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Proving Her Critics Right

I’ve been trying to process this Sarah Palin decision for a few hours now and I still don’t really understand it. Like her or loathe her, John McCain’s decision, however responsible you think it was, gave a minor league politician from a state remote from the national political game a shot at, well, something. Whether she [...]

Survivor: Five Former Contestants Are Fasting For Darfur

As announced by press release yesterday, former Survivor cast members—Palau’s Coby Archa, Kimberly Mullen, and Janu Tornell; Vanuatu’s Scout Cloud Lee; and Australia’s Michael Skupin—will fast for the next three days, drinking only water in solidarity as part of the Darfur Fast for Life campaign. As reported by Reality Blurred, the former cast members announced in [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Survivor: Five Former Contestants Are Fasting For Darfur", url: "http://realitytvmagazine.sheknows.com/blog/2009/07/03/survivor-five-former-contestants-are-fasting-for-darfur/" }); Related posts:

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Five ways to save on … petrol

With the cost of motoring on the rise, we find ways to cut the expense (and help the environment)

1. Pump up your tyres and cool your passion for air conditioning

It is estimated that 50% of the tyres on the road are under-inflated, which increases resistance and raises your fuel consumption. Driving with soft tyres can add up to 2% to your fuel bills, the RAC says. So keep your tyres inflated to the correct level. See your car's manual for the recommended pressure, check your tyres once a week and use the air pump at your local garage.

Air conditioning uses up to 25% more fuel, according to the National Energy Foundation, so don't use it unnecessarily. Switch it off and open your air vents instead, or just have the window down. But if you're travelling at more than 60mph and it's too hot, you're better off having the air-con on instead of keeping the windows down. Open windows increase drag, which at high speeds can cost you more in fuel than having the air-con on.

2. Maintain your motor

Inefficient, under-serviced engines can reduce fuel economy by 10% or more. So have your car serviced regularly. Dirty air filters can seriously reduce your fuel economy, according to the RAC. So change them regularly. They are inexpensive and easy to change if you have your car's handbook. Similarly, have the oil in your car changed regularly. Having clean oil reduces the wear caused by friction of moving engine parts, and helps improve fuel consumption.

Make sure your petrol cap fits tightly – petrol will evaporate if the cap is not airtight.

3. Adjust your driving technique

Drive smoothly and consistently using higher gears. Avoid sharp braking and accelerating and you can save as much as 30% on fuel costs, says the RAC. Change up a gear in a petrol car when you reach 2,500 revs a minute and at 2,000 revs a minute in diesel cars to be most fuel-efficient, the National Energy Foundation recommends. When starting from a dead stop, accelerate slowly.

If you make a cold start, don't sit around idling. Move off as soon as you can, and stay light on the accelerator until the engine has warmed up.

Reverse into parking spaces so you can drive smoothly away later without having to reverse when the engine is cold.

Driving at 85mph uses approximately 25% more fuel than at 70mph, so stick to the speed limit.

4. Get rid of weight and reduce the drag

Remove roof racks, carriers and removable seats when they are not in use, take out unnecessary boot luggage such as golf clubs and other sports equipment. Think twice about heavy accessories and wide tyres that add rolling resistance. On average, every 50kg will increase your petrol consumption by 2%, according to dedicated website save-petrol.co.uk. Flags and fancy sun roofs also increase your car's aerodynamic drag and increase fuel consumption. And carrying around the extra weight of fuel in a full tank will itself reduce fuel efficiency, so don't fill your tank up to the brim.

When filling up, find your cheapest local petrol station by using specialist price comparison website petrolprices.com. But don't drive too far out of your way to get to a petrol station for only a tiny discount on fuel prices, as the extra petrol you use getting there will cancel out the saving.

Opt for a station on a route you often travel if possible.

5. Think green to save money

Ask yourself if you really need to drive, especially on short journeys, which are the most inefficient in terms of fuel consumption.

