From The Sunday Times
June 6, 2010
Fair pay can’t be defined, but still the snoops are after our wallets
Minette Marrin
There is no such thing as a just price. That is what my O-level history teacher said years ago, shocking me out of my schoolgirl boredom with this startling idea: I had, without thinking, assumed prices were fair, like sixpence for every Mars bar.
At some time in the early modern period, she said, people began to realise that the price is never absolutely right: it is a relative question of supply and demand and, of course, of political constraints and other circumstances. The price of something is what, in those circumstances, people can and will pay for it.
If so, the same must apply to pay; there is no such thing as just pay or fair pay. A worker may well be worthy of his hire, but what does that mean in practice? I was reminded of my late, great history teacher by all the agitated discussion at the moment of fair pay.
David Cameron said before the election that nobody in the public sector should earn more than 20 times what the lowest-paid employee was getting (which would mean a cap of about £200,000). And since the election he has set up a fair-pay review into public sector pay under Will Hutton. Last week there was outrage, in some quarters at least, at the government’s publication of top civil servants’ pay: 170 of them earn a great deal more than the prime minister (£142,500).
Somehow the revelation that John Fingleton, the chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading, takes home between £275,000 and £280,000, seemed to stick in most people’s throats, while those who resent the money being thrown at the Olympics had further cause for grievance in the £225,000 salary of Jeremy Beeton, head of the government’s Olympic executive.
Many people are already horrified at the vast salaries of top BBC executives; it is hard for even the most rugged of free marketeers to understand what Mark Thompson, the director-general, can possibly do to deserve £800,000 or so of public money, plus lavish perks.
Underlying all the anger and resentment, there seems to be a sense that there really is or ought to be a notion of fair pay, and that in the public sector at least it could be achieved. There are plenty of people on the left, politically, who think fair pay could and should be imposed on the private sector too. The pay ratios there, as everyone knows, are vastly greater than in the public sector.
In the FTSE 100 companies the ratio between the highest and lowest pay rates has more than doubled in the past decade to 81:1, while in middling companies it is 34:1. There is disquiet about pay levels in some charities: the trade union Unite has asked Hutton to investigate “glaring pay differentials” in the voluntary sector. Last year Unite publicly objected to the £391,000 annual salary paid to John Belcher, then chief executive at the residential care charity Anchor.
What I think people are really arguing about, unless they are unreconstructed Maoists, is not fair pay, but unfair pay — unjust pay, unjustified pay. It is impossible to come up with a workable notion of fair pay in a free society, but most of us have a lively idea of unfair pay. Starvation wages are unfair. And I cannot be alone in muttering to myself about unfairness at the news on Friday that Adam Crozier, chief executive of Royal Mail, was given a package of £2.4m in his final year with the company, of which £1.5m was a bonus: Royal Mail has not exactly distinguished itself under his command, to put it mildly.
In the new resentment about all this — first prompted by the shocking revelations about bankers’ so-called “compensation” — there are signs of a cultural shift.
A feeling is developing, perhaps in line with the growth in public nosiness, that we should all be told much more about other people’s affairs, including what they earn. The annoying buzz word for this is transparency. The new government is a true believer in transparency — its latest offering at the altar was the public posting on Friday of everything that government spends — the entire contents of the Treasury spending database.
But while transparency about public money and public servants is as welcome as it is proper, it might not be so welcome on all sides if the popular demand for information were to spread to the private sector. That might happen. One or two commentators have suggested that all our tax returns should be made public, as in Sweden. And without going that far, Polly Toynbee of The Guardian, weather vane of the old egalitarian left, hopes that at the least the proposed 20:1 pay ratio in the public sector will “fix a benchmark to nudge the private sector into reform”.
