Lib Dems respond to Centre for Cities study

Centre for Cities: High debt levels in North leave people badly prepared post-Coronavirus
 

THE Liberal Democrats have responded to a Centre for Cities report warning that high debt levels in Northern England and Wales will leave people poorly prepared for the post-coronavirus economic downturn.

Their new research maps debt levels in England and Wales and found that in Northern England and Wales’ cities, people have the highest levels of debt relative to their incomes.

On average, for every £5 people earn in Warrington, Swansea, Sunderland and Wigan, they owe around £1. This compares to Oxford and Cambridge where people owe just 35p for every £5 they earn on average

Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for the North John Leech said:

“Report after report and analysis after analysis shows the North hit hardest. From schools to busses, pensions to child poverty, and now debt.

“Let’s be absolutely clear: this is another example of the undeniable and devastating result of decades of overinvestment and relentless focus on London and the South, and it cannot be solved overnight with warm words.

“It’s time to take the North/South divide and its impact on people’s lives seriously.

“Ministers, MPs and councillors must listen and commit to investing in the North, and they must do it with real urgency to guarantee real equality across our region.

“Only the Liberal Democrats are standing up for the North. We will continue fighting to rebalance our regional economies, making sure those in the North are not continuously left worse off and build a brighter future where everyone gets their fair share, no matter where they live.”

ENDS.

The Axeman Cometh & Ludwig Wittgenstein

 ASPECT BLINDNESS in ROCHDALE & BEYOND

by Brian Bamford

Editorial Note:  Below I have tried to lay out

the editorial position of our NV Blog in the light of the 
axeman's attack on a team of tree surgeons after
a group of Asians in the Newbold area of Rochdale 
had trapped them, called them 'white bastards' and 
cut off one of their hands.  

 https://www.gmp.police.uk/news/greater-manchester/news/news/2019/october/Four-men-have-been-jailed-for-their-part-in-a-brutal-gang-attack-which-left-a-man-with-life-changing-injuries-after-being-hit-with-an-axe-in-Rochdale/

As I write these words Barack Obama, the former US 
president has  called out the cancel culture on the 
Internet, saying that it is not an effective form 
of activism.  

He said: “This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised, 

and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, 

you should get over that quickly.  The world is messy. 

There are ambiguities.”   

https://www.nytimes.com › politics › obama-woke-cancel-culture

 We believe the case of the actions of axe man in Newbold 

Rochdale illustrates better than any form of words the

dilemma facing the liberal left and community relations.

The Newbold axeman case better than any clever intellectual 

argument clearly shows us the 'aspect blindness' of the 

current spirit of our age.  

For the relevant post on the story of the Newbold gang's assault on the tree surgeons go to:

https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk › blog › when-is-a-hate-crime-not-a-hat..    

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“What can be shown cannot be said,” that is, what cannot be formulated in sayable (sensical) propositions can only be shown. - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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WHEN Northern Voices was established in the summer of 2003 at a meeting in The Buffet Bar on the Stalybridge Station in Greater Manchester, it was decided we would produce a regional publication dedicated to local news and cultural issues in the North of England.  The editorial in the first issue began with a quote from Ray Monk's biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein:

'We do not ... need to consider imaginary wild tribes to find examples of people with a world picture fundamentally different from our own.' 

Even among our neighbours we can find distinct differences as the curious Newbold axeman case shows so clearly here and Ray Monk no doubt had in mind what Wittgenstein had already said to one of his students: 'Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same ... Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.'

At that time we wrote: 'Northern Voices' editors seek to find variety and differences within our local northern communities at street-corner level.  We do not seek easy generalisations and simple minded explanations, which so often lead to hole-in-corner ideas and solutions.'

Since then we have tackled a wide variety of news stories, cultural events, political scandals, and items of interest to northerners.  In doing so we have built up a readership outside the narrow confines of what has been called the political left to embrace a more general northern constituency.

This blog aims to establish a web presence for Northern Voices. It will feature some current and past articles from the printed journal, as well as things that don't quite fit in the magazine - both for editorial and technological reasons.

