Posts Tagged ‘Rob Carr’

When the plan falls apart, by Rob Carr

03/10/2010, 11:00:45 AM

When I was a kid, the big show on TV was the A-Team. In breaks and after school, my friends and I used to be the A-Team. This mainly involved acting out invented episodes whilst running around back lanes or climbing trees down the local park.

There were four main characters of which (in the eyes of an eight-year-old) only two were cool. They were John ‘Hannibal’ Smith and Templeton ‘Face’ Peck.

This of course caused difficulties. Among six or seven of us, only two could be the cool characters, two others had to be the boring characters, and the rest were the ‘baddies’. This should have led to squabbles, arguments, sulks and tantrums, but as a rule it didn’t. Eight year old minds are creative and open and we usually managed to rotate the roles in a democratic fashion before killing each other by the climbing frame.

Except for one kid. There’s always one kid isn’t there? In the case of my childhood, it was a kid I shall call Paul. Mainly because that was his name. Paul was a pain in the arse. He insisted on being Hannibal. If he couldn’t be Hannibal, he would refuse to play. And, worse, he’d generally end up sabotaging our game as we played around him. (more…)

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Rob Carr on the Lib Dems’ exit strategy

17/09/2010, 10:09:54 AM

If you are a viewer of Dragons’ Den on the BBC, you will have heard the phrase “exit strategy”. The idea being that if you want someone to invest in your business, there has to be a way for them to make a profit and get their money back out of the business. The obvious way to recoup capital is to sell equity, and the Dragons do that all the time. Four years or so into an investment, they’ll begin looking to sell their share of the business for a profit.

We also hear it more and more as a military term. How does a nation get its troops out of a given conflict? George W Bush didn’t have an exit strategy for Iraq. The Iraq war began on March 20 2003 and there was no real exit strategy until 2007, four years later.

Andy just you need an exit strategy in business and in war, you need one in politics too. (more…)

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Immigration is not the enemy, not the answer, says Rob Carr

02/06/2010, 03:59:01 PM

I’m puzzled. I’m puzzled by our leaders and by some of the commentariat.

I spent the general election campaigning on the ground. I knocked on a lot of doors, did a lot of phone-banking, talked to a lot of voters.

While I did most of that campaigning in Newcastle, it wasn’t the only place. I talked to voters in Bury. I talked to voters in London. I talked to voters in Nottingham, Scotland, Wales and the Southwest.

I had fantastic conversations in our word-of-mouth campaign. Conversations about SureStart, about jobs, about hospitals. I listened to voters’ concerns on the economy, housing, welfare, education, and human rights. I learned a lot about what people thought Labour had done right and what we had done wrong.

And having done all that talking, listening, communicating, I’m puzzled. (more…)

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