It’s interesting that publishing firms take so long to pay what are relatively piddling sums of money to freelancers. Yes, administrative mistakes happen but this is a pattern of late payment – more than 30 days qualifies as “late”, according to the Late Payment of Commercial Debt Act (1988) – that suggests a general sloppiness caused mainly, perhaps, by the fact that freelancers hardly ever bother to kick up a stink.

What I particularly object to, however, is when the late payment is sent by cheque. Thanks for that Mr Publisher – that’s another week I’ll have to wait until the damn thing has cleared.

TK Maxx doesn’t have a particularly good track record in this area. The chain has been caught out previously, selling real fur marked up as fake. Others have also spotted fur for sale at TK Maxx but say that the store will remove it when it’s pointed out. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful policy – who’s to say what happens to it after it’s taken off sale, and how much is actually sold without the store realising it? I don’t want to get into a debate about the fur trade but the simple fact is that TK Maxx claims to operate an anti-fur policy (and presumably reaps the PR rewards from that) so it’s not a very good state of affairs.

In this case, the label states clearly that the coat contains fur. There’s even a sample attached to the tag, so we’re not exactly in Sherlock Holmes territory here. But you don’t expect to find real fur for sale in a high street store, which is why we didn’t notice until we got it home.

We took the coat back today. The assistant looked a bit shocked and it was taken off sale with assurances that checks will be made to remove others. I’m no retail expert but if TK Maxx made these checks before putting fur on sale, or maybe stopped using known suppliers of fur, that would help everyone out.

1. They didn’t sell enough adverts. Sounds fairly obvious but estimates suggest Crain’s would have had to have made up to £25,000 a week in advertising just to break even. Anyone who ever picked up a copy of Crain’s will have noticed that there weren’t very many adverts in it, and their “no discount” policy is well documented. However, assurances were made that the title would have five years to start making money. Perhaps the recession accelerated that process; after two-and-a-half years, the magazine has closed.

2. They were too fearless. Crain’s always seemed to me to have a sort of fearlessness about it, which was great. But it’s not difficult to imagine that its “no bullshit” approach did little to endear it to potential advertisers used to their cosy relationship with the MEN. I was told by contacts from time to time that they’d stopped talking to Crain’s, supposedly because the paper had messed up some story or other. But from what I could see Crain’s very rarely got things wrong, it just printed things that others either missed or ignored. This got up people’s noses.

3. There isn’t enough news (and a lot of it is boring). I think I might have said this before, but how many business magazines does a place need? As well as the MEN, which has had its own problems over the last two years, there’s also the long-established Insider, which rightly increased its news/online efforts immediately after Crain’s launched. (Disclaimer: I freelance for Insider.) The free-to-access Business Desk North West, which has done well under the editorship of former MEN Business Editor Chris Barry after launching less than a year after Crain’s, has further queered the pitch, while there are also various sector-specific business news websites like How-Do and Place North West. Crain’s should be commended for, in the main, having a proper news agenda that avoided recycling press releases. But there has to be a limit over the amount of business coverage people actually need.

4. It had no local roots. Manchester is the seat of the industrial revolution. Parachuting an American brand into a city as rich in business heritage as Manchester, albeit with a crowd of highly capable local journalists, was always going to be risky. And, when things don’t go to plan, a US owner isn’t going to weep over the closure of an outpost thousands of miles away. The writing was perhaps on the wall when Crain’s parted company with Manchester-based publisher Arthur Porter in January, in slightly mysterious circumstances.

5. The timing was wrong. Launching a business magazine in autumn 2007 was a terrible idea given the banking crisis, property crash, unemployment bubble and recession that followed. All this is easy to talk about in hindsight, perhaps, but the fact remains that Crain’s timing was absolutely bloody awful.

With this in mind, I thought I’d have a bash at a similar sort of piece. Obviously 3,000 words might piss you off a bit, so I’ll just give you the first few pars. If anyone at the Observer wants to commission me, I’m all yours at a rate considerably cheaper than Miranda Sawyer.

How Greggs is taking over the world

Peter Kay’s mate (the one out of Max and Paddy) eats there, so does Brian Blessed and my window cleaner. The appeal of Greggs among hungry normal people in places like Chadderton and Northwich is truly fucking astounding. So how did that happen, asks David Quinn (BA (Hons) Smash Hits)?

It was on the high street I spotted the place, just between Curry’s Digital and Timpsons. Blue and orange sign, with the delicious aroma that only baked-on pastry can provide. The queue of unfashionably-dressed people outside told me everything I needed to know. These normal types simply couldn’t get enough of this stuff, whatever it was, and I was determined to spend several weeks researching a pointless feature on the subject.