Revealing what private sector employees earn might well have some advantages. For most people — although clearly not for some of the greediest bankers — public exposure is a good corrective. Fat cats may be quite impervious to shame and to other people’s righteous anger, but most people aren’t. A new definition of fair pay might emerge; it is a salary you wouldn’t be embarrassed to have publicly known, either as employer or employee. Before long, under the prurient gaze of public opinion and the scrutiny of colleagues, an individual’s pay would be neither too high nor too low to justify — pay that is not obviously unfair.
All the same, whatever the benefits of revealing private sector pay in public, they are outweighed by the obvious disadvantage. It is an attack on privacy and on freedom.
People entrusted with public money cannot expect privacy or freedom — public scrutiny and state control is in the nature of their work. The same is not true of the private sector; there we are entitled to the freedom and the privacy, within the law and under the eyes of the tax man and the regulators, to make whatever commercial arrangements we like. If we are exploited, there are industrial tribunals.
In times of public resentment and anxiety, it is easy to forget that freedom and privacy are precious. They should not lightly be given up for the sake of something so elusive and intractable as the idea of fair pay. Jobs are not equal, the same job is not equally well done by all employees, employees are not equally good. When it comes to footballers and film stars, people are quite prepared to acknowledge that.
The private sector market in jobs is not entirely free, nor should it be — it’s constrained by social norms, mostly expressed in law — but it should be free of threats to the privacy and freedom of those who work in it, for what they see as pay that is not unfair.
minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk
Showing posts with label the Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Times. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
GRANDADDY OF GREEN, JAMES LOVELOCK, WARMS TO ECO-SCEPTICS
From The Sunday Times
March 14, 2010
Grandaddy of green, James Lovelock, warms to eco-sceptics
Charles Clover
Just occasionally you find yourself at an event where there is a sense of history in the air. So it was the other night at the Royal Society, when a small gathering of luminaries turned up to hear that extraordinary nonagenarian, the scientist James Lovelock.
They had all come: David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change; Michael Green, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge; Michael Wilson, producer of the James Bond movies; Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum; and more. You knew why they had answered the Isaac Newton Institute’s invitation. They wanted to learn where one of the most interesting minds in science stood in the climate debate.
Lovelock has been intimately involved in three of the defining environmental controversies of the past 60 years. He invented an instrument that made it possible to detect the presence of toxic pollutants in the fat of Antarctic penguins — at roughly the same time as Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, her hugely influential book about pollution. In the 1970s the same instrument, his electron capture detector, was used to detect the presence of chlorofluorocarbons — CFCs — in the atmosphere. Although Lovelock mistakenly pronounced these chemicals as no conceivable toxic hazard, the scientists F Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina later won the Nobel prize in chemistry for proving they were destroying the ozone layer.
Then, in 1979, Lovelock published the book-length version of his Gaia theory, which postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of super-organism, with millions of species regulating its temperature. Despite initial scepticism from the Darwinists, who refused to believe that individual organisms could act in harmony, the Gaia theory has been widely accepted and now underlies most atmospheric science.
What, I wondered, would be the great man’s view on the latest twists in the atmospheric story — the Climategate emails and the sloppy science revealed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? To my surprise, he immediately professed his admiration for the climate-change sceptics.
“I think you have to accept that the sceptics have kept us sane — some of them, anyway,” he said. “They have been a breath of fresh air. They have kept us from regarding the science of climate change as a religion. It had gone too far that way. There is a role for sceptics in science. They shouldn’t be brushed aside. It is clear that the angel side wasn’t without sin.”
As we were ushered in to dinner, I couldn’t help wrestling with the irony that the so-called “prophet of climate change”, whose Gaia theory is regarded in some quarters as a faith in itself, was actively cheering on those who would knock science from its pedestal.
Lovelock places great emphasis on proof. The climate change projections by the Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre — a key contributor to the IPCC consensus — should be taken seriously, he said. But he is concerned that the projections are relying on computer models based primarily on atmospheric physics, because models of that kind have let us down before. Similar models, for example, failed to detect the hole in the ozone layer;
it was eventually found by Joe Farman using a spectrometer.
