THE PICKLE PROJECT

After reflecting on "The Pickle We're In", or The Big Society Pickle, and the particular pickle in which New Localism and Eric Pickles find themselves, I discovered this rather wonderful blog called "The Pickle Project": http://pickleproject.blogspot.com Pass the Pickles Please !

SOME ADVICE FOR GETTING OUT OF A PICKLE

I have some sympathy for the Prime Minister's former Enterprise Adviser, Lord Young (now 78). The business banking adviser in my local branch of one of the UK major financial institutions expressed similar sentiments to those of the good Lord, to the effect that most people have never had it so good and what's all the fuss about. Indeed, I'm sure that many people, by reason of some insulation from the wider world - wealth, stupidity, some combination of the two, university vice-chancellors, people who run "difficult conversation" workshops for the Cabinet Office etc, etc - feel the same. The question is do we want such people running, or helping to run, the country or advising businesses on their banking. No, but they will continue to do so.

This is precisely why it is important that politicians, business people and bureaucrats are constantly reality-checked, and every citizen should regard this function as a basic duty. So last week I wrote, for the second time, to Bob Neill, the Minister for Local Government and Planning: please see http://janetmackinnon.wordpress.com/

My letter was prompted by a legal judgement against the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, to the effect that his over-hasty abolition of Regional Spatial Strategies (RSS) earlier in the year was unlawful. I anticipated this judgement, although - and I'm sure that Mr Pickles would agree with me - the law can be just as much of an ass as anyone else. In fact, Mr Bob Neill may well be right when he describes this judgment against the Secretary of State as a Pyrrhic Victory for house-builders. My legal verdict, which may be as good as that of anyone else, is that whilst the Pickles was "ultra vires" in his abolition of the RSS, the development targets set during the previous administration's revision of these are a matter of government policy, which has now been superseded.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUDENCE

Whilst trying to calculate the expenditure by UK Universities on property development and construction projects under the previous government, I came across an interesting paper by the Oxford Professor Avner Offer subtitled "The Political Economy of Prudence 1870-2000". Although the paper didn't deal with the period in which I am most interested, its exploration of the "political competition" between private and public control of services such as housing, health, transport and other infrastructure is instructive, and an addendum for 2000 to the present day would be very welcome. The original paper was published by Nuffield College Oxford in 2002.

In the meantime, the real political economy of prudence, or perhaps the political economy of real prudence, is definitely something worth valuable consideration. This isn't intended as an Irish joke, although, for my money, the mare called Prudence may have already bolted.

UNIVERSITY TUITION FEES - MY POSITION

Over the weekend I was greeted by a dog bearing a remarkable resemblance to Kanellos, "The Famous Greek Riot Dog", in the car park of a rural village hall. However, the owner assured me that his hound is a law-abiding British citizen...and so am I. Therefore, I want to clarify my position on university tuition fees.

First of all, the bad guys (and girls) in this case are fat cat British Vice Chancellors and other expensive university suits who have been responsible, along with the previous New Labour Government, for the unsustainable expansion of the further education sector. To put it bluntly, many universities have unaffordable overheads and these have contributed more than anything to the proposed rise in tuition fees.

I do not, however, agree with the proposed rise. Instead, I would suggest that universities need to substantially reduce their overheads through a programme of asset - primarily land and building - disposal and improved management. Cutting administrative costs is also necessary, as well as a re-focusing on their "core business" of education and research. Spin-off enterprises should be precisely that.

Students, and prospective ones, should also bear in mind that the pension entitlements of some of the very staff who accompanied them on their march last week are also a contributory factor in the cash crisis faced by many universities. Extending the retirement age for those in a profession well suited to the older worker would therefore seem a good idea.

I make the above comments as someone who enjoyed a university degree funded by the state - but which didn't create a career path - and who subsequently self-funded a part-time masters degree, whilst working full-time. This led to better paid positions and professional training paid for by employers. I was by then thirty years old and had experienced two major economic recessions.

FURTHER EDUCATION - NOT FOREVER 21

Forever 21, yet another "young" high street store opened in Birmingham's Bull Ring yesterday. The city boasts the youngest population in Europe in a region which still claims chronic labour shortages. Nevertheless, the young shoppers, who looked very much like the student marchers of earlier in the week, formed an orderly procession as they waited for their next consumer fix. It was clearly this kind of behaviour that police had anticipated in London.

