Small country big divide
A journey across England underlines the political and economic division in our small country.
I was a guest last week on Any Questions, hosted by the Workers Education Association in Newcastle . The other guests all tweeted their followers to get them to listen or send in questions, but I’m not that organised and sadly my tweeting is now restricted to an automatic notification of new blog posts.
Judge for yourself but I achieved the three key objectives I set myself:
- Mention the RSA
- Don’t make a fool of yourself
- Be reasonably politically balanced
I was helped in the final task by being sandwiched between Tory blogger Iain Dale and former Gordon Brown pollster and RSA speaker Deborah Mattinson. It may have simply been that her answers were better but Deborah was easily the most popular guest with the audience. The WEA is an organisation with roots and branches in the labour movement but even so the audience reaction underlined that the North East is systematically more left wing than most other parts of England.
It is also – and of course the points are related – the region whose economy is most dependent on public spending. So the future for the region is of deep and painful cuts which will be implemented with little or no public sympathy.
I have long thought that the North East needs to think boldly about how it can boost public service productivity both to improve services but also to exploit the commercial potential of cutting edge public services (after all, education, health care and security are all fast growing global markets). I tried to get something off the ground with ippr North but it turned into a damp squib. A more recent attempt to develop a project with a high tech health company specialising in remote heath care also came to nothing.
I know there is interesting work taking place in the North East, particularly through its universities (notable for the high level of regional collaboration). But the danger is that the region succumbs to a feeling of victimhood and victimisation in the challenging times ahead. I wonder whether the RSA in the North East can do anything to foster a more creative and positive response?
Boing!
This short post has three elements: self promotion, self indulgence and humour amusing only to its author (‘no change there’ I hear you chorus). If you have anything better to do with your time (eg watching paint dry, re-reading the Thompsons business directory, removing the Madonna or Queen songs which have unaccountably got on to your ipod playlist) I strongly advise you to do so.
On Tuesday I went to Leyton Orient to see the West Brom second string win 2-0 in the Inter-city Poundstretcher Vase (aka the Carling Cup). Apart from a great last minute goal from New Zealand wonder boy, Chris Wood, it was a pretty grim game, of which it could fairly be said ‘neither team deserved to win’. Still, at least there were two chances to go through the West Brom fans’ goal celebration ritual.
This comprises the supporters jumping from one foot to the other and punching the air out of time shouting ‘boing, boing’, followed by a discordant but strangely uplifting rendition of Psalm 23 (The Lord’s My Shepherd) and ending with the ungrammatical but elegant simplicity of ‘The West Brom’ clap, clap, clap ‘The West Brom’ clap clap clap. The whole thing lasts about a minute and has over the years occasionally been rudely interrupted by the opposing team equalising.
The next day, as is my habit, I visited Boing – the excellent unofficial West Brom supporters’ site – to see whether my player ratings matched those of other fans. As you will see if you visit it, Boing is to website graphics and technology what West Bromwich town centre is to urban aesthetics.
So…imagine my surprise and delight when a colleague at the RSA (presumably looking for a rise, clever girl) referred me to a link to my 21st century enlightenment talk (‘46,000 views and counting’ now you ask). The link is on what it turns out is one of the world’s most hip blogs (formerly a ‘zine and web site). Its slogan is ‘brain candy for happy mutants’ and its name is?
No really, this is worth waiting for…
Oh, how I laughed. Oh, how I patted myself on the head. Oh, how I marvelled at the inability of my long suffering PA Barbara to see this as the most exciting thing to have happened all week.
Some little tweaks to the blog…
A reader recently suggested some improvements to the blog, and we listened:
- Recent posts and recent comments widgets are now on the sidebar
- Retweet button on all posts – so please spread the word on Twitter
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Feel free to suggest anything else to help improve this blog.
A comment on the ‘regressive’ budget
Channel Four on-line news contacted me about today’s IFS report showing that the Coalition’s budget measures are likely to be regressive. Of course, I wouldn’t say anything to Channel Four that I wouldn’t say to my loyal, clever and beautiful blog readers…..