I went inside and looked around. There was a fridge with some sandwiches in it (“prawn mayonnaise” according to the sign) and some ladies behind an apparently heated counter containing an array of pies and pasties. “What would you like, love?”, one of them asks, and I am immediately drawn to her crow’s feet, her daft hat and her gruff northern charm.

I ignore her completely and instead identify an office worker standing in the queue, which snakes purposefully towards the exit. As I reach for my Moleskine notebook and Olympus voice recorder I poke him in the chest and ask him: What brought you here? What is all this stuff? How can I wring a 3,000-word feature out of it? He looks at me, him in George at Asda, me in Paul Smith, and replies: “I like cheese and onion pasties.”

Greggs. You might not have heard of it but you probably know at least one person earning below thirty thousand pounds a year who regularly buys some kind of cooked brown thing from one of these establishments. Be it a pie, a pasty, or a “prawn mayonnaise sandwich”, Greggs is the place to be if you are a British person who has a proper job in a shop, office, factory or somewhere like that, somewhere in 21st century Britain today.

Peter Kay’s mate (the one out of Max and Paddy) is an idol to these people and regularly comes into the Horwich branch for a steak and kidney pie, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and bottle of 7Up. “It’s all about the pastry, the heat on your tongue as the gravy dribbles down your chin. It can only be matched by the joy of the fizzy bottle of ice cold 7Up that I wash it down with!” he says, after I have his dialogue translated by a northern person I went to university with.

Emily, a wonderfully committed and, dare I say it, attractive young thing who runs the PR team, is similarly enthusiastic. “Greggs has become a metaphor for all that is wholesome, wonderful and British about this great British country of ours in the 21st century,” she says. “Cheap, ordinary, drab it may be, but, look, we can’t all eat at the Ivy every day, can we?”

Continues for several pages…

I’ve been thinking a lot about newspapers recently. About how I never buy one anymore except when I’m going on a long train journey, about the supposed closure of the Observer (which isn’t now happening), about what I can’t help thinking is gross mismanagement of certain newspapers somewhere along the line, and about how it must be possible to produce a local newspaper that isn’t based entirely on “soft news” and advertorials.

There are clearly some complex reasons for the demise of the newspaper, which is why the simplicity of a recent statement by Michael Moore stood out. In an apparently off-the-cuff outburst at a promotional event for his latest film, he said:

“Anytime you say that the people who read your newspaper are secondary to the business community, you’ve lost.”

This led to a further summary by media commentator Philip Stone:

“If you take care of the reader as your primary function then everything else will eventually fall into place.”

All this came to my attention via Roy Greenslade.

It’s kind of obvious, really. If you cut the journalistic budget, the quality of the journalism falls, people stop buying the paper, advertising revenues slump and what Greenslade calls the “death spiral” kicks in. I’m not saying this is especially original, either. But amid the hand-wringing and expert analysis, the neatness of Moore’s summary appeals.

Look at this picture I captured from the news earlier. I’m surprised the BBC allowed Michael O’Leary, boss of “low-cost” airline Ryanair, on air in this get-up. The point is to publicise some new routes from Leeds to fifty miles outside a number of European cities. In the most shameless and embarrassing way possible.

I actually think O’Leary could have maximised the opportunity a little better. He should have worn a sombrero with the maximum baggage allowance scrawled across it and had the departure times tatooed all over his puny forearms.

Earlier this year a Ryanair spokesman described a blogger who pointed out a glitch on the airline’s website as a “lunatic”. Obviously I object to this, so I hereby state that Michael O’Leary is a ball bag. In a stupid shirt.

Mark Brown, director of the Association of Cycle Traders, noticed that in the TV advert, Asda had managed to put the front forks on back-to-front, meaning that if you managed to avoid steering the thing into the path of a double-decker bus, you’d almost certainly come a cropper with malfunctioning brakes. It was also pointed out that a self-assembly bike is actually maybe not that much of a good idea in principle, since you’d really need a range of tools and technical know-how in order to put it together safely. Aside from which, the bike’s components are utter shit.

As the Guardian’s reviewer noticed:

The derailleur, gear shifts and more are made by a brand that sounds like Shimano but isn’t. It’s even written in the same font.

Asda’s response was to pull the TV ad. But, rather foolishly, its press office attempted to mask the fact that the supermarket is – in the view of at least one expert – selling dangerous merchandise with a series of crap bike-related puns.

A spokeswoman said: “As soon as we spotted the error, we put the brakes on the TV ad and pulled it. Our agency is back-pedalling as we speak and we will be wheeling out the new one tomorrow…”

So, if you’re unlucky enough to have bought one of these things and find yourself in an unfortunate death-related scenario, remember to think about the Asda press office’s funny bike jokes. It’ll hurt less.