There was, however, more than one difference between yesterday's queues and the storming of Conservative Party HQ: participants in the London disorder were predominantly white, and - notwithstanding any subsequent claims by the Whitechapel Anarchist Group - likely to be mostly middle class. One can interpret this as either a cascading down of upper class/public school yobbishness, a sort of Bullingdon Club rampage for the masses, or an ascent upwards of the kind of behaviour expected of so-called lower class Chavs.

My perception of the group of people likely to have participated in last Tuesday's disorder, as distinct from those who may have instigated it, is that they came from "Middle England", either earlier in the morning or at the beginning of the university term, with no thought of conducting themselves in the manner that transpired. Indeed their lack of ability to think for themselves made them vulnerable to the kind of pack mentality which subsequently erupted.

This doesn't say much for our post-16 education system, or perhaps it does. For far from encouraging what the Coalition Education Secretary, the Conservative Michael Gove, has called "deep thinking", the British system seems to encourage precisely the opposite. For in reality it is the unsustainable growth of the this system - and of universities in particular - and its especially unaffordable building programmes, which has led to the escalation in costs now reflected in the rising price of further education.

In short, Britain has too many young people in full-time education, particularly at university, and too many foreign students. The main beneficiary of this situation appears to be the retail sector, the ever burgeoning number of high street and online outlets serving the youth market, together with associated media services which market and promote "fast fashion" and cheap consumer goods, including BBC WM who advertised the opening of Birmingham's "Forever 21" yesterday.

So Wise Up Young People, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Retail Chains !

KANELLOS & THE STORMING OF 30 MILLBANK

The spirit of Kanellos, the famous "Greek Riot Dog", appeared to have joined yesterday's protests by student and university lecturers against proposals to raise tuition fees.

I'm rather surprised that this wasn't anticipated by classical scholar - albeit more of Rome than Greece - Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London

As a consequence, a truly British farce ensued with the occupation of Conservative Party HQ by protesters, whilst "Military Intelligence" officials in a nearby building locked themselves in.

One can only suppose that "The Dogfather" of London and his advisers presumed that the consumer values of most young Brits cannot produce "good old fashioned" anarchy.

THE CHINA SYNDROME

This week's visit to China by the UK Prime Minister and leading members of the Coalition Government has inevitably raised the issue of human rights, and how these should be handled.

However, the issue is much more entangled than some in Britain might wish, for contemporary China is as much a creation of western consumption patterns, including our insatiable appetites for cheap consumer goods, as it is of communist state capitalism.

Moreover, the West's own record on human rights issues, following the US-UK led intervention in Iraq in 2003, is also currently open to question.

The Chinese interpretation of "human rights" is certainly one that would not be widely countenanced in Western democracies. Nevertheless, for the billions of very poor people in the world, China's development model may be preferred to, say, that of India.

Human population management, something which India has largely rejected in recent years, has certainly played a key role in lifting millions of people out of poverty in China.

Yet the present vulnerability of China to those very Western market forces which have enabled its apparent economic miracle in the past 20 years suggest that this achievement remains precarious and perhaps unsustainable.

There is also the more important underlying question of environmental sustainability in the context of Chinese "growth", and whether this may yet trigger a crisis of Gaian magnitude.

What is certainly needed in this context is freedom of expression, but any criticism of China should bear in mind that there are some subjects in Britain and the West which are still very much politically "off-limits", including resource consumption and population management.

ROCKET SCIENCE & THE GOLD STANDARD

The World Bank suggestion that a return to "The Gold Standard" should be considered comes at a time when rocket science is undergoing a renaissance: that is real rocket science rather than the kind deployed in recent years by banks, and largely responsible for the global financial crisis. We should also remind ourselves that much of Britain's reserves of gold were sold by "No more boom and bust" Brown when Chancellor of the Exchequer on the advice of his own personal rocket scientist, Ed Balls, when in fact both men were ill-equipped to run the proverbial "p.ss up in a brewery".

BBC: IT'S ALL COMING OUT IN THE WASH !

I was actually grateful for the British National Union of Journalists strike (about pensions) this morning, which meant that the BBC Radio 4's prime time "Today" was replaced by an interesting nature programme about "The Wash", a large estuary in the East of England. This comes on a day when former Countryfile presenter Miriam O'Reilly takes the Corporation "to court" for unfair dismissal on the grounds that she had too many wrinkles for high-definition television. Countryfile had a "face lift" a couple of years ago, and number of older presenters had to leave when the programme moved to a prime time slot. When are women in their prime I wonder.

RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY IN UNITED STATES

The Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington over the weekend is a reminder of the Roman festival of Saturnalia*. Aimed at overheated political debate and laziness in the media, according to today's Guardian newspaper, we could very much do with a rally over here.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia

REPORTING OF PROPERTY & HOUSING ISSUES

Whilst my previous post noted that media reporting of economic and labour issues had been in decline since the 1980s, the subjects of property and housing, and particularly the latter, have attracted more and more media attention, sometimes, it seems, to the exclusion of all other news. The present furore over the Government's proposed changes to housing benefit, following an earlier announcement to cut funding to housing associations and expressed desire to phase out social housing illustrate this very well.

In stating my provisional support for social housing, I also want to share my experience of some its problems through recounting a short history of the flat next door to my former London home.
Soon after purchasing this property, the owner "inherited" the tenancy to a nearby council flat into which he then moved, leasing his own flat to the local authority. A range of housing benefit claimants were placed in this property, one of whom, an Irish lady, also had access to another nearby council flat, and so sublet the one bedroom flat next to me to a large family from Nigeria. At various points, I drew the attention of the local authority to what was clearly housing benefit fraud, and they usually acted on the matter. Incidentally, I owned the property in which I lived, although it was suggested to me on more than one occasion that I was a council tenant, possibly because other owners in the block had entered into arrangements similar to my neighbour.

So we come back to another subject which has received much attention in recent years: regulation. It is the regulation - from policy to enforcement - of property and housing which really needs to be tackled by politicians and in the media, so that "issues of the moment", no matter how important, can be objectively considered in a wider context, and people like the Mayor of London do not have to resort to using highly intemperate language.

However, London does indeed have a particular set of housing issues, some of which have been adequately covered elsewhere, so I don't proposed to dwell upon them here. One issue which has not been fully covered in the media relates to my previous post on "labour issues": low wages. London is producing a great many low paid private sector jobs, many of which are directly in highly paid-sectors such as banking, or in services linked to these. Instead, therefore, of paying some of their employees increasingly high amounts, might I suggest that City institutions provide housing for their less well-paid but nevertheless essential workers.

With regard to the very high levels of housing benefit paid to residents in some areas of London, I would also suggest that this is as much a problem of the type of buy-to-let market which has developed in London, as of individual recipients of state support. To put it bluntly, the beneficiaries of large housing benefit payouts are as much, if not more so, the owners of the properties themselves: something the media, once again, has not properly acknowledged.

REPORTING OF ECONOMIC AND LABOUR ISSUES

Having given vent to "My Inner Yahoo" - a creature of Swiftian satire rather than the new media kind - in my previous post, readers should be warned that I shall be writing in a highly serious vein today. Nevertheless, my critique of Britain's ruling classes - the media, bankers, bureaucrats and politicians et al - will continue.

Last weekend brought media coverage of two symbolically important events, the near demise of "The Work Foundation", due to pensions obligations, and the discovery of Roma children working in the spring onion fields of Worcestershire during a spell of particularly cold autumn weather. The Work Foundation has, as it happens, been rescued by the University of Lancaster, and the young Romanians by the Gangmaster's Licensing Association in conjunction with West Mercia Police.

However, the wider economic and labour context which has thrown these two disparate events into relief has not, and almost certainly will not, receive the receive the media coverage that it merits. The reasons for this are complex: journalism which tackles economic and labour issues in a comprehensive way has been in retreat since the 1980s; people's lifestyles rather than their employment tend to be the focus of media attention; most people are no longer part of an organised labour movement.

Yet there are very good reasons why a more traditional approach to the reporting of economic and labour issues is called for at the present time. For Britain, and England in particular, is not only recovering from a financial crisis induced recession, but also from a period of government under New Labour when is was extremely difficult in matters of the economy, and political economy more specifically, to distinguish facts from fictions, and truth from ideological distortions. Moreover, the British media for much of the decade between 1997-2007 colluded in this process.

Unfortunately, there are strong indications that some within the present Government regard themselves as the "Heir to Blair", and the media management school of political economy as practiced by New Labour but with a somewhat different ideological emphasis, has already sprung back into action. Whether the Secretary of State for Business, Skills and Innovation, and others of a more objective outlook within the Coalition, can steer the nation onto a more broadly-based path to economic regeneration, as distinct from from another financially engineered spurt of growth, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, the media - and indeed the Coalition Government - should pay close attention to "labour issues". Perhaps an analogy with New Labour's attention to matters of property, normally the focus of Conservative policy, is appropriate here, if David Cameron really wants to claim the "Heir to Blair" legacy.