Last November the RSA/2020 Public Service Trust published a pamphlet called ‘The Fiscal Landscape: Understanding contributions and benefits’. The top lines of this report were that:
* Taking tax, benefits and public services together public spending is very redistributive. One estimate is that on average across the lifecycle low income families with children are net gainers by nearly £13k pa while high income families are not losers by nearly £5k pa.
* The pivot point (the point at which people pay more that they receive) is higher up the income scale than might have been thought. Only between 30 and 40% of people pay more to the state than they receive.
* The pivot point for pensioners is even higher with fewer than 20% of pensioners paying more than they receive.
This is why it is very hard to reduce public expenditure without impacting more on the poor than the well-off. This is even harder when – as the Coalition has – you have made a blanket guarantee to protect the income levels of all pensioners.
And there is another factor too. If the Government were, say, to reduce the value of free health care to a rich family through cuts to the NHS this would represent a very small proportion of its family income. But the same cut would represent a much bigger proportionate reduction in the social income of a low income family.
Putting to one side the debate about the June budget, George Osborne will face a difficult choice in the October spending review. Either he genuinely makes the package progressive in its impact (which will mean hammering middle class entitlements) or he accepts that a cuts package is bound to be regressive (which threatens the Coalition’s centrist credentials).
The classic case in point is the proposed pupil premium which is intended to direct more funds to the poorest pupils. There are already several mechanisms in place which ensure poorer pupils have more money spent on them so the premium will have to do more redistributive work than the existing framework. But if overall pupil funding is flat this either means a generous premium – which will have to involve taking money away from better off pupils – or a small premium – which will be insufficient to compensate for the overall regressive impact of a cuts package.
This is very hard stuff. The Coalition needs to be clear in its aims, its policies and its message (a hesitant spokesman for the Treasury had at least three competing defences on the Today programme this morning).
But whilst sympathising with the Chancellor’s dilemma, there are two things I would advise the Coalition against strongly: don’t over-claim at budget or spending review time (something which dealt a heavy blow to Gordon Brown’s credibility), and don’t slag off the IFS (which is highly respected for its rigor and objectivity).
My YouTube obsession
My Youtube obsession
I’m finding it hard not to become obsessive about checking the viewing figures for my RSA Animate. It reminds me of a few years ago when I wrote a book with my old man. It got part serialised (in The Times I think) and for a day climbed the Amazon charts reaching the heady heights of the top fifty. Thereafter it fell inexorably and now every year I get a royalties statement from the publisher which is always a negative figure.
There was a point a few days in, when we were still in the top thousand, when I flirted (as so many other authors must have done) with buying ten copies myself to see if I could start a reverse trend. Given the pretty ghastly reviews the book received, the fact that I didn’t try to rig the market is one of the few scraps of dignity I can take from the whole episode.
But the YouTube number is continuing to rise, which makes it all the more addictive. I find myself day dreaming complex theories about on-line contagion effects. The viewing figure is rising steadily at about 5-6,000 a day, but how long until the momentum runs out? Is there a certain window of time in which an acceleration of take-up has to take place, and if so, how long is it?
The main value of the video is that it is helping get the RSA brand out world wide. But it is also great to see the ideas being debated. For example, blogs by Duncan Green and Julian Evans have been talking about them. Julian and I have had an email conversation following his post (I’m delighted that he is thinking of becoming a Fellow). Like a number of critiques of this and others of my lectures he worries about the strength and linearity with which I link evidence about human nature to actual human behaviour.
My defence goes back to my elephant rider metaphor in which our conscious self is the rider, our automatic systems the elephant and the social context the jungle. I like this metaphor but am having to accept that it doesn’t seem to resonate with other people. The point I am trying to make is not simply that what we can do is conditioned by who we are as a species and the situation in which we find ourselves, but also that we use our freedom as riders most effectively when we understand how we operate and how we are constrained. It is when we see how our conscious self is only a part of what we are that we understand what an amazing part it is and how best to use this amazing mysterious capacity to be fulfilled and effective people.
So, far from being a neurological determinist I believe that the key to being powerful self-directed individuals is to understand our physiological and social nature. But somehow I’m not managing to get this across. Is it because the point is simplistic, wrong, or the metaphor inept or something else?
Do tell me….
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