Cars have an insatiable thirst for fuel when cold. A car capable of 40mpg on a motorway run, for example, can plunge to 15mpg or less on a short run in town. Could you walk or cycle instead?

If you have to commute by car, halve your fuel costs by car-sharing with a colleague or consider park-and-ride schemes. If you must drive, plan your route in advance and check it on TV, radio or online for hold-ups.

Small cars stuck in traffic jams use up a litre of petrol every 60 minutes, costing drivers around 1.7p per minute. Larger cars lose petrol at double the rate.

When replacing your car, you'll make major savings in fuel costs if you buy the greenest car in your price range – the one with the best mile-per-gallon performance and lowest CO₂ emissions.

The RAC says that the difference between a fuel efficient and not-so-efficient £10,000 car can be about £12 a week.

The funny side of job statistics

The biggest companies are not recruiting and unemployment is rising, but after taking a look online, comedian Dave Cohen suspects there's more to the figures than meets the eye

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) tell a familiar story – unemployment is at its highest level for 12 years, up by 232,000 for the three months to April. Job vacancies, which peaked a year-and-a-half ago at 700,000, were down to 444,000 in May.

It's grim, grim, grim, wherever you look. But hang on a minute – 444,000 vacancies, 232,000 job losses?

Forgive me for sounding like an idiot (I'm a comedian, that's a CV requirement). I know not every job gets filled straight away, some are seasonal, the rest are given to Peter Mandelson: but why doesn't unemployment fall by 212,000 a month? "It is a net figure," explains David Bradbury of the ONS, with the patience of a man who has been asked this sort of question by ignorant journos before. "So if 520,000 lose their jobs and claim benefit in a month, and 444,000 find work, that's still 76,000 without a job."

It's easy to believe things are, indeed, as bad as they sound. In the latest issue of my local paper, virtually the only non-government job is for "self-employed debt collector". Monday's 144-page Loot offered less than a page of jobs – and it probably hasn't escaped your notice that this section of the Guardian has shrunk at almost exactly the same pace as the economy.

Unemployment is simple to measure accurately – every new benefit claim adds one to the statistics, just as every new job takes one away.

Measuring vacancies, though, is a much vaguer science, based on monthly recruitment policies of 6,000 companies. That sounds like a lot, until you realise there are more than 2m firms in the UK. Bradbury assures me the figures are an accurate reflection – the largest businesses are included, and they are updated every 15 months. Yet doesn't 444,000 vacancies sound like there's still a lot of activity? Jobcentres alone took 5,000 recruits last year, and will employ another 10,000, although I may be missing the point here.

You're probably wondering why the Guardian has entrusted this topic to the world's most averagely-successful stand-up comic. I've been freelance and self-employed since 1983: for years I was a curiosity at parties, the bloke who got up in the afternoon and went to the pub to work. Nowadays, I take whatever's going – a gig here, TV gag-writing there, and journalism, specifically, here. We bits-and-pieces self-employed types are now among the fastest-growing group in the economy. I'm no longer a novelty, I am work's Face of the Future.

At my local Jobcentre there were 300 new jobs advertised on the day I visited. A quick browse revealed some interesting facts: for instance, each of those sweet-faced young students who greets you in the street, whose happiness depends on you purchasing a standing order for Greenpeace, is earning £8 an hour. It almost makes me want to take to the streets to give those poor, unloved kids a rise.

The most popular job advertised was "solar panel expert". On further inspection, the company was Everest. I'm guessing that "solar panel expert" is more exciting than "door-to-door salesman". A spokesman for the company confirmed that this is not some kind of born-again conversion from windows to roofs, and that double-glazing will continue to be their raison d'etre. Still, at least they're recruiting, and recruiting heavily, unlike most firms at the moment.

This is the first recession since the internet boom, which has a number of implications. Like everything to do with the net there are pros and cons. Every vacancy offered to a Jobcentre goes online. And every local Jobcentre website is updated every five minutes. So you don't even need to go in.

