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?
Dave’s wise words
Fresh from putting the icing on the cake of the final report of IPPR North’s Commission on the Future of Public Services (I’ll leave it to others to say whether cake or topping provided more nutrition), I am on the road again.
This time to the strangely old fashioned surroundings of Chesford Grange Hotel near Leamington Spa to speak to the education conference of the National Association of Head Teachers. In a desperate (and I’m afraid, at least, partially successful) attempt to ingratiate myself with the audience I told them I would blog about them later but only be complimentary if they gave me a good reception.
What a lovely, intelligent, attentive and generous audience! Before speaking I was rather nervous having decided yesterday, somewhere between Doncaster and Peterborough, that I couldn’t bear simply to repeat a version of my speech in July to SSAT. Also, the conference platform included the excellent NAHT General Secretary Mick Brookes who spoke here at the RSA on Tuesday. How could I match his eloquence without obviously filching half his material?
Anyway, all seemed to go fine. Among the questions was a point which formed a nice but depressing link between two sections of my annual lecture last week Someone called David put his hand up and, after asking whether if he said something nice about my speech I would mention him in my blog, (as if, Dave, mate, how cheap do you think I am?), he made a point about my advocacy of more imaginative efforts by schools to engage parents. He described a school which had taken the imaginative step of encouraging parents to join their children in school for twenty minutes before the start of the day and twenty minutes after the end of last lesson. There were no teachers in attendance as they had other duties to perform, but the system worked well, engaging parents and forming a good bridge for the pupils between school and family.
But the scheme is no more. The new ‘safeguarding’ requirements for child protection mean that every parent who might want to join their child would – because there would most likely be others children in the room as well as their own – have to submit themselves to a CRB check.
In my sympathetic response I referred back to the argument in my speech about how we have somehow to enable people to see that politics and democracy are about choices and trade offs not just about demanding what you think you want right now. Every time there is a child abuse tragedy the demand goes up for more and tighter regulations and it is only later – too late generally – that people understand what they might lose as a consequence of trying to take all risk out of out lives.
It’s not a new point, I know, but a good example with which to make it.
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