Not so. Instead, the company was simply biding its time before disclosing that it would be making even more drastic cuts at Channel M, which it has done today. From a total of 74 staff, some 41 will be given the boot.

Reading the latest statement from GMG regional boss Mark Dodson, one cannot escape an apalling feeling of deja-vu:

These further redundancies at MEN Media are deeply regrettable but, in the current climate and in the context of wider changes in our industry, they are unavoidable.

Clearly, the product isn’t making any money. In fact, the channel is said to be losing £200,000 a week month [error based on Press Gazette story, amended 1pm, 28 April]. To alleviate the problem, its live broadcast output will be cut to three hours a day.

As was the case with the local weeklies, there is little explanation about how these cuts will prove sustainable in the long term. It’s obviously a good idea to cut costs if losses are being suffered. But if the cuts are so drastic that an already struggling product is suffocated to within an inch of its life, the outcome can’t possibly be good.

The Telegraph reports (hysterically):

More than 25,000 people are planning to leave Britain to avoid the new top rate of income tax, a leading City consultancy warned last night…

They would be expected to depart for low tax cantons in Switzerland, such as Zug.

Overall, according to the CEBR, the cost of their departure from the UK would be around £800 million a year, with as may as 140,000 jobs lost and a fall in GDP in the City of London of three per cent.

The Times, meanwhile, quotes Alex Henderson, tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, as saying:

This has got to reduce the UK’s attractiveness as a place to do the kind of business that requires highly-skilled and correspondingly highly-paid individuals, whether that is people choosing to go overseas or – the hidden cost – people who never come here at all.

Clearly I’m no tax adviser (thank God). But there are a couple of reasons why such arguments don’t stack up.

Firstly, there’s precious little evidence that the previous, slightly lower, rate of tax has had any positive effect on the UK economy. It’s not as though we’ve benefited from attracting those at the top of the capitalist meritocracy with a 40% tax bracket for the last 20 years.

Figures from Income Data Services last October showed the salaries of chief executives of FTSE 100 companies averaged £3.5m, reflecting an 11.5% year-on-year increase. Enough, one would think, to stop the brain drain and protect us from the ravages of the recession. Except for the fact that the UK economy is now buggered to a worse extent than any other developed country.

Secondly, I can’t find any evidence to show that where a supposedly punitive, more redistributive tax regime does exist, it has harmed productivity. If Britain is about to suffer for taxing the rich, perhaps the Murdoch papers, the business lobby and right-wing think tanks can point us to where this suffering has happened elsewhere in the world. The reason they can’t is because, put simply, it hasn’t.

In fact, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Japan and Sweden all have top individual tax bands of 50% or more. Meanwhile, countries where the top rate of tax is between 10% and 30% include Brazil, Bulgaria, Egypt, Estonia, Pakistan and Romania. Consequently, I’m struggling to see the correlation between low tax rates and a vibrant national economy.

If the great captains of industry want to leave, perhaps we should just let ‘em. Just as when Phil Collins and, latterly, James Blunt decide to leave the UK for tax reasons, the correct response is surely: So what?

The revelation will be an embarrassment to Ms Smith in many ways. Not least the fact that as Briain’s first woman Home Secretary, she has taken a stance on the sex industry, pledging to introduce tough licensing laws for lap-dancing clubs. She is responsible for regulating the adult entertainment industry.

You’ll spot the hinted-at hypocrisy of paying for adult films while at the same time taking “a stance on the sex industry”. And I suppose it is kind of embarrassing.

Then again, perhaps paying for a couple of blue movies at a fiver a time isn’t quite as embarrassing as actually owning a couple of TV porn channels, like the Sunday Express’ proprietor, Richard Desmond, does. As the website of Northern & Shell, owned by Desmond puts it:

Building upon the achievements of the Fantasy Channel, Northern & Shell expanded into the pay-per-night market with equal success. With the Red Hot channels, viewers register and purchase via their remote control handset. Interactive and Red Button services give the easy access that is the key to high viewing figures.

It is possible that Desmond doesn’t view this sort of thing embarrassing. It’s all above board and Ofcom-regulated, as the N&S website is at pains to point out. In which case, why is the front page of his newspaper saying that the “revelation” that someone has been watching pay-per-view porn “will be an embarrassment” to them?

Of course it’s not right that a cabinet minister is spunking cash (fnarr) on late-night dirty movies. But it’s a bit rich for a newspaper to focus on the “embarrassment”-factor, when its own proprietor is a porn baron.