How, asks Lovelock, can we predict the climate 40 years ahead when there is so much that we don’t know? Surely we should base any assumptions on things we can measure, such as a rise in sea levels. After all, surface temperatures go up and down, but the rise in sea levels reflects both melting ice and thermal expansion. The IPCC, he feels, underestimates the extent to which sea levels are rising.
Do mankind’s emissions matter? Yes, they undoubtedly do.
No one should be complacent about the fact that within the next 20 years we’ll have added nearly a trillion tons of carbon to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. When a geological accident produced a similar carbon rise 55m years ago, it turned up the heat more than 5C. And now? Well, the effect of man-made carbon is unpredictable. Temperatures might go down at first, rather than up, he warns.
How should we be spending our money to prevent possible disaster? In Britain, says Lovelock, we need sea walls and more nuclear power. Heretical stuff, when you consider the vast amount that Europe plans to spend on wind turbines.
“What would you bet will happen this century?” a mathematician asked him. Lovelock predicted a temperature rise in the middle range of current projections — about 1C-2C — which we could live with. Ah, but hadn’t he also said there was a chance that temperature rises could threaten human civilisation within the lifetime of our grandchildren?
He had. In the end, his message was that we should have more respect for uncertainties and learn to live with possibilities rather than striving for the 95% probabilities that climate scientists have been trying to provide. We don’t know what’s going to happen and we don’t know if we can avert disaster — although we should try. His sage advice: enjoy life while you can.
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This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
March 14, 2010
Grandaddy of green, James Lovelock, warms to eco-sceptics
Charles Clover
Just occasionally you find yourself at an event where there is a sense of history in the air. So it was the other night at the Royal Society, when a small gathering of luminaries turned up to hear that extraordinary nonagenarian, the scientist James Lovelock.
They had all come: David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change; Michael Green, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge; Michael Wilson, producer of the James Bond movies; Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum; and more. You knew why they had answered the Isaac Newton Institute’s invitation. They wanted to learn where one of the most interesting minds in science stood in the climate debate.
Lovelock has been intimately involved in three of the defining environmental controversies of the past 60 years. He invented an instrument that made it possible to detect the presence of toxic pollutants in the fat of Antarctic penguins — at roughly the same time as Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, her hugely influential book about pollution. In the 1970s the same instrument, his electron capture detector, was used to detect the presence of chlorofluorocarbons — CFCs — in the atmosphere. Although Lovelock mistakenly pronounced these chemicals as no conceivable toxic hazard, the scientists F Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina later won the Nobel prize in chemistry for proving they were destroying the ozone layer.
Then, in 1979, Lovelock published the book-length version of his Gaia theory, which postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of super-organism, with millions of species regulating its temperature. Despite initial scepticism from the Darwinists, who refused to believe that individual organisms could act in harmony, the Gaia theory has been widely accepted and now underlies most atmospheric science.
What, I wondered, would be the great man’s view on the latest twists in the atmospheric story — the Climategate emails and the sloppy science revealed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? To my surprise, he immediately professed his admiration for the climate-change sceptics.
“I think you have to accept that the sceptics have kept us sane — some of them, anyway,” he said. “They have been a breath of fresh air. They have kept us from regarding the science of climate change as a religion. It had gone too far that way. There is a role for sceptics in science. They shouldn’t be brushed aside. It is clear that the angel side wasn’t without sin.”
As we were ushered in to dinner, I couldn’t help wrestling with the irony that the so-called “prophet of climate change”, whose Gaia theory is regarded in some quarters as a faith in itself, was actively cheering on those who would knock science from its pedestal.
Lovelock places great emphasis on proof. The climate change projections by the Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre — a key contributor to the IPCC consensus — should be taken seriously, he said. But he is concerned that the projections are relying on computer models based primarily on atmospheric physics, because models of that kind have let us down before. Similar models, for example, failed to detect the hole in the ozone layer;
it was eventually found by Joe Farman using a spectrometer.
