Hinterland - rural intelligence from behind the headlines (w/e Fri 5 Nov 2010)

Weekly summary - 5 November 2010

This week I reveal how Garden Birds provide our own DaVinci Code clue to why rural matters.

On the way to this revelation, you can wade through what the increasingly regular series of bad news and hard luck stories for public service workers and the recipients of their services mean to rural England. Happy reading!

Ivan Annibal
ivan.annibal@roseregeneration.co.uk

Ministers earmark more than
100,000 civil service job cuts

(Link: The Guardian, 3 November)
There is no good way to cut jobs. There are few useful outcomes for society from removing people's livelihoods. There are however different ways of implementing job cuts.
    There are ways to protect the most vulnerable employees and to ensure that the economic impact of job losses is managed insightfully in terms of its economic consequences for local communities.
    It seems to me in reading this story, in the very same way that there is clearly no common approach within Whitehall, to addressing these issues, that there is certainly no clear or well thought through approach to them across the Local Government family.
    I worked in the Nottinghamshire coalfields in 1985/6 when the pits were closing and I have always remembered the mantra - once you close a coalmine - its almost impossible to re-open it. Now there's a thought for those wielding the political knife who might one day want to re-think the notion of public service and what it means for rural communities.

Silicon Valley - but in the
East End, promises PM

(Link: Independent, 4 November)
When businesses with similar characteristics cluster together they can generate mutual economic advantage through something called agglomeration effects. Why am I banging on about this? - simply because it appears to be an emerging aspect of the new thinking of this Government about how our economy can be strengthened - it is not that new - the previous Government had a broadly similar commitment to it (but perhaps intended to spend more on it).
The article explains how: "London's East End can be transformed into a world-leading technology city to rival Silicon Valley in California, David Cameron will claim today.Google, Facebook, Intel and McKinsey & Co are among companies which will invest in the East End, helping new small ....to grow into multimillion-pound global businesses. The Prime Minister will publish a blueprint for technology designed to make Britain "the most attractive place in the world to start and invest in innovative technology companies".
I am not so convinced that clusters can be stimulated in the way set out here. If you want to read more generally about what this Government is up to (or at least get confused by a lot of good intentions a bit like a joke without a punch-line) have a look at the new Growth White Paper. To be even handed, the allocation of new county level partnerships to replace RDAs is one good aspect of this with early commitment to rural emerging in the allocation of LEPs for Lincolnshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, the Marches and Camridgeshire/Peterborough.

Middle class pay six times more for degrees

(Link: Daily Telegraph, 3 November)

This article tells how: "Successful graduates will be penalised most by the introduction of variable interest rates on the loans they take out to pay the fees. A university leaver with debts of £30,000 and an annual salary of £45,000 will have to pay back about £2,160 a year for about 30 years. Someone earning £25,000 will have to pay £360 a year for the same debts because a lower interest rate will be applied."

I wonder how many rural facing universities - the likes of Gloucestershire, Corwnall, Cumbria, Lincoln et al will be able to charge the premium rate of £9,000 per annum? I do reflect however - the more I think about this - that the policy of expecting those who get a disproportionate benefit from education to make a disproportionate contribution to it is probably right, particularly in such a graduate rich environment and particularly if it is fairly implemented in these difficult financial times.

I also reflect on how corrosive the widening gap of inequity between the cost of going to University in England compared to the rest of the UK might become. Finally there is clearly scope in this new regime for good universities - a number in rural milieu - to develop additional external income from selling places to overseas students - that is if they are allowed to come without raising the old hoary chestnut about migration. This line of argument reminds me of a platitude at the bottom of an email I received: "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world". John Muir.