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Justifying Reviews on the NV Blog

We have taken the unusual step of publishing two reviews of the controversial booklet 'Shit Wigs and Steroids: Anarchism's (and the left's) Tolerance of Delusion'.  We have done this because in the current climate we believe this publication, whatever its flaws, offers a valuable insight into developments on the strange shores of the British political left and beyond.  It needs to be read, because too many people are what we would call 'skedaddlers', ducking and dodging all requirements for moral compass in a social context like the current trends and fashions encouraged by the Gender Recognition Act.

The authors of the two reviews on this Blog offer different perspectives in their approach to the text.  Both are experienced reviewers; Les May reviewed 'Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith'* and Chris Draper wrote 'Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history'**.  

In the past Freedom newspaper would have had the courage to run alternative assessments together with follow-up correspondence, always encouraging controversy.  Nowadays, Freedom in all its forms offers a less challenging body of work both intellectually and in propaganda terms.  One might have thought that Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News, who was at the Liverpool Bookfair when the incident described in the book occured, and its author was accosted, detained and roughly expelled, would be willing to review it, and certainly it might be expected that it would be a worthy subject of debate on a thread on Libcom?

Any problems in the contents ought to be left to the readers to access its value.  Whatever it shouldn't be censored by the supercillious southern anarchists who think they can decide what is suitable for us northerners to consume.

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* 

N.V. Review of 'Smile for the Camer - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/nv-review-of-smile-for-camera.html

**  Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history 4. - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/.../who-killed-freedom-unauthorised-history_7.html

Housing, People & Regionalism in the UK

by Brian Bamford  

AT the Green Gathering in the Methodist Hall Oldham Street in Manchester, last Saturday, Dr. Roz Fox from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), a qualitative analyst, said: 

'The city of Manchester is the fastest growing city outside of London, and there have been interim talks about the city needing 200,000 homes by 2030.'  The academic  argued that 'housing is not just about bricks and mortar, but more importantly 'about people; the local labour market; land availability and social facilities.'   

This all has now to be accomplished in an era of public service cuts and an increasingly ageing population.  

This has to happen at a time when devolution is becoming fashionable.  According to Dr. Fox, the challenges now are what type of properties are required, and most important how do with involve people in the decision-making.   

Meanwhile, last Tuesday, in Haringey civic centre councillors were heckled while debating plans to rip communities apart, and hand control to a private entity.  Aditya Chakrabortty wrote about the Haringey case on Friday 20th, January 2017:  'At its heart is a programme that is among the most audacious I've ever seen.  Haringey wants to privatise huge swaths of public property: family homes, school buildings, its biggest library.  All of it will be stuck in a private fund worth £2bn.'  The fear is that areas of north Manchester between Bury, Rochdale and Oldham something rather similar is in danger of happening as armies of protesters gather to protect what they perceive as the threat to the Green Belt. 
In an article about anti-social behavior in the North East, Neil Tweedie in the Mail on Saturday last November, claimed that 'Grimsby is a long way from the oak-paneled conference rooms of the government departments in Whitehall...' but that 'Cameron's project to "cure" Broken Britain (started in 2011) ' had cost '£450m' and it had 'achieved nothing-apart from exposing Whitehall incompetence, deceitful councils, the vanity of politicians... and how they squander YOUR money'.

Regions of the UK

In England, the culture of centralism dominates in a strange way of a kind of surburban relationship and attachment to London.  In 1905, the novelist Henry James declared:  'All England is in suburban relation (to London).'  
Since the beginning of the 20th Century the south and particularly London have come to dominate the English economy and culture.  The historian, Tristram Hunt, in concluding his book 'Building Jerusalem' (2004) wrote:  'The corporate and financial stampede southward was quickly followed by the political parties, the media (including the Manchester Guardian), the professional establishment (from lawyers to doctors to accountants to architects), the cultural elite, even the representatives of organised labour.' 
Centralisation is the problem confronting this country.  One or two comments last week, on this NV Blog suggested that DevoManc, as it is now being presented, is a top-down phenomena.  
The regions and localities of the England, unlike Scotland, lack the self-confidence and imagination required to promote a bold self-identity that could compare with provinces in France or the regionalism on the Spanish peninsular.  Notions of federalism seem alien in the English regions. 
I think that in Northern Voices' we have identified a broad North-South dichotomy, but the various particular regions lack confidence and up to now have had a provincial insecurity in relation to the metropolis that is London. 
This has not always been the case, Tristram Hunt again in 'Building Jerusalem' wrote:  'In the Victorian era, that metropolitan imperialism appeared out-dated as the great northern civilisations established themselves as core components of the cultural firmament.' 
Neither the Green Gathering last Saturday nor the Andy Burnham Manifesto Meeting last Thursday tackled this problem of building an awareness of regional identity, although in the workshops of the Burnham meeting it was asked 'How do we change mind-sets?'.