How, asks Lovelock, can we predict the climate 40 years ahead when there is so much that we don’t know? Surely we should base any assumptions on things we can measure, such as a rise in sea levels. After all, surface temperatures go up and down, but the rise in sea levels reflects both melting ice and thermal expansion. The IPCC, he feels, underestimates the extent to which sea levels are rising.
Do mankind’s emissions matter? Yes, they undoubtedly do.
No one should be complacent about the fact that within the next 20 years we’ll have added nearly a trillion tons of carbon to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. When a geological accident produced a similar carbon rise 55m years ago, it turned up the heat more than 5C. And now? Well, the effect of man-made carbon is unpredictable. Temperatures might go down at first, rather than up, he warns.
How should we be spending our money to prevent possible disaster? In Britain, says Lovelock, we need sea walls and more nuclear power. Heretical stuff, when you consider the vast amount that Europe plans to spend on wind turbines.
“What would you bet will happen this century?” a mathematician asked him. Lovelock predicted a temperature rise in the middle range of current projections — about 1C-2C — which we could live with. Ah, but hadn’t he also said there was a chance that temperature rises could threaten human civilisation within the lifetime of our grandchildren?
He had. In the end, his message was that we should have more respect for uncertainties and learn to live with possibilities rather than striving for the 95% probabilities that climate scientists have been trying to provide. We don’t know what’s going to happen and we don’t know if we can avert disaster — although we should try. His sage advice: enjoy life while you can.
Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times, or place your advertisement.
Times Online Services: Dating | Jobs | Property Search | Used Cars | Holidays | Births, Marriages, Deaths | Subscriptions | E-paper
News International associated websites: Milkround
Copyright 2010 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
WHAT WOMEN WANT IS AN END TO HECTORING BY FEMINISTS
Times Online Logo 222 x 25
From The Sunday Times
March 14, 2010
What women want is an end to hectoring by feminists
Minette Marrin
Women beware wimmin. International Women’s Day rolled around once again for the 99th time last week and many of the usual alpha females came out to celebrate.
Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama had an awkward little womanly moment together in the White House, although most Americans ignore the day. Harriet Harman took the opportunity to remind us how few women there are in British boardrooms. Her intrusive Equality Bill, which encourages discrimination against men in the workplace, was going through its final stages in the Commons last week.
It is true, of course, that there has been a lot for women to celebrate in the past century and we have the courage and persistence of earlier generations of feminist women to thank for that. But somewhere along the way feminism in this country has turned into something many women cannot identify with. I can’t. Harman, along with other prominent alpha females, expresses a kind of feminism that is so far divorced from what most women think and want that she might as well belong to another sex. Alpha females seem closer to the alpha male than to the ordinary woman in gender.
Harman’s thinking, like the feminist orthodoxy in the government, is based on the following assumptions, which have always seemed quite wrong to me.
First, that all women want to work (for money, outside the home). Second, that all women, including mothers, ought to work. Third, that all women want to do and are equally suited to doing the same work as men. Fourth, that if the number of women working in an organisation is less than 50% of the total, that is in itself evidence that women are being unjustly discriminated against. Fifth, that motherhood is a problem that makes it difficult for women to work. Sixth, that the problem of motherhood can easily be fixed by paid childcare, subsidised if necessary by the state. Seventh, that what all mothers want above all is “affordable childcare” to enable them to work: children don’t need much of their attention. And finally, that it is for the state to sort out all such family matters.
This is the 1970s mindset of Harman and of many alpha females in high places; this is how women like them feel and talk.
That’s how alpha females behave. They push out babies along with policy papers and tour the interview circuit proudly bearing breast pumps. One prominent headmistress went back to work only a few hours after giving birth to her third child last month, commenting that this would show her schoolgirls what woman is capable of.
It struck me as irresponsible; pregnancy and childbirth usually involve extreme hormonal upheavals and physical demands, even when all is well. It’s not for nothing that for the first few weeks after childbirth women have not been held responsible for their actions in law because they are often not themselves, so to speak.