It isn't just Jobcentres. Hundreds of recruitment agencies have sprung up on the web, and although business has slowed they're still reporting activity.

Here's one business that's clearly booming: if you want to attract people, set up an online job recruitment service. I could have spent hours, or days, looking up every job. (Internet bad thing: unlimited opportunity for displacement activity.)

Stephen Pink of Ecom Recruitment is gaining many new clients, especially those offering work in online publishing. (Internet good thing: there is definitely a boom in job availability online.) "We're being asked to find people to work online, in digital industries, and there are loads more jobs in mobile phone technology. In the coming years, you'll see phenomenal changes to your phones. A few candidates are ahead of the game and they're finding work. Companies are being very picky, also they're not training so much."

Stephen's message is clear – if you want to make yourself more employable, you should learn more about the internet. (Internet good thing – age is less relevant than online skills. Internet bad thing – computer-illiterate oldies like me will need to work harder to learn those skills.)

So is the ONS really up to speed? Stephen Pink says there's been a huge drop in recruitment from the biggest companies. But thanks to the smaller online businesses, jobs have not completely dried up.

Many of the ONS's sample of 6,000 firms come from the largest companies, some of whom have suffered more than most from the recession.

Brent Jenkins set up his own Vale Web Designs in Milton Keynes just over a year ago, and has four full-time staff and several more on a freelance basis. "The first website design companies have become too big, they're overcharging and not always doing a good job," he said. "I thought I could set up on my own and do the job better, more efficiently, and at a profit. It's impossible to find someone who has done everything on the web.

"You can find some people with certain skills. The internet is always changing. Our firm is about finding new ways of doing things.

"Many smaller businesses are starting up in the same way. And now a lot of the larger firms are dealing with companies like ours," he added – while the baby crying in the background added to the sense that he's working in a different way from what's accepted.

In the 80s, we grew accustomed to twisted statistics which proved that despite the deliberate dismantling of manufacturing and mining, there were actually only three people on the dole, two of whom were workshy scroungers. This recession, have we gone too far the other way?

I'm not an expert. And this is a snapshot, not necessarily an accurate reflection. But I'm building an impression that, while there are private sector jobs, people from older industries are not retraining fast enough to pick them up. The West Midlands has been hit hardest – Birmingham, Sandwell and Wolverhampton are among the top five unemployment blackspots.

Using the internet (again), I did a quick search for job vacancies in Wolverhampton. I checked how many were on offer for the traditional workforces – construction, engineering and motoring. I'd trawled through about 60 before finding anything remotely applicable – a small engineering parts manufacturer, offering £8-9 an hour, three months only.

I called a Black County recruitment agency and asked if they were getting many traditional jobs. "Not really," the man on the phone said. Are most of your CVs from people in those industries? "Afraid so." Were they retraining quick enough for the jobs coming up? "Afraid not." You sound pretty down. "No, that's just my accent."

Clearly this recession is far worse for the carmaker from Wolverhampton than for the web designer in Milton Keynes. Claire McCartney of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (who actually is an expert), thinks there has been a tendency by the media to focus on the negative.

"Obviously work habits can't be changed overnight. But big companies are still looking. Top of everybody's list is "transferable skills". How do you demonstrate that? You need to show flexibility in previous work."

She envisages "an economy made up of more small companies, though it is likely to be healthier than one that relies on larger companies … although, of course, more smaller companies means fewer pension schemes and sick leave, poorer union representation."

Welcome to my world.

Commodities: Is it time to buy copper and nickel again?

Once they were the hot funds. Now Patrick Collinson asks if they're leading a new bull run

The price of oil went below $40 a barrel, but is now around $70. Copper collapsed from $9,000 a tonne to below $3,000; now it is above $5,000. Nickel, zinc and tin are all up 50%-60% since their March lows. Is this the start of another bull run for small investors in commodity funds or time to cash in?

Commodity funds were the hot unit trusts of 2005-07, with small investors enjoying huge gains as China's voracious demand for industrial metals pushed prices to record levels.

