Ilkley leads the way in the digital high street revolution with the launch of its new gift card

 ILKLEY has become one of the first towns in the county to have its own digital and physical gift card.

The new Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card is available to buy online as either a physical or digital card, and can be spent with over 50 businesses in the town, including shops, restaurants and services. A sales point will be added in the coming months.

Driven by Ilkley Business Improvement District, the new gift card is part of the BID’s mission to make local shopping easy, cater for how customers shop now and in the future, and help to position Ilkley for a digitally enabled future.

Physical gift cards are sent to the recipient by post with an optional gift message. Digital gift cards are sent to the recipient as a text or email, the recipient can then add the balance of their Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card to their digital wallet and make their purchase using their phone, either online or in-store.

Helen Rhodes BID Manager at Ilkley BID said the introduction of the new gift card will enhance the town’s attractiveness for locals and visitors.

She said: “Gift cards are incredibly popular, with 40% of people purchasing at least one gift card in the past three years. Over 50% of people used gift cards with a new business in 2021, and people typically spend around 65% more when they redeem their gift card. Now, with the Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card, we have a single gift card that can be used right across the town, giving people a local, fun and easy way to shop local. But as well as locals, the Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card can be used by visitors, and by local employers to reward and incentivise their staff. The Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card is a gateway to all that Ilkley has to offer.

“People have the choice between the physical gift card that can be handed over as payment and a digital gift card that can be loaded onto a digital wallet for payment. 27.5% of gift card buyers in 2021 said that they had converted to digital gift cards, vs. 24.2% in 2020. This choice makes the Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card suitable for a wide range of customers.”

A business who has signed up to receive the Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card as payment is Attic Womenswear. Sarah Lyles is the founder of Attic Womenswear, and said: “We can’t wait to see people embracing local life by using the Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card, whether that’s meeting friends for a coffee or meal, or enjoying shopping in one of our many independent boutiques. It’s more thoughtful than a cash gift as it shows that the purchaser has a real pride in our local offering and it’s a great way to support our town. It may encourage people to shop at places they’ve never been before and we’re looking forward to welcoming new customers to our independent boutique in Crescent Courtyard.”

Richard Grafton Interiors. Left is Victoria Varney and Right is Fran Temperton. Photo@ Heidi Marfitt Photography

Another business who is set to accept the new Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card as payment is Richard Grafton Interiors. Fran Temperton of Richard Grafton Interiors said the gift card can encourage people to think local first.

She said: “The Gift Card is a welcome initiative to support our town’s economy. The recent Sunday Times article recognising Ilkley as the best place to live in the UK highlights the town’s energetic community spirit, and by actively buying an Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card, it urges people to think local first evoking this loyalty to our community businesses. It’s a powerful way of unlocking spending potential and keeping that money in Ilkley so the more businesses sign up, the better the experience will be. We’re looking forward to accepting the Gift Card at Richard Grafton Interiors with the recipient able to choose from our wide portfolio of services and products.”The Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card can also be spent with services, including salons and hairdressers. Maria Carrera is the Director of Beau Monde Perfumery and Beauty Salon said the new gift card is a welcome initiative.

She said: “By giving an Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card to friends and family, it encourages them to explore everything that Ilkley has to offer, like the vibrant independent retailers and service providers. We’re delighted to be part of the scheme and at Beau Monde the gift card can be used on a fantastic range of treatments or luxury perfumes and products, or both, making it the perfect present. The pandemic was hard for our businesses so this is a great way to encourage people to shop local and bolster the economy.”

The initiative has been funded following a grant from Bradford Council through the Additional Restrictions Grant scheme. The Ilkley Town Centre Gift Card is part of the award winning Town & City Gift Cards programme from fintech Miconex and joins 7 other programmes in Yorkshire: Barnsley, Bradford, Halifax, Harrogate, Scarborough, Sheffield and York.

Colin Munro is the managing director of Miconex: “Ilkley’s new digital and physical gift card gives customers ultimate choice and convenience. Two thirds of people are looking to make gift cards more usable by storing them in their mobile wallets. By 2023, a mobile phone will be the main payment method for 12 million UK customers. This isn’t just about how customers shop today, but how they’ll shop tomorrow.”

Original post: 

Ilkley leads the way in the digital high street revolution with the launch of its new gift card

The UK remains committed to investing in UN conflict prevention and peace building

 Statement by Ambassador James Kariuki at the UN High-Level Meeting on Peacebuilding Financing

Mr. President, Excellencies, colleagues,

“To take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to peace” – this was the commitment we made in the first sentence of the first article of the United Nations Charter.

But today, two billion people live in countries affected by conflict. Russia’s war of choice in Ukraine has increased that number and wrought untold suffering on the people of a peaceful country.

