’ vision, as defined by Thomas Sowell, and because of this think the writer is a less extreme version of the activists but pulling in generally the same direction.
This is because he hasn’t escaped from the delusion (the unconstrained vision dictates this) of having more capabilities, like God, than humans actually do possess, however intelligent and educated they are.
The intelligent and educated are particularly susceptible to this way of thinking for obvious reasons.