The UK's biggest commodity fund, JP Morgan Natural Resources, gave investors a return of 50.1% in 2005; 26% in 2006 and 43% in 2007.

But in 2008 the world's mines turned into a money pit, as everyone from car manufacturers to skyscraper developers pulled the plug on demand. Some investors who bought towards the top of the market saw their investment more than halve in value.

At JP Morgan, fund manager Stuart Connell says much of the recent rebound in prices is down to demand from China which, despite the global slowdown, is still posting economic growth figures of around 6% a year. "We don't think valuations are by any means ridiculous. We are still a long way from the top," he says.

In the short term there could be a "wall of money" looking to commodities as an alternative to minuscule returns on cash, he adds. In the longer term, he reckons commodities are supported by the industrial revolution in China and Asia's young and increasingly urban population and act as a hedge against the possibility of a rise in inflation in the west.

But the scale of the rally in commodities has left some analysts puzzled. For example, worldwide copper demand is down. The world's oil inventories, which normally acts as a brake on price rises, are near record highs. The car industry remains stagnant. So why have prices started rising again?

What's emerging is that the Chinese State Reserves Bureau has been stockpiling copper and other metals, regarding this as a better way of investing its $2tn reserves than sinking them into risky US treasuries.

This is music to the ears of commodity fund managers. Shares in the world's giant mining companies have soared this year. Oil companies such as Brazil's Petrobras have doubled in value, while BP and Shell are around 20% above their March lows.

All of the reasons why investors first became so excited about commodities are still there, Connell reckons. And because the credit crunch has starved many projects of capital, the supply issues have, if anything, got worse.

Critics won't see it that way. There is still virtually no volume revival in industrial demand in Germany, Japan or the US, which together still make a lot more stuff than China.

Back in March, when commodity prices were at a low, Rob Pemberton, of financial advisers HFM Columbus in Tunbridge Wells, told investors to pile back in. But today he believes prices could plateau or even fall.

"Commodities have done too much, too soon. These things have a tendency to overshoot. The fundamentals don't really back up the magnitude of the move. It's not as if Chinese industry has sprung back into action. This has been a Chinese-led inventory build, but they weren't buying because of demand, but because metals were so damned cheap."

Try playing the game – it's a (natural) gas

Is natural gas about to explode, or will it just burn your money?

Speculators are moving out of the commodities that have performed well in recent months and into the ones that have not, writes Patrick Collinson. And the one the speculators like most is natural gas.

This sort of punting used to be the preserve of big-money investors, but small investors can now play the same game. You buy an "exchange-traded fund" (ETF), which replicates the price rise and fall of a particular commodity. ETF Securities is the leading player in this market. The minimum investment can be just a few pounds, while the annual management fee tends to be between 0.4% and 1%. You can even put them in your personal pension plan or self-invested personal pension (Sipp).

But there is no denying this is a risky strategy. The underlying ETF is backed by a "counter-party", which can be a bank or other financial institution, and we have all seen how shaky they can be.

Nicholas Brookes, head of research and investment strategy at ETF Securities, closely monitors securities. Last year, many were shorting oil, making money as it tumbled from a peak of above $150 a barrel. "From last October we started seeing inflows into metals. The big move, which has been going on since May, has been into natural gas."

He says the "rig count" in the natural gas market – an indicator of production – supports a possible price rise, but warns inventories are high and demand weak.

Capital letters: End of an era

Consumer champion Tony Levene is calling it a day. Here he looks back at some of the battles he has fought and won over the past decade

Read Tony's top tips on how to complain

1 My biggest victories

This week sees my last Capital Letters column. After nearly a decade of helping Guardian readers get justice – and warning them about frauds, scams and dodgy deals – it's time to close my mailbox. Over the years I've read some 40,000 letters and emails, and published more than 2,000.

I've won back well in excess of £1m for readers. My biggest victory in financial terms involved a £350,000 "stolen" house, of which more later. But the numbers game is not the real point. Someone who is fighting over £50 can feel just as much hurt and injustice as another disputing £5,000.

