Please Be Our Sugar Daddy, Alan

When we heard Lord Sugar was looking for projects to give funding to, we just knew he'd want to support the Prole Star. So we applied...

Our application has been submitted to Amsvest, the investment arm of his business activities. We'll let you know how it goes.

Our bid

"We are looking for investment to help fund a people's media project. In a time when much of the corporate controlled media fails to represent the ordinary man or woman on the street, we aim to become a strong voice for working class people.

With the help of social media, we wish to act as a challenge to the mainstream political narrative. We already have a reasonable following, but we have ambition to grow into something much more influential. Since we launched our website we have had a number of MPs and prominent journalists sharing our content and we have also been mentioned in the mainstream media.

The Prole Star is a people's media project. And our small team of volunteers have worked hard for two years to help make it a reality. Why should the upper and middle classes dominate the media, while the working class are left without a voice? This must change. The Prole Star hopes to be a voice for everyone.

Your investment would help us form a cooperative company owned and democratically managed by its all inclusive membership. It will also help us build a new, more advanced website, which will help us make this inclusive democracy a reality.

If you are unhappy with the current situation in this country, where millions rely on food banks and 1 in 200 people live without a home, then please invest in our cause. Independent media websites shared through social media are becoming more and more influential. The Prole Star aims to be a challenge to the toxic narrative and the institutional racism within sections of the mainstream media.

We hope that our coverage of sport, celebrity and even gaming will help us gain readers from a broad audience. This will help us spread our message of unity, challenging the message of those that seek to divide us.

We aim to fund our project through our gift shop and by having a membership scheme, which will give our members access to the membership area of our website and will also allow them to participate in elections and major decision making. We will also have a policy of unilateral wage equality written into our constitution. We aim to pay everyone the same from our writers to our cleaners.

We at The Prole Star are passionate about the creation of a fairer more just society. But part of this battle lies within the media. We must change the media for the better, so it serves the people and doesn't just promote and protect the interests of a tiny, self-serving elite.

We believe the most realistic way of changing this country for the better is by securing a Labour government and that is what we actively campaign for. A 10 pound minimum wage will lift so many out of poverty and degradation and dramatically reduce social inequality. It will also give the working classes more buying power, as the current economic recovery is based on household debt, as people borrow to maintain their living standards.

We at The Prole Star are staunch opponents of fiscal austerity. When austerity first began, Richard Branson supported it and called for public spending to be reduced immediately. The aim was that by reducing public spending this would eliminate the deficit, create a surplus, and this over time would reduce the national debt.

The debt has now more than doubled since the Conservative government came to power and it now sits at over 1.8 trillion pounds. Austerity is a total failure by its own objective.

If a household was in debt our basic impulse would be to rein in spending. But what is sensible at the level of a household is often disastrous on a macroeconomic level. The Nation as a whole is not the same as a household, in so many ways. Despite the narrative of the right wing media which has actively promoted austerity as an economic necessity. Reining in public spending when an economy is in recession always makes the problem it is meant to solve worse.

If the market is unable to stimulate a recovery it is the responsibility of the state to create demand. And you do this by running a large deficit in order to create employment. And also by taking out loans and using them to finance vast public works. Which might include building roads or investment in other infrastructure. This wouldn't just create employment, but would it would leave a useful legacy for private enterprise. The state should act as the primary consumer creating demand until more widespread sources of demand return.

One obvious objection to this is who should pay for the loans? By creating more debt would the problem not be simply postponed to another day rather than solved? The Labour Party have already stated they are going to borrow to invest. For this reason they are often attacked by the right for having a magic money tree and for trying to run the country on a plastic card. However this makes no economic sense. Labour have already committed not to borrow for day-to-day spending, but only for investment.

By creating employment by public works the government would save some of the money they would have spent on benefits such as universal credit. Secondly, the increased number of people in employment would create purchasing power, therefore it would be a boost to the economy and and the government would collect more in tax revenue. Businesses would be effected as contracts to service public works programs become available. The final result would be an increase in tax from businesses and individuals. In succession these tax receipts would then pay off the debt created by the initial expenditure of public works.

But rather than stimulating the economy, austerity has depressed it. We have had the slowest economic recovery in history and that is partly why the national debt has increased so much. Even the IMF has now stated that austerity has done more harm than good and is advising countries they can boost growth by higher spending on infrastructure projects.

Other sensible policies we support are the nationalisation of the railways and by investing in free and independent media you could help us campaign for this. Privatised railways have had around £5 billion on average in government support in the last 5 years. In the last 5 years of the 1980s - before privatisation - it was an average of £1.6 billion in today’s money. Privatisation has failed the public. It isn't just that it isn't cost effective in regards to the taxpayer. Since privatisation standard single fares have increased by up to 208% The madness is foreign state owned companies have franchises on our railways and use their profits to subsidise cheap rail fares in their own countries.

We also strongly oppose the marketisation of the NHS, which is happening by stealth. A Labour government will bring It back into public ownership. It is immoral to profit from sick people. Not only that, there is no free market health system in the world that actually works. They are a market failure. Any move towards a US style healthcare system should be strongly opposed. We have enough problems in our country without the poor dying because they are rationing their insulin, all for the benefit of multinational corporations.

If you want to see a country that works in the interest of the many and not the few then a Labour government is what we need and independent media has a role to play in making that happen. If you want an end to austerity so businesses can once again prosper, then this would be a wise investment for you to make. Independent media will have a much greater role in setting the narrative in the future as mainstream media is on the decline.

No matter how wealthy you are we all have to walk through our towns and city centres to see human beings littered like rubbish in shop doorways. Homelessness is up 169% as a direct result of government policy. The last Labour government reduced homelessness by 75%. Independent media has an important role in helping to get The Labour Party back into power.

You aren't just investing in the creation of a democratic organisation owned by its members that gives working class people a voice. You're investing in our people's future. I think that's a really important investment to make"

In case anyone hadn't realised, this was not a serious application, it was satirically intended to illustrate the hypocrisy of his claims to want to give a helping hand to those trying to improve their lot. If by some miraculous turn of events Al did offer to give the Prole Star some money, we wouldn't accept it.

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