Participants in the Gangnam style flash mob are asked to wear their brightest clothing to encourage people to wear bright colours on Blooming Monday the following day.
Members of the Trust will be present and joining the flash mob, as well as being available to discuss its purpose and the idea of Blooming Monday; whilst also discussing depression and how people can look after their mental health.

There will also be events occurring throughout January in local schools, with the Trust speaking about the importance of mental health and the support that the Trust can offer, as well as other local services.

Founder member and Trustee of MHRUK, Dr Laura Davidson, said: “Blooming Monday is an annual campaign to bring some cheer on ‘BlueMonday’.

“On 20 January 2014, we invite everyone to join our Blooming Monday campaign and make a big visual impact by injecting some unexpected colour and joy into the day.

“It’s a simple ask: that everyone wears their brightest clothes on one of the dullest days of the year.  Even if you have to wear formal clothes to work, you can at least wear a bright tie or scarf or even socks for a change, and bring a smile to someone’s face.

“By taking part and encouraging friends and work colleagues to wear bright clothes for Blooming Monday on 20 January 2014, you can make a real difference to those with mental ill-health.
“MHRUK funds research into the causes of mental illness and helping to develop much better treatments to reduce the misery resulting from it.  We welcome all donations and collections, however small, towards a new Blooming Monday  research scholarship on depression.  The easiest way to donate is by text.  For less than the price of your next cup of coffee, please text BLOO22 £2 to 70070.

“Find Blooming Monday on Facebook and Twitter and join in by posting or tweeting photos of you and others wearing your brightest clothes on the day for a chance to win a Blooming Monday t-shirt. The most spectacularly outlandish, neon, clashing outfit will win!”

To find out more, or to keep up to date with MHRUK and its efforts to improve the lives of those suffering from depression, look for the charity’s Facebook page, tweet them at @MHRUKCharity or visit the website at www.mhruk.org/campaigns/

Anyone who would like more information or is willing to assist in any other way can also contact TalkEasy at talkeasytrust@gmail.com

Mr Gold says:
“I am delighted to be there to support The Talk Easy Trust. I believe it is very important for students of all ages to be able to talk to both students and teachers when needed. Young people often have to deal with stress and difficult decisions with no support. Hopefully the Talk Easy Trust will help to reduce this over the coming years.
Well done to all the boys who have set up the trust and organised the event. Good luck to all playing, I will keep my chief scout on alert!!!”

The Talk Easy Trust was founded on the 29th November 2012. It has been set up by many students from the John Fisher School, Purley, alongside Nescot College and Carshalton Girls.  The service offers students support and guidance from trained sixth form students who have undergone online and face to face sessions.

We work inside the local community to attempt to decrease the collision of bullying and depression happening in young people’s lives. Our facility is free and confidential and you can talk to anyone of us who work in the trust with great peace of mentality.

West Kent Freemasons representatives present a cheque for £5000 to David and Vanessa Gold

Last night the Bickley Restaurant in Chislehurst played host to the latest in a series of fundraising dinners held to raise £30,000 to purchase a minibus for the Charlton Upbeats, a project for young people with Down’s syndrome, run by the Trust.

David and Vanessa Gold were the guest speakers last night and were a big hit with the packed audience.

Trust Vice Chairman Peter Varney, said, ‘It was a brilliant evening and David and Vanessa were informative and witty and you could tell how much the audience enjoyed listening to them so much so that we overran. I can’t thank them enough for giving up their time to support the Upbeats. We are also grateful to Dickie Davis of Sky Sports for compering the event and Terry Pullen of The Bickley for helping us take a giant step to the £30k target. I must also thank David Huntley who made a donation of £5,000 on the night on behalf of the West Kent Freemasons added to the fund.’

The sum raised now stands at some £27,000 and The Bickley and the Trust are in touching distance of the £30,000 target. Last night’s events followed previous successful evenings with Alan Curbishley and Damon Hill.

David Gold presents a signed West Ham team photo to the winning bidder

Up for grabs on the evening was a signed West Ham FC squad picture, which sold for £700, along with three signed David Gold autobiographies, which raised a further £600 for the minibus fund. For the evening’s prize draw, attendees were asked to donate £5, £10 or £20 notes and write their name on it, with the winner picked at random splitting the proceeds with the Upbeats. £575 was raised in total, as winner Jill Humphreys donated back the amount she won to the Down’s syndrome project.

Speaking about life as a youngster, David Gold said, ‘I played for West Ham FC as a kid. I was offered a contract to sign as a professional but my dad wouldn’t sign the papers. You can’t have it all in life and sometimes things happen for a reason. I don’t regret anything; I’ve had a fantastic life.’