And there are the victories in which I had only a ghostly walk-on part. Countless readers have told me how putting "cc Tony Levene, Capital Letters, the Guardian" on a complaint suddenly opened hitherto slammed doors.

But perhaps more important than numbers is the effect I've had on financial and consumer affairs. Bizarrely, my first column in 2001 and the one published a fortnight ago both dealt with Nationwide's failure to properly transfer a cash Isa. However, much else has changed ... and for the better.

Here are some of the areas where I believe I've made a real difference. All originated because you, the readers, had written to me.

Property I continually warned against get-rich-quick property seminars and the false hopes of big bucks from "landbanking" firms. I sat through several so-called "workshops" from property firms Inside Track and Instant Access, where the only "work" was to sell the expensive dream of becoming a "property millionaire". My "reward" was a stream of legal threats and phone calls from former directors that cannot be repeated in a family newspaper. Inside Track and Instant Access went bust last year.

Payment protection insurance It took three articles before I convinced Barclays it was wrong to have sold this expensive cover to a woman who could never claim because she was self-employed. I fought and won many similar cases. It's been a long struggle which is not yet over but, as a result, regulatory authorities have severely limited the banks' scope to rip off borrowers via PPI plans.

House recovery In 2005 I featured a Brighton man whose £350,000 house was literally stolen while he was working in the Far East. A crooked tenant convinced lender GMAC he was the real owner, "remortgaged" the property for £207,000, and fled abroad with the cash. Besides persuading GMAC to return the house (which it had grabbed due to mortgage arrears) to the rightful owner, I exposed weaknesses both at the Land Registry, and in identity theft protection, that have ensured no one else's house has been stolen since.

The imprisoned student When a theology student tried to withdraw £200 from a Barclays branch with a card whose security chip malfunctioned, the teller hit the panic button instead of double-checking the card. The police arrived in force, locking up the student for seven hours. The bank paid him £4,000 in compensation for his ordeal after I rejected its previous offer. Bank staff were issued with new instructions on panic-button use.

There have been many others: the 18-year-old single mother on benefits lent £5,000 by NatWest for a nose job must have taught the bank something; the exposure of dodgy solar-panel companies has hopefully helped prevent green rip-offs; and the countless timeshare and vacation club problems should have convinced consumers this rarely works.

2 The worst scams I've warned against

Where do I start? There are so many. But unlike most rival reader problem pages, I always stressed scam warnings.

I believe it's far better not to lose money in the first place than to try to recover it later – and the sad fact is, most of the money lost to fraudsters is never recovered.

I've written about so many boiler rooms that I could, if I was criminally minded, set up my own. It's a simple, time-tested formula that works. All you have to do is to set up a call centre – Spain, Thailand, Hungary, Curacao, it doesn't matter – give the company a vaguely respectable-sounding name, staff it full of chancers, and sell shares in a company that sounds as though it has a miracle product but really is nothing other than hot air.

I've also written about "recovery rooms" – boiler rooms which offer to buy the phoney shares you can't sell if you send a fee. They take your cash, but do nothing.

Phoney lotteries, ranging from small-scale £10 a time efforts to El Gordo (its international crime clone and not the real Spanish draw) have been high on my hit list.

Why does anyone believe in them when they have grown out of the tooth-fairy? I'll leave that to the psychologists!

I could fill a book with other scams. In fact, I did. It's a paperback called How to Avoid Scams.

3 The most heart-rending letters

I've found a big disconnect between what financial firms preach in mission statements about disability and what they practise – particularly when it comes to mental health problems.

I've often highlighted how the banks treat victims of bipolar disorder (previously known as manic depression). This can cause sufferers to go on irrational spending sprees, which they can't afford, on their credit cards.

I've pointed out to banks they need help rather than harassment. And when you do this at a high level, it usually works – at least that time.

