The Eighties Revivial aka Thatcherism Redux

No, this is not what you think. It won't be a nostalgic trail through puffball dresses, piano ties, wedge haircuts and misty-eyed reminiscence about Durran Duran. for those of us who were there, there was another, far more serious 1980's, and today's news seems to rather starkly highlight it.

Plastered all over the news this morning is the story that certain parts of the country will be less resilient to cuts when the spending review finally happens this autumn. Can you guess which bits of the country they might be? So much for sharing the pain. So, if you live in poor, Labour-voting Middlesbrough or Mansfield you are far more likely to feel the effects of the ConDem axe than if you live in Harrogate or St Albans. At this stage, I might say that this was always likely to be something of a 'No Shit Sherlock' moment, but the barefacedness of it all is just breathtaking. Anyone who says the North-South divide is closing is, frankly, living in a dream world. And Nick Clegg's mewlings about how, as a Sheffield MP, he understands the concern being shown, is little better. Prattling about 'difflicult choices' does nothing to acknowledge that those who are going to be asked to suffer the most are likely to be the ones who can least afford to suffer at all. All of his attempts to ameliorate the anxiety that is being felt are ham-fisted and ineffectual, all of which seem to be rapidly becoming his leit motif. To those of us who were around in the North during the Thatcher years, this is all starting to sound depressingly familiar.

And the results of all of this are fairly obvious to predict. Yet more damage will be done to those places least able to sustain it. So they will be left to rot further, and will then be berated by the government for doing so. Then, in years to come (and not a for fair while yet), the mistakes of now will be lamented over as regeneration money will be allocated to solve problems that have lain unresolved for the best part of thirty years already. Current actions are storing up huge structural problems for the next generation, but no one in the coalition seems to either want to listen or care.

Clegg must also see the writing on the wall. The support the LibDems have spent years building up has been pissed away. Already, party supporters and the wider electorate are starting to ask questions about the LibDems, and more particularly their leader. He may be convinced that the coalition will hold, but will he manage to hold his own position? It may seem fanciful to ass this question now, just four moths into the coalition; but come next May, especially if the AV referendum is lost, and the LibDems do badly in local elections, what then?

And what if we have a bad winter? If we have another severe winter, against the backdrop of swingeing government cuts and worsening public services, the distinct possiblity of civil unrest, strikes and protest rears its head again.

Of course, the background to this is painting a picture of blitzing those making a, "lifestyle choice to just sit on out-of-work benefits" (in an interview with Nick Robinson, reported by BBC News) and ramping up the rhetoric on 'benefit cheats'. This is, once again, the language of the 1980's, with its return to the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor. I notice, however, very little being said on the far more expensive problem of tax evasion and avoidance. I wonder why.

Meanwhile, the previously sensible Vince Cable appears to have totally lost the plot (see this BBC story from yesterday), in announcing that Science funding would face significant cuts. This was defended by Science Minister David Willetts, echoing Cable's promise to 'screen out mediocrity'. What was more worrying was the push for concentrating funding on 'impact' research, which generates immediate outputs. The president of the Royal Society, Lord Rees, was rightly deeply concerned about such moves and, in an opinion piece in the Financial Times lambasted the goevernment's approach.

We are in grave danger, by cutting in this way, of leaving vast swathes of our economy so fundamentally weakened that any potential recovery will take years, perhaps even decades to happen. And when recovery does happen (if it happens), then some regions will be left even further behind to wither and die. Coiicidentally, few of the areas suffering most are represented by LibDem MP's, fewer still by Conservatives. How very strange.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the beief that much of this is being done with an ideological zeal that borders on the insane. And that the Liberal Democrats are actually abetting this madness is nauseating. A generation in the wilderness awaits them.

God help the rest of us.

Here Be Dragons.

One of the things that went largely unnoticed by most of the media in the Conservative announcement yesterday at their annual bun-fest about trashing the Heathrow third runway project was one rather glaring feature of the proposed alternative.

To cut flying, a Tory government would build high speed rail links between Lonon and Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. This is clearly a way to 'connect the north' to the capital. Or, part of the north anyway. What happened to tbe bit above Leeds? You know, the bit with Newcastle. And SCOTLAND. It looks like someone just kind of forgot that there's actually quite a bit of mainland Britain north of Leeds. Though of course we are savages because we don't have Harvey Nicks or other such markers of 'civilisation'. It is also fairly incongruous given the amount of air traffic going through both Teesside (I refuse to call it Durham Tees Valley) and Newcastle airports. you would think that the East Coat mainline up to Edinburgh through Geordieland would be the ideal route for a high speed link, upgrading what's already there and giving a much improved connection to mainland Europe by means of the Eurostar.

Either that or perhaps the 'insane' Policy Exchange Report of earlier this year (q.v Rivers of Black Pudding) wasn't as mental as Cameron would like to have us believe.

I don't think I'll even bother talking about the meltdown across the world. It's hilarious enough trying to watch President Chimpy flailing helplessly out of his depth without needing to say anything else.