The Future of Federalism in the UK?

In France the French Revolution finished off the work of Louis XIV and gave France a powerful highly centralised state.  In Spain the Liberal Revolution imitated this development.  Then in both countries came a reaction to this centralisation with movements for greater local and municipal liberty. 
In France this reaction was best expressed by Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who put forward those ideas which, he believed, the French Revolution had come into existence to fulfil, but which had been diverted by the ruthless political action of the Jacobins. 
In Spain, with its intense provincial feelings and local patriotisms, one would have expected the movement towards decentralisation to be even greater,but because of the consequences for Spain after the Napoleonic Wars and the fact that Carlism drew into its ranks many of the forces of resistance to Liberal centralism, these feelings didn't for some time make their appearance among the parties of the Left.  Only as an result of the work of Pi y Margall, a Catalan, who knew and understood the social and political ideas of Proudhon, did he grasp that these ideas best suited the aspirations of his countrymen.  It was through the efforts of Pi y Margall that the Federal movement in Spain grew in the 1860s.  
Unlike France and Spain, no such popular radical movement to express the local and regional spirit in a federalist manner has yet developed in England.  This may be because as an island we have been isolated from the continental currents which are still prevalent in Europe.  It may be because anarchism and organised regionalism, have been half-baked traditions.  Marxism, even though the Communist Party itself has never caught on in Britain, has had a wider influence in the universities than anarchism or federalism.

On Being Sour About Southerners

THIS morning on 'Saturday Live' Stuart Maconie promoted his book 'A Pie at Night' which is a follow-up on his earlier work 'Pies and Prejudice' reviewed in an early printed issue of Northern Voices.  James Watson in his review in the Daily Telgraph last October argued that in the current book 'Maconie [is] unwilling to hear, or write, a word against the region' and that 'his fondness for the North is now unconditional'. 

On 'Saturday Live' today, while glorifying the Stalybridge Buffet Bar on Stalybridge railway station and even comparing it to George Orwell's ideal pub, 'The Moon under the Water', Maconie said that he was annoyed by Janet Street Porter expressing her dislike for Manchester and going on about 'Women dressed-up to the Nines going out on the Town!'

Maconie said 'These are my people you're talking about!'

As Watson writes: 

'Many memorable set pieces [in the book] rely on Maconie’s rare ability to convey the sense of people having a really good time. One of the best takes place in Southport on a hot bank holiday, and includes his visit to the town’s celebrated lawnmower museum where, among the exhibits, are Nicholas Parsons’s secateurs, Vanessa Feltz’s dibbers and a mower that belonged to the hangman Albert Pierrepoint.'

For Mr. Watson, accuses Maconie:

'Far too often he breaks off to confirm, inadvertently, the biggest Northern stereotype of the lot: coming over all chippy about Southerners. (Full disclosure: I’m a Northerner too.)'

And Watson argues:

'The chippiness leads him to appropriate anything he approves of – hedonism, punk, the urban working classes, even scientific achievement – as essentially Northern. It also creates a curious double standard. If people in Halifax tuck into, say, “ox tongue spring roll with cauliflower purée”, this is proof of Northern culinary sophistication. If people in London do the same, it’s proof of their irredeemable pretentiousness. '

James Watson concludes his review:

'To expect Maconie to give a fully-rounded picture of Northern life would be like asking Romeo to give us a warts-and-all portrait of Juliet.'

On today's 'Saturday Live' Stuart Maconie appeared alongside other studio guests such as Saba Douglas-Hamilton,   Radzi Chinyanganya, and Frederick Forsyth.

Titchmarsh Toppled at Chelsea by Monty Don

North vs South at Chelsea Flower Show

 YORKSHIREMAN, gardener and TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh