Hinterland - rural intelligence from behind the headlines (w/e Fri 14 Jan 2011)

Weekly summary - 14 January 2011

I feel a bit reactionary this week. Let's hope its not the onset of my winter cold! With some help from Jessica I bring you sad, happy and strange reflections on the challenges facing rural England.

I would also just like to thank the presenters and participants in the rural Broadband seminar we ran in Leicester on Monday. I thought it was a really good day. What arose most strongly and clearly to me was the fact that rural and digital disadvantage are wholly and challengingly inter-twined.

The outcomes from the day and the presentations will be on RSN online in due course but if you would like a preview of the presentations let me know.

Ivan Annibal
ivan.annibal@roseregeneration.co.uk

Disability living allowance cuts could confine disabled to homes, say charitie

(Link: The Guardian, 12 January)
This article explains how: "A brief line on page 69 of the comprehensive spending review in October announced that the mobility component of the disability living allowance (DLA) would be removed from people living in residential care.
    "The benefit reduction was not explained in George Osborne's speech to parliament, where he outlined the scope of the cuts, and subsequently has not attracted much attention amid the myriad of changes announced that day."
    This allowance however underpins the ability of people with disabilities to travel. Its removal is doubly iniquitous from my point of view because it impacts on both people with disabilities and disproportionately significantly on people in rural areas who have greater mobility challenges.
    I am with the CEO of Scope who is quoted as saying "Disabled people and their families do not have 'broad shoulders', so why are they bearing the brunt of these cuts?"

Julie Burchill: Living by the seaside is like having all your Christmases come at once

(Link: The Independent, 13 January)
In a positive advert for the British seaside, Julie Burchill writes: "Even when I'm abroad in the five-star sunshine (even in Israel!) staying at some hotel where Mrs Obama or Miss Rihanna recently laid their heads, I get excited when I know I'm coming home, like a kid at Christmas - "Two more sleeps... one more sleep..." Tragic but true. I'd bet it's probably unusual to feel that way about somewhere you've lived for more than 15 years [Brighton] - and it's all about the seaside."
However, the grey cloud around this silver lining is the consequence of thousands of people who share this view and who are economically inactive, ignoring the received wisdom of this present Government that they should move to find work and as part of a long established trend moving with few or no resources to find their imagined idea of the seaside.
Off-season in rural English seaside resorts this can often turn out to be more of a nightmare than a dream come true. I have been banging on about the issue for a long time now but notwithstanding the burgeoning work of the Coastal Communities Alliance there is much more support needed to positively help these people and address the broader issue of social regeneration in rural, coastal England.

Petrol prices to hit £6 a gallon

(Link: Daily Telegraph, 11 January)

There never was a better reason to argue for a more diversified approach to energy options. This article explains how for what seems to me an eternity now companies which take all the benefit of fuel profits but pass all the risks of their work onto us now have us under the thumb to the extent that they raise petrol prices at will.

This of course then knocks onto other sources of fuel and hey presto rural dwellers in England end up cold and isolated from services with the worst impact hitting the most vulnerable. The FSB have been arguing for a fuel duty stabiliser because they know as is often the case, those things that hit rural communities also often hit small businesses as well.

Let's hope people can get behind them. On a broader point I have been speculating for a while that the current level of austerity measures (the rise in VAT has contributed to the hike in fuel prices) haven't been too unpopular to date because we have been in a "phoney war" position with them which feels a bit like planning a diet.

Now we are actually beginning to seek to "fight the flab" it will be interesting to see what impact the actual impact of some of the less well thought through elements of government policy on public opinion in those place which suffer the worst unintended consequences.

Poor families must pay an extra £1,300 a year for basic goods and services