The United Kingdom stands with the overwhelming majority of countries around the world in deploring Russia’s aggression and calling on President Putin to cease his senseless war.

Mr. President, few conflicts today are so unequivocal. More often, they are driven by a mixture of political, economic, social, and environmental factors. But the vast majority are preventable. And prevention is where we need to focus if we are to live up to the commitments of the Charter.

This means investing in peacebuilding. This is why we are here today. Because instability jeopardizes development and puts lives and livelihoods at risk.

The United Kingdom has been steadfast in its support – political and financial – for United Nations peacebuilding. We have contributed over 230 million dollars to the Peacebuilding Fund since its inception. But the Fund is still sustained by only a handful of major donors. Others need to step up.

As co-Chair of the Group of Friends of the PBF, the United Kingdom is deeply committed to the Fund. But the Fund is not a silver bullet. National governments and international development partners all need to play their part. This includes the UN development system.

The United Kingdom is also working to advance prospects for innovative financing for peacebuilding. And to deepen strategic partnerships with the international financial institutions. In addition to our multilateral contributions, our deep bilateral partnerships focus on durable peace and inclusive development, rather than quick fixes that risk saddling countries with unsustainable debt.

Today, the world can quite literally no longer afford the cost of conflict. The current global economic climate is straining both stability itself and the resources available to support that stability. This is a dangerous spiral. We need to explore all possible solutions. And we need to increase impact across all resource strands.

The United Kingdom remains fully committed to maximizing investment in UN conflict prevention and peacebuilding.

Thank you

originally posted on : 

The UK remains committed to investing in UN conflict prevention and peace building

UK parliament invites Twitter-lovin’ Musk to talk ‘authenticating all humans’

 The British parliament has invited Elon Musk to “discuss the future of Twitter” because we live in deeply wild times.

If Musk agrees to speak to parliamentarians on the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee — even virtually — he will be going further than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who (in)famously snubbed repeat calls to testify before it in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data abuse scandal back in 2018.

Unlike Zuckerberg, who was seeking to evade scrutiny of how exactly Facebook came to allow a firm some of its own staff had dubbed “sketchy” suck up data on millions of users without their knowledge or consent, Musk has no obvious reason to avoid a chinwag with a few of the U.K. parliament’s ‘honorable members’ — besides his general distain for government institutions.

He may also (currently) be too busy trolling owners of NFTs to notice or care about an “invitation to speak” to parliamentarians of a country on the other side of the Atlantic.

But he probably should take up the invite — because it’s a sign of things to come if he succeeds in his mission to own Twitter.

As we reported earlier, there is a growing patchwork of international regulations that already and/or will soon apply to the speech platform. So if Musk become Twitter’s owner, he will be on the hook for decisions that could result in the company being fined substantially for failing to comply with regional/per market rules on content such platforms can legally carry.

Rules that could even see local execs doing prison time for compliance failures in the case of the U.K.’s incoming Online Safety legislation.

In its letter of invitation to Musk which the DCMS committee made public today, it writes that it’s especially interested in his proposal to “authenticate all humans.”

“My committee has noted your proposed acquisition of Twitter and we are interested in the developments you propose,” writes committee chair and MP Julian Knight. “In particular, your intention to roll out verification for all users echoes our calls on the U.K. government as part of proposed legislation, which we hope will restore the U.K. public’s trust in digital platforms.”

Knight goes on to note a 2020 report by the committee on misinformation during the COVID-19 “infodemic” which called for “greater transparency of bots and automated and spam accounts,” as well as referencing its more recent report on the Online Safety Bill — which “discussed ways to balance civil liberties like freedom of expression with the need to tackle pernicious, pervasive online child sexual exploitation and abuse,” as he puts it.

“I therefore wish to take this opportunity to invite you to speak before our committee and discuss your proposals in more depth,” Knight goes on, before suggesting Musk use the British parliament’s public platform to troll his critics (er … careful what you wish for!) — as he writes: “I know you have expressed your wish that critics remain on Twitter and this may present an opportunity to address any critiques in public.”

Critics of the U.K. government’s Online Safety Bill, meanwhile, have long been concerned the government could be leaning toward limiting social media anonymity — in a claimed bid to quash trolling and abuse on online platforms.

However the government unveiled a compromise approach earlier this year that would require the largest platforms to provide users with tools to limit how much (potentially) harmful but technically legal content they get exposed to by offering ways for them to verify their identity and control who can interact with them on the service (e.g., by selecting an option to only receive DMs and replies from verified accounts).

“The onus will be on the platforms to decide which methods to use to fulfil this identity verification duty but they must give users the option to opt in or out,” DCMS wrote in February of the partial authentication addition to what critics already dub a ‘kitchen sink’ bill.