I even had to tell one bank to lay off chasing someone for debt who was detained in a hospital under the Mental Health Act. The bank ignored the man's family and his doctors. It was only when I said the bank would have its case thrown out if it tried to take someone with severe problems to court that it backed off.

The deaf often get an unsympathetic reception from call centres, who sometimes refuse to talk to a family member with good hearing, quoting "data protection act procedures".

While data protection is important, I've found it is all too often an excuse for appallingly insensitive service.

It can never be a happy moment when a mother calls me to denounce her daughter as a fraud.

But perhaps the saddest of all was the Yorkshireman who fell for a Nigerian letter scam. He thought he would get millions of dollars. Instead, he handed over all his savings to the fraudsters, followed by the remortgage proceeds of his house – some £220,000.

And when I told him to stop and save what little he had left, he abused me for "interfering" in his private business.

4 The most common complaints

I've been overwhelmed with problems involving utility companies. You've told me tales of such jaw-dropping incompetence by phone, gas and electricity companies that I wonder how anyone can trust anything from them.

How do gas companies manage to send bills to people without a supply – and then threaten them with court action for non-payment? And why can't phone companies manage a basic connection three months after taking money from the customer when all the wires are present in the home?

As for getting bills right, forget it. How do power companies send people living in one-room flats bills for thousands? What surprises me is that so few complain.

The likes of British Gas, npower, British Telecom and TalkTalk have taken up a more than a fair slice of my inbox.

Mobile phone companies seem to be a law unto themselves. Some even force me – and you – to phone premium 0870 lines just to complain.

And what has amazed me is the total apathy and complete unpreparedness of so many managers in these firms.

When TalkTalk offered "free broadband" a few years ago it was overwhelmed by the response, and its customer service systems went into meltdown. But if I'd have come up with a highly publicised new service that was bound to attract millions, I would have ensured I had the infrastructure to back it up. So why do the hugely paid managers and directors of these firms fail to?

Railway ticketing is another mess. Those who send in complaints about these firms usually only do so after beating their heads several times against the call centre brick wall.

I can only deal with a tiny percentage of these justified complaints. It's to the shame of these companies that I've had so many.

5 The silliest complaints

Most Capital Letters complaints are justified. In general, I've found people only write when they have exhausted every legitimate avenue.

But can it be right to complain over the difference between a first- and a second-class stamp? That was one I did not take up.

One reader wanted me to get him compensation for a bad meal he ate on an internal flight in Mexico.

And I was feeling very sorry for one student victim of bank charges – until, at the end of his letter, he revealed he had deliberately ignored five warning letters from Barclays.

6 The biggest legal rip-offs

The ultimate accolade must go to endowment mortgages, followed by precipice bonds and payment protection insurance (PPI).

All these came with the blessing of the Financial Services Authority, which oversaw the products, the way they were sold and the small print.

While I can't take the credit for the original endowment mortgage mis-selling story – that honour belongs to my colleague Patrick Collinson – I worked hard to help readers who had been turned down for compensation, often for iffy or made-up reasons.

It's no wonder. The mis-selling episode added up to billions of pounds.

I forced many companies to back down and compensate, though, sadly, I could do nothing about some gaping loopholes in the compensation scheme.

The first was that anyone who bought before 1988 was not covered, unless they could show they bought from a company still in business. And very few advisers were.

Even some banks and building societies denied they sold the plans – even though their literature pushed high-commission endowments as the only way forward. A second group denied justice are those that bought until the mid-1990s from solicitors and accountants who, for some unfathomable reason, remained outside the regulatory framework set up in 1988.

I led the way in warning about precipice bonds – supposedly high-income products whose small print revealed investors could lose some, or all, of their money if stockmarkets fell even a few points over five to six years – early on. But the lure of commission meant firms kept selling them.

It was with no joy that I saw Lloyds TSB fined £2m with £98m compensation for mis-selling the bonds, or IFA firms such as David Aaron go bust.

And I was among the first to challenge the banks on PPI. I pointed out – and it often took several articles and many weeks' work – to banks such as Barclays and NatWest that it was wrong to sell the overpriced cover.