When asked why he bought West Ham United FC, given its bad financial state at the time, David responded, ‘You do things for the club you love, whether that be West Ham, Charlton or whoever, but we ran Birmingham City FC as a business and eventually sold it for £82m.

‘My daughter Vanessa and I are delighted to help to support The Bickley’s fundraising efforts in raising £30,000 to purchase a minibus for the Charlton Upbeats and hope we have helped all those involved move closer to reaching their target.’

Financial Fair Play regulations are making all English League clubs focus on how to balance the books between income and wage bills

Amid all the discussion last Wednesday and Thursday at the annual Stamford Bridge talking shop that is the Leaders in Football conference, what was most notable was the lack of any real disagreement on the main issues. If a single word could be said to characterise the summit it was “consensus”; a sense of broad agreement not only that Something Must Be Done to prevent the sport eating itself but that the Financial Fair Play regulations being introduced across Europe by Uefa provide the best starting point.

FFP demands that annual losses are kept to a certain level. English football’s favoured method, it is becoming clear, is the crucial link between a club’s income and their wage bill. As Arsenal’s chief executive, Ivan Gazidis, said: “The environment we are in has become somewhat irrational in terms of player spending but it’s becoming more rational. Some form of financial regulation has extremely broad support among the Premier League clubs.”

The Football League have led the way domestically with a two-tier system. The lowest two divisions are effectively bound by a maximum amount of turnover they are allowed to spend on wages.

League Two clubs have reduced the threshold from 60 per cent of income to 55 per cent and face a transfer embargo if they break it. League One clubs are currently operating a pilot scheme with a threshold reduced from 75 per cent to 65 per cent this season, when similar sanctions apply, and to 60 per cent next season.

The Championship will have a broader system based more closely on FFP which means, as Brighton’s chief executive, Paul Barber, says: “It’s basically not being able to spend more than you bring in. So in the next couple of years we are going to see changes here which will limit the amount you can spend on players to what you can earn off the field.”

None of these regulations goes as far as a salary cap. Wigan’s Dave Whelan is one of the few owners who believe such a system is practical, while West Ham’s David Gold finds the notion abhorrent: “I wouldn’t want my salary capped and I don’t suppose you would yours either. Wage-capping is almost Communism, the tea lady and the chairman earning the same money. What I’m in favour of is good business and governance. When clubs are spending more on wages than their income then there’s something desperately wrong. We have one of the most fantastic leagues the world has known and last year we lost £480 million. I’m an ex-bricklayer. I know that if I spend more money than is coming in, I will go bust.”

There are other options: at Sunderland, the owner, Ellis Short, is thought to favour limiting wage rises to a set percentage each year.

On the most recent figures (above), Queens Park Rangers, Manchester City and Aston Villa all spent more than their annual income on wages, the deficit being made up by rich owners in a way that Uefa wish to outlaw. QPR, whose figures were based on Championship income, have to build a stadium holding more than 19,000 people; Villa are drawing in their horns, which cost them the services of a manager, Martin O’Neill; City, like Chelsea, are seen as an example of why regulations are necessary at all because of the way they distorted the market with inflated transfer fees and wages.

But some believe that stopping benefactors such as Sheikh Mansour and Roman Abramovich pouring millions into a club in future will merely cement their position at the top, preventing, say, an Everton finding the sugar daddy they need to truly challenge them.

City insist they had to spend heavily in a short period to catch up, and their former chief executive, Garry Cook, says: “If you look at their transfer work in the last window [net spend £32.2m] it was significantly different from the first one when I was involved [£98.7m]. Financial Fair Play has to work because it’s the cornerstone of the future of the game. I think the execution of it and the penalties are still being worked through and there’ll probably be lots of trial and error. The irony is that it is Uefa saying you must have control, but the biggest prize, where all the risk is taken, is in a Uefa competition – the Champions’ League. It’s a bit like the fox guarding the hen house.”

Patrick Vieira, an ambassador for City and Western Union, says the way forward for the club is securing existing players on long contracts and developing youngsters through their academy: “The new philosophy is to get young players coming through the academy. We have the likes of Sergio Aguero, Samir Nasri and David Silva, who signed a five-year contract. We are into a cycle where these kind of players will stay at the club for the next five, six, seven years. That will give us the time to develop young players. We made a big investment in the first two or three years to challenge straight away because we could afford it. We’re not going to do it for the next 10 years because of Financial Fair Play.”