DROP THE DEAD DONKEY

Checking out two news stories on the Telegraph website yesterday, both on the subject of "drops" - the ongoing drop in house prices and a "surprise drop" in consumer spending - I soon found the "Comments" more interesting than the main articles; and particularly this advice from "Jacqui" quoting "Descartes, Discourses on Method": "Accept nothing as true, unless clearly recognised as such." My sentiments exactly !

The "Discourses" revealed that most people weren't at all surprised by the drop in consumer spending, and nor apparently were "the markets" whom the Financial Times report, quoting one lunching - albeit at his desk these days - stockbroker "only respond to surprises". What does "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street" make of these imprudent hussies of today's markets I wonder, when they can't even register a drop in the sales of lingerie ?

Nevertheless, the price of lingerie has undoubtedly come down in recent years, almost certainly an achievement for "The Spender of Last Resort": to quote another commentator called, I think, "Princesschipchops" (surely the pseudonym of a female impersonator !). My guess is that house prices will follow a similar downwards trend, a bit like those pants that barely covers the buttocks, and which the young seem to favour and the middle aged and over to revile.

If some readers wish to deduce from the above account that I think the bottom may yet fall out of the housing market, please feel free to do so. My own guess is that there are some within the present Government who would like to see a further downward adjustment in property prices, and others who would not: a political reflection for once of the position of wider society. In the meantime, "The Old Lady" should surpise the bankers by witholding money from their hussies.

THE PROBLEMS OF KING & PARLIAMENT

The Governor of the Bank of England's sobering advice of yesterday was blatantly ignored in the unruly behaviour of the UK Parliament today, whose benches sounded as if they had been taken over by a multitude of Swiftian Yahoos when Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson endeavoured to respond to the speech of George Osborne.

My present feeling is that neither the mild-mannered King nor the unruly Parliament are up to the tasks required of them.

The New Spirit Level of the Real Global Economy

The following article appeared in last Sunday's Telegraph newspaper: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/8057069/Jobless-America-threatens-to-bring-us-all-down-with-it.html

Comments are still coming in - some not very politically correct - and along with the original text make for interesting reading. One respondent wonders where all the money is coming from to prop up the United States economy.

The answer of course lies in the labours of overseas workers, and their financial fruits to foreign governments: notably China, increasingly banker to the US.

This is now "The International State We're In", as indicated in my reprinted post of yesterday.

So if political folks over here are getting excited about a new book called "The Spirit Level" - profiled on BBC Radio 4's Analysis yesterday - might I suggest that they also think about the wider international implications of this book's message concerning the benefits of increasing socio-economic equality.

For I would suggest that "The New Spirit Level of the Real Global Economy" is going to be very challenging indeed for many people in the economies of "The Old West", and that their governments, including our own, need to "get real" in responding to this situation sooner rather than later.

THE ECONOMICS OF FAIRY DUST REVISITED

The Coalition Government's policy of continued "quantitative easing" reminds me of a post of six month's ago from my alter ego "The Witch of Worcester": @ http://www.witchofworcester.wordpress.com/

"Writing in The Observer last Sunday (11 April 2010), the former newspaper editor Will Hutton bemoaned the lack of any real content in the current British General Election campaign, and the fact that the euphemistically named government policy of "quantitative easing" - ie pumping £billions of public money to prop up the banking sector - was reinforcing structural problems in the UK economy: namely, the dependence of this on the financial and property sectors.

Commentators on the article - including this one - seemed to have found much to agree with. However, I have to take issue with Hutton's assertion that the British have all been living on fairy dust - ie asset price inflation largely constructed on increasingly sophisticated financial systems, which also provided unprecedented levels of consumer credit - for the past 20 years. For there is another dimension to "The State We're In" - also the title of a book by Hutton published around the time of New Labour's election in 1997. The other side of the story is, of course, the hard labour of people in low wage countries, notably - but not exclusively - China which has produced the cheap, but nevertheless high quality, consumer goods of which we in countries like Britain and the United States are so enamoured. I therefore find it strange that Mr Hutton, now identified with the UK-based Work Foundation, should have apparently overlooked the labours of these multitude of overseas workers in his article, given that their production has underpinned, more substantially than the speculators as it turns out, the long boom from early 1990s to the late noughties.