In particular, it was wrong to sell it to pensioners and the self-employed who could never claim. They are still selling PPI, but under far stricter conditions, thanks to this campaign.

7 Who's good...

I've never featured a letter of praise from readers. But some have sent in examples of good practice – often as a reaction to a complaint.

The list is depressingly short. There's old favourites such as John Lewis/Waitrose, while Asda has a fan base. The only bank that consistently attracts praise is First Direct, though HSBC has a low complaint score and Barclays has improved substantially.

Japanese car makers score best.

Now that I've praised these firms, I'm sure my successor at Capital Letters will get scores of complaints about them.

I'm off to … well, I don't know exactly. But I've joined the twitterati – you can follow me on twitter.com/tonylevene1

And, although I'm leaving, Capital Letters will continue to fight for you.

In the coming weeks it will be in the capable hands of senior trading standards officer Steve Playle. So keep the letters flooding in.

Once again, thank you, dear readers. Without you, there would be no Capital Letters.

Tony Levene may be leaving, but Capital Letters isn't going anywhere and will continue to fight your corner. In the coming weeks it will be in the hands of experienced trading standards officer Steve Playle. Write to him at: Capital Letters, Money, The Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email capital.letters@guardian.co.uk. Please include a daytime phone number.

Festival offers free tickets with a rain mac

Live music events are not immune to the credit crunch, says Rupert Jones

Buy a £9.99 rain mac and get two rock festival tickets worth £250 chucked in for free. That was the amazing offer, launched a few days ago, to presumably boost attendance at the Hop Farm Festival, a two-day event headlined by Paul Weller and the Fratellis in Paddock Wood, Kent, today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Britney Spears's spectacular live shows at London's 02 Arena last month were among the most hyped concerts of the year, but even she doesn't seem to be immune from the credit crunch. It has emerged that while many fans paid large sums to attend, others were being offered the chance to buy tickets from official agencies for just a few pounds.

It all goes to show that while live music is supposed to be flourishing – this year's Glastonbury sold out well in advance, Take That have been packing them in at Wembley Stadium this week, and even new acts that have yet to release much material can sell out biggish venues – these are still challenging times.

The Hop Farm Festival promotion is a real eye-opener. The event also features Editors, Doves, Echo and the Bunnymen and Florence and the Machine, and day tickets cost £65, with weekend tickets that include camping priced at £125. Yet last month, organisers teamed up with online fashion retailer MandMDirect.com on a promotion where people buying a £9.99 "designer splashmac" received weekend tickets "entitling two people to attend".

Needless to say, the promotion proved a big hit. It is unclear whether the number of free tickets runs into the hundreds or thousands. According to the Kentnews.co.uk website, 8,000 tickets were given away. Live music mogul Vince Power, the man behind the Hop Farm Festival, told Guardian Money that more than 1,000 people were likely to be attending as a result of the special offer.

He defended the promotion (which is now over), pointing out it has raised thousands for Teenage Cancer Trust, a charity dedicated to helping young people fight cancer. All proceeds from the sale of each mac go to the charity. He described it as a "win-win" where a good cause benefits and "I get more people on the site". Power said standard ticket sales "are not as good as I expected them to be". He had hoped to get 20,000 people, but reckons it will be more like 15,000.

Meanwhile, it appears Britney Spears may have been over-ambitious in opting to play eight gigs at the 20,000-capacity 02 Arena last month. Ticketmaster ran a promotion, on behalf of promoter AEG, where it was selling tickets for a fraction of what many fans paid. Money has seen customer emails showing people could buy a pair of "lower tier" tickets for £12.

Another music festival has (temporarily) bitten the dust due to poor ticket sales. Monarchy Live was due to take place today at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, and boasted a bill topped by Happy Mondays, Supergrass and Reverend and the Makers. But the promoters, SMR Entertainment, said it was being postponed because the event had "not sold sufficient tickets to make the festival viable on this date".