If the government holds to that, the U.K. will avoid a controversial blanket verification requirement mandate for platforms like Twitter — akin to Musk’s “authenticating all humans” idea — although the Online Safety Bill is still undergoing parliamentary scrutiny so there could be further amendments before it becomes law. (And the DCMS committee, at least, appears keen on moar authentication.)

A lot could still happen to change the detail of the incoming legislation. But it’s strange to think that new ownership at a major platform like Twitter could reset the social media speech dial in an even more radical direction than that proposed by the U.K. government — i.e., if Musk really means to force all Twitter account holders through identity verification.

If he does intend that, it could mean the worst of all worlds: An ill-thought-through speech chilling intervention by Musk, which fails to value privacy nor understand the relative risks for users of being forced to trust a third party to (at best) safeguard their identity, combined with the growing mass of restrictions being applied to speech platforms by states and political institutions around the world, some (technically) democratic, others (totally) autocratic, which are tending to take a narrower view on what’s legal to express online.

Originally posted on : UK parliament invites Twitter-lovin’ Musk to talk ‘authenticating all humans’

‘Embarrassed to be British’: Brexit study reveals impact on UK citizens in EU

 Exclusive: Survey of Britons on continent shows ‘deep transformations’, shame and disappointment

The first major study since Brexit of UK citizens living in the EU has revealed its profound impact on their lives, with many expressing serious concerns over their loss of free movement and voting rights – and a very different perception of Britain.

The survey, of 1,328 British nationals across the continent, showed that if “the public narrative suggests Brexit is done and dusted, it has brought deep transformations to the lives of British citizens in the EU and EEA”, the study’s co-lead, Michaela Benson, said.

“The long tail of Brexit is evident in its continuing impacts both on the way they live their lives, and in its lasting significance for their sense of identity and belonging,” said Benson, a sociology professor at Lancaster University.

The survey, conducted between December 2021 and January 2022, a year after the end of the Brexit transition period, and part of a wider project by Lancaster and Birmingham universities, found 59% of respondents had lived in their country of residence for at least five years and most intended to stay.

But many were angered by their loss of free movement, meaning they can no longer move within the EU for work, or retire to another EU country, and especially worried about being unable to return to the UK with non-British family members in future.

Asked whether their past or future migration plans had been affected by Brexit, 27% of respondents said it had affected them a great deal, and 14% a lot. “Where does one even start?” was the response of one British citizen living in Belgium. “Loss of rights like freedom of movement around the EU and to the UK. With a wife who is an EU citizen, I had to decide whether to move to the relevant EU country or stay in the UK. Family now cannot move back to Britain. Uncertainty.”

Another said: “I moved to France in 2020 in order to protect my right to live and work in France post-Brexit. My migration is 100% a result of Brexit.”

Brexit, and the British government’s handling of the Covid pandemic, strongly affected 80% of respondents’ feelings towards the UK, with responses including “deep shame”, “disappointment”, “a shit show”, “embarrassed to be British”, “shambolic”, and “like watching a house on fire”.

Just over 30% still felt very or extremely emotionally attached to the UK, compared with 75% who said they felt a very or extreme emotional attachment to the EU, and 59% who felt the same in relation to their country of residence.

“For me, one of the most interesting things the survey reveals is this sense of disappointment, shame and anguish over Brexit and the pandemic – and a really quite pronounced expression of European identity,” Benson said.

About two-thirds had changed their legal status since 2016, acquiring residency or citizenship. But nearly half did not have the same status – and therefore the same migration and settlement rights – as some or all of their close family members.

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This was a major or significant concern for a large majority of respondents, who said it was affecting their own and their children’s work, career and education, or would do so in the future.

“My wife is a Russian citizen,” said one respondent in Italy. “Her right to live and work depend upon my status under the withdrawal agreement. She fears a potential move to another EU country as her residency rights are totally dependent upon mine.”

Those who felt they may want or need to move back to the UK at some stage felt particularly affected, since non-British partners and other family members coming with them would now be subject to UK domestic immigration controls.

“I have a house in England,” said one respondent, who has lived in the Netherlands for 10 years. “I was going to retire there. It’s now being sold. My wife is Dutch. I do not think she could even relocate back to the UK – despite joint ownership of a house, having lived there for 15 years, being fluent in English and having two dual-nationality kids.”

The loss of EU voting rights was also a big concern, with 46% saying they could no longer vote in European elections or, in most cases, local elections in their country of residence. Roughly 42% were also unable to vote in the UK because they had lived abroad for more than 15 years, although this is expected to change.

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Originally posted on: ‘Embarrassed to be British’: Brexit study reveals impact on UK citizens in EU