During this time, Britain has been living not so much on fairy dust - attractive although this analogy may be to one concerned with non-material realties - but on the hard labour, and to a significant extent the savings, of people living in less-developed countries. However, I would argue that this process has not delivered the advantages at home or abroad that are frequently advanced. We are all now aware that the kind of growth which the consumer revolution has brought to China poses not only grave environmental problems for the rest of the world, but has also suppressed, and in some cases destroyed, the development of industries in other countries, including our own. Moreover, there are an increasing number of people within China who would like to see their country take a different development path, which is less reliant upon Western consumers, and the economics of fairy dust."

VICTORY FOR MILIBAND VS THE MEDIA

Congratulations to Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson for foiling the British media's attempt to foist one or other of the Ed Balls-Yvette Cooper husband and wife couple in to the role of Shadow Chancellor, and sending them on their separate ways as shadow spokespersons for Home Affairs and Foreign Policy.

It's great to think that a sense of humour - as well as some common sense - might have been restored to Labour Party politics at long last !

OLD LESSONS OF THE NEW IRISH PROBLEM

This image from the Wikipedia Media Commons depicts the "Famine" sculpture in front of Dublin's financial centre.

Created at the height of the credit boom, when Dublin was amongst the four richest cities in the world, this artwork now symbolises the "feast to famine" cycle of the modern Irish economy.

For some, last week's Irish Government bailout of the banking sector may recall the country's earlier potato famine, but the lessons are much closer to home.

In short, "The New Irish Problem" - as I'm going to call it - shows the folly of a small country adopting the "growth policies" of a much larger one, namely the United States.

For in Ireland, the problems of an overly large and inadequately regulated financial sector as well as a highly speculative property market - problems which the country shares with the United Kingdom - have been made far worse by a lax planning regime and lending to the construction sector, mixed up with some good old fashioned corruption.

UK Coalition Government and "Next Generation Labour" please take note !

For if the previous administration had succeeded in fully implementing its plans for massive volume house-building, the outcome would almost certainly have been akin to the property market collapses in the US, Ireland and Spain, which followed similar policies.

Looking Beyond Britain's Post "Blair Babe" Politics

Image: Stylish fifty something Christine Lagarde, French Minister for Economic Affairs.

News this weekend that Brazil is likely to have a sixty something woman President put in to perspective the election of Miliband Junior as UK Leader of the Opposition. It was also a shame that Diane Abbott apparently lost out to the politics of envy over the choice of a private education for her son, just when I thought such "Old Left" hang-ups had lost out to New Labour.

In the run up to the General Election, I lamented the absence of the "Herd Matriarch" in British politics, as distinct from those "Folletted" women politicians struggling to look forty something when now nearer sixty than fifty. As someone a lot nearer fifty than forty herself, I am actually being cruel to be kind when I say this.

Unfortunately for we more mature ladies looking "ten years younger" has been one of the great aspirations since the Blair Babe years. Indeed, it is now a requirement for "the boys" as well, with baby-faced male politicians like Cameron, Clegg and the Milibands all doing better than their more mature (looking) colleagues.

Poor "old" Alistair Darling had to point out, as in the BBC interviewer's words, he handed over to "the next generation" of Labour politicians that he did not yet have "one foot in the grave". How did British politics arrive at this advanced state of ageism, I wonder, and how can the body politic be restored to a more sensible demographic ?

Were it not the case that European politics still looks like a relatively mature state of affairs, I might have deduced that politicians become younger as their populations age, and younger countries have older leaders, based on the experience of Britain and Brazil, for instance. However, this would not explain the enduring success of "Mother Merkel" in Germany.

No, I think the cult of youth in UK politics must be the new "British Disease", reflecting a society dictated to and dominated by its visual media, including the British Broadcasting Corporation. Something needs to be done about this. Maybe it's high time we more mature women staged a continental-style coup, ejected those hair dye fascists, and sported French-style grey hair.

OH DELHI ! - The Commonwealth Games Fiasco

Like the rest of what I suspect is the world's great silent majority, I do wonder what all the fuss is about sport; and I'm fed up with hearing about the problems of pampered elite athletes, particularly Australian ones and footballers....but that's another story.

So on one level, the Indian Commonwealth Games fiasco is almost welcome: a timely reminder that this a country struggling with development issues of far greater importance than the delivery of yet more world-class sporting facilities.

On the other hand, I very much support the idea of a Commonwealth Games, and hope that this one ultimately delivers a beneficial legacy and the next goes to Glasgow and does the same.

However, a more sensible perspective on sport is essential. People are increasingly comparing the current global obsession with the last days of the Roman Empire, providing a timely reminder to London's classicist Mayor, Boris Johnson, of the wider challenges facing his own country.