"Rivers of Black Pudding"

Well, here we are, silly season once again. And, as a result, we have the wondrous report that was farted from the bowels of Conservative-leaning policy unit Policy Exchange yesterday (link here to a BBC story about this). To call it idiotic would be to do a great disservice to idiots everywhere. If even the moon-faced poltroon Cameron is even calling it insane, then things are looking bad for the dunderheads at th ePE...

So, a bunch of Tory policy wonks who mostly think the north starts at the North Circular Road and beyond that there be dragons have come up with what, even for them, is a crassly and comically piss-poor piece of work. Why is it bad? Well, all you have to do is imagine what would happen if there were a mass migration from the north. The consequences for the beautiful south would be truly dreadful:

The language: Northerners all speak Northern, not English, you see. They say things like "Ay Up", and "Sithee' (whatever that means) and similar. They split their infinitives, drop their aitches and can't say 'bath' properly. Think of the expense of translating public service documents and providing interpreters for interviews because they'll spend most of their time in the council and benefit offices, sponging off hard-working Daily Mail readers; most of these Northern types don't want work, you know.

Housing: Where will all the whippets go? Northerners all have whippets don't they? Or pigeons. Or Bull Mastiffs And they're all drug dealers. Of course, worst of all, when one Northerner moves into your street, soon he’ll bring all his relations to live with him. Then before you know it the street is full of tracksuited neanderthals with moustaches from Barnsley (though it's not just the moustaches that are from Barnsley of course). At that point the price of your house has dropped through the floor. You’ll never sell it. Not that you can now of course. Ha ha.

Economy: For those few who are not workshy, what will northerners contribute to the economy? Of course, any money they earn will either be sent home to the barren north, or used to pay to bring a herd of evil-smelling proletarian filth in ill-fitting clothes to our green and pleasant land. Of course, we can use them for all the nasty jobs that no one in their right mind would do, like being the continuity announcer on Big Brother, or being Lauren Laverne, for example.

Culture: When Northerners get to the south, the fact that they have different customs and speak a different language means they are likely to form ghettoes of their own where they can speak northern and do their northern customs and wear northern national costume - the flat cap, muffler and braces. They won't drink real beer, they'll insist on drinking that northern muck. And they all smell of chip fat and northern food, you know. Schools will have to spend a fortune on teaching Northern children to speak proper English, innit? And teach them proper rugger instead of that league game.

But northerners won't want to integrate. They'll cling on to their old way and bring down areas. They'll insist on intermarrying with other northern families. There are all those fundamentalist Yorshiremen too. That's when the trouble will start, because we will be accused of not respecting their northern culture and ways. No, we'll be accused of discrimination against them. We won't be safe in our own communities. The Thames will foam with black pudding...

An exaggeration, perhaps, but it does point up a couple of worrying things if one happens to live in the North. There is still an ingrained metropolitan snobbery in some sections of the Conservative Party (and in the Labour Party come to that). And those sections have the ear of the leadership. The other is that the north, even in Labour circles is seen as a “problem”. While the north undoubtedly has issues connected to economic development it is lazy and short-sighted to characterise the whole place in such a blinkered fashion. One example given was to get people moving from Sunderland to the south. Comparing like with like, Nissan has been a great boon to Sunderland (and the North in general). Can the same be said of Cowley in Oxford, one of the shining examples held up in the report? Hardly a ringing endorsement of the city. Indeed, beyond Arnold’s 'Dreaming Spires' Oxford has just as much social deprivation as some parts of the North. But this report doesn’t really talk about that, does it?

The depressing vision here is one of an unacceptable social and geographic Darwinism: if the south is relatively more prosperous, don't let's address the gap in the poorer communities. Or try to improve the transport links into the South East. Heaven forbid that we should make it easier for companies to do business in other parts of the country. Does anyone remember that at some time there was supposed to be a high speed Channel link from the North? No, I didn't think so...

No, let's just let those communities die on their arses. Idiocy hardly seems sufficient to describe this, especially when you consider who was responsible for most of the destruction of those places in the first instance.

The real problem once again is one of control. There seems to be a desire to "roll up" that funding and "allocate according to need". But this would more than likely be controlled from the centre. And we know all too well that the centre knows little and cares even less about outlying regions, especially if there is no electoral gain to be made from doing anything.

Actually reading the report (and yes, I have) is a depressing experience. In fact, what's even more amazing is that in a rush to concentrate economic resources they are trying to solve the wrong problem. The economy is concentrating in the south. So let's make it even worse! Let's take an already overcrowded region and build more houses on flood plains! Let's make water shortages even worse! Let's further overload already overstretched public transport systems! Let's overload local authorities even more!

The idea of encouraging people to move south in this way has faint echoes to me of Powell’s 'Rivers of Blood' speech forty years ago. It’s a speech that, as a left-wing libertarian I find unsettling but oddly prescient. and this report seems hell-bent on further ingraining a 'them and us' mentality between north and south. People laughed at it this summer, but it might not be long before som eactually begin to take som eof the ideas within seriously.