That’s to say nothing of the psychological needs of mother, baby and other children or of the developmental and emotional needs of children after the first few months. Are these needs really best left to childminders and crèches? Most women don’t think so.
The latest alpha female planning to combine full-time work — very long hours and a constituency — with producing a baby is Joanne Cash, the prospective Tory parliamentary candidate for Westminster.
If she gets into parliament, her first baby will be born only weeks after she takes her seat this summer.
I suspect that most mothers, remembering the arrival of their own babies, will regard this as daft. Even if things go smoothly, the demands of motherhood are such that Cash will be forced either to neglect the baby or to neglect the job. Cash is taking the approved Tory line — it’s not restricted to the left.
There is nothing new about alpha females giving their babies over to other people to look after; that has always been the price of great success, and successful women have taken it for granted. With the best of expensive childcare, it seems to work well.
However, I have come to feel strongly that it isn’t what most women want. I did hand my own first baby over to a full-time nanny so I could go back to a job in television with foreign travel. But before long I realised, like countless women, that what I most wanted was to be with my baby and work part-time from home, which I’ve done ever since.
We all tend to generalise from our own experiences: if Harman has, so have I (but then, I’m not in a position to impose mine by statute). At last there is some good evidence about what women really do feel about all this. Professor Geoff Dench of the Young Foundation has just finished a series of presentations for the Centre for Policy Studies and the Hera Trust based on evidence from the British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983, to be published tomorrow as What Women Want. In his survey of women’s attitudes, one of his conclusions is that the sisterhood is failing mothers.
Apart from married middle-class women in full-time work, most women would prefer to look after their children and work only part-time if possible. Most women value home and family life above a career — hardly surprisingly, since few women are offered careers and most must content themselves with jobs — and, he argues, women with these domestic priorities feel increasingly that the femocracy of career women in power doesn’t speak for them.
This is a bold inference. It’s drawn from the withdrawal of women from political parties, as expressed in the BSA surveys. Men have been increasingly losing interest in political parties over the past 20 years, but the process has been much faster among women and above all among mothers.
It is the Labour party that appears to have lost most support from mothers; support for Labour among working-age, working-class housewives went down from 52% in 1986 to 27% in 2008.
That doesn’t mean they’ve deserted to the Conservatives; the trend is towards “no party” disaffection. It is surely time, now, that women in politics started thinking about what women want, which is what is best for their babies and children.
I suspect it would actually be cheaper and better for government to enable women to look after their own children and families, if they want to, rather than nudging and driving them back into work. But it’s difficult for alpha females to understand such an unliberated desire. Women beware wimmin.
minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk
Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times, or place your advertisement.
Times Online Services: Dating | Jobs | Property Search | Used Cars | Holidays | Births, Marriages, Deaths | Subscriptions | E-paper
News International associated websites: Milkround
Copyright 2010 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
From The Sunday Times
March 14, 2010
What women want is an end to hectoring by feminists
Minette Marrin
Women beware wimmin. International Women’s Day rolled around once again for the 99th time last week and many of the usual alpha females came out to celebrate.
Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama had an awkward little womanly moment together in the White House, although most Americans ignore the day. Harriet Harman took the opportunity to remind us how few women there are in British boardrooms. Her intrusive Equality Bill, which encourages discrimination against men in the workplace, was going through its final stages in the Commons last week.
It is true, of course, that there has been a lot for women to celebrate in the past century and we have the courage and persistence of earlier generations of feminist women to thank for that. But somewhere along the way feminism in this country has turned into something many women cannot identify with. I can’t. Harman, along with other prominent alpha females, expresses a kind of feminism that is so far divorced from what most women think and want that she might as well belong to another sex. Alpha females seem closer to the alpha male than to the ordinary woman in gender.
Harman’s thinking, like the feminist orthodoxy in the government, is based on the following assumptions, which have always seemed quite wrong to me.