Having inherited a situation at West Ham with his co-owner, David Sullivan, that he says was “out of control”, Gold understands the temptations, if not the logic: “You chase a player, offering a million pounds a year, and your competitor offers £1.2m and you offer £1.3m and so it goes on. At West Ham arguably they were gambling by spending more than they were earning.

“We can protect clubs from gambling, borrowing, running up debts by for instance insisting on a certain percentage of wages against turnover. It’s not brain surgery.”

Football brains are at least, and at last, working on it.

See original article

Posted by: David Gold, Chairman West Ham United

Top-level football in this country is on the brink of diving into the financial abyss.

An alarming statement, you might say, but if someone told you 12 months ago that Glasgow Rangers, one of the biggest clubs in the world, was in desperate danger of being broken down and dismantled, you may have found that even more alarming.

The truth is the English Barclays Premier League, despite all of its riches, is spending far more than it earns.

In 2010-11, the Premier League’s 20 clubs collectively made a loss of £361m. This meant they spent all of their record £2.3bn income, and then some.

A recent audit of all the English leagues by Deloitte and Touch showed only one league, League Two, was making a profit. The reason for that is they and they alone introduce wage control as a percentage of turnover. League One has followed suit and the Championship have introduced their own governance. That leaves the mighty Barclays Premier League.

The over spending on players wages and agents in the Premier League is embarrassing – and it can’t go on.

The Premier League clubs are currently spending approximately 70 per cent of their turnover on player wages. Twenty years ago that figure was 40 per cent. Revenues are increasing but costs are increasing even faster. Revenues from TV have soared. But this simply papers over a huge chasm of financial problems.

In business, profit is vital – but not in football, it seems, and it should be.

Why is profit so important?

A profitable football club means a healthy football club. It means a football club that isn’t in danger of going out of business, of crumbling into history. Profit could help freeze or even reduce ticket prices.

We need to regulate spending, reduce debt and ensure profitability – and quickly.

We have to stop football clubs racking up debt or we’ll have an even more desperate situation. We can’t have clubs running with large percentage of debt against turnover.

The lower leagues have already implemented new regulation, and the Premier League must do the same.

I would propose that there is a robust and clear debt cap – enforced by points deductions or a transfer ban on incoming players which would have to become the base level for all clubs in the first year. Each year after that the base level could be reduced until there is no debt at all, with maybe an exception for capital projects, which could be ring fenced.

As the only realistic way to achieve his would be for clubs to cut costs, I believe this would effectively reduce the money spent on wages and agents fees. At any football club, the biggest outgoing by some margin is the players’ wages. It’s not rent, it’s not the tea lady and it’s not the heat and light.

But if a club, under a new scheme governing it’s levels of expenditure on turnover, simply cannot afford the wage demands of a new transfer target and cannot borrow further to pay for him, they will have to walk away and do with who they have got or find a new target. But it will be the same for all clubs.

Sure, clubs without the players they want will be in danger of getting relegated. But ask any fan; would you take relegation over extinction? You can bounce back from one, but not the other. Of the bottom 12 clubs in the Premier League most will lose money and 3 will be relegated but with proper governance the same 12 clubs could make 100m, its true that 3 will still be relegated. However it’s infinitely more desirable to get relegated having made 10m than having lost 10m. Could this ultimately lead to a freezing of ticket prices?

Market forces would, I believe, then keep a grip on players’ wages and manage the expectations of their agents.

It would be helpful if UEFA and FIFA were involved but not critical. There would need to be independent, external auditors to police the process.

The system put forward under my proposal would be separate to UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations. Financial Fair Play governs clubs that play in Europe and have to be signed up to. The rules in my proposal would be for all teams in the Premier League.

This has to be done to protect the fans as well as their clubs. If a club goes into administration, as a rule, the owners and chairman disappear and leave behind tens of thousands of distraught supporters. It has to be remembered that although the real estate of a football club is owned by its shareholders the heart and soul and the memories of the clubs history belongs to the fans their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers before them.

I’ve never seen a club chairman cry over football, I’ve never seen a manager do it either. Sure, the odd player has shed tears but I’ve seen millions of fans with tears streaming down their faces. That is all over their love for their football club and that’s why we need governance to protect football from itself.

Premier League rules state that 14 votes would be needed to pass new laws. I think that there are 14 chairmen ready for change to protect the greatest football league the world has ever seen, to do the right thing in the best interest of football as a whole.

It is time to step up to the plate.

You can read more articles by David on his personal website www.davidgold.co.uk

Read the article here:
Telegraph – David Gold