First, that all women want to work (for money, outside the home). Second, that all women, including mothers, ought to work. Third, that all women want to do and are equally suited to doing the same work as men. Fourth, that if the number of women working in an organisation is less than 50% of the total, that is in itself evidence that women are being unjustly discriminated against. Fifth, that motherhood is a problem that makes it difficult for women to work. Sixth, that the problem of motherhood can easily be fixed by paid childcare, subsidised if necessary by the state. Seventh, that what all mothers want above all is “affordable childcare” to enable them to work: children don’t need much of their attention. And finally, that it is for the state to sort out all such family matters.
This is the 1970s mindset of Harman and of many alpha females in high places; this is how women like them feel and talk.
That’s how alpha females behave. They push out babies along with policy papers and tour the interview circuit proudly bearing breast pumps. One prominent headmistress went back to work only a few hours after giving birth to her third child last month, commenting that this would show her schoolgirls what woman is capable of.
It struck me as irresponsible; pregnancy and childbirth usually involve extreme hormonal upheavals and physical demands, even when all is well. It’s not for nothing that for the first few weeks after childbirth women have not been held responsible for their actions in law because they are often not themselves, so to speak.
That’s to say nothing of the psychological needs of mother, baby and other children or of the developmental and emotional needs of children after the first few months. Are these needs really best left to childminders and crèches? Most women don’t think so.
The latest alpha female planning to combine full-time work — very long hours and a constituency — with producing a baby is Joanne Cash, the prospective Tory parliamentary candidate for Westminster.
If she gets into parliament, her first baby will be born only weeks after she takes her seat this summer.
I suspect that most mothers, remembering the arrival of their own babies, will regard this as daft. Even if things go smoothly, the demands of motherhood are such that Cash will be forced either to neglect the baby or to neglect the job. Cash is taking the approved Tory line — it’s not restricted to the left.
There is nothing new about alpha females giving their babies over to other people to look after; that has always been the price of great success, and successful women have taken it for granted. With the best of expensive childcare, it seems to work well.
However, I have come to feel strongly that it isn’t what most women want. I did hand my own first baby over to a full-time nanny so I could go back to a job in television with foreign travel. But before long I realised, like countless women, that what I most wanted was to be with my baby and work part-time from home, which I’ve done ever since.
We all tend to generalise from our own experiences: if Harman has, so have I (but then, I’m not in a position to impose mine by statute). At last there is some good evidence about what women really do feel about all this. Professor Geoff Dench of the Young Foundation has just finished a series of presentations for the Centre for Policy Studies and the Hera Trust based on evidence from the British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983, to be published tomorrow as What Women Want. In his survey of women’s attitudes, one of his conclusions is that the sisterhood is failing mothers.
Apart from married middle-class women in full-time work, most women would prefer to look after their children and work only part-time if possible. Most women value home and family life above a career — hardly surprisingly, since few women are offered careers and most must content themselves with jobs — and, he argues, women with these domestic priorities feel increasingly that the femocracy of career women in power doesn’t speak for them.
This is a bold inference. It’s drawn from the withdrawal of women from political parties, as expressed in the BSA surveys. Men have been increasingly losing interest in political parties over the past 20 years, but the process has been much faster among women and above all among mothers.
It is the Labour party that appears to have lost most support from mothers; support for Labour among working-age, working-class housewives went down from 52% in 1986 to 27% in 2008.
That doesn’t mean they’ve deserted to the Conservatives; the trend is towards “no party” disaffection. It is surely time, now, that women in politics started thinking about what women want, which is what is best for their babies and children.
I suspect it would actually be cheaper and better for government to enable women to look after their own children and families, if they want to, rather than nudging and driving them back into work. But it’s difficult for alpha females to understand such an unliberated desire. Women beware wimmin.
minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk
Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times, or place your advertisement.
Times Online Services: Dating | Jobs | Property Search | Used Cars | Holidays | Births, Marriages, Deaths | Subscriptions | E-paper
News International associated websites: Milkround
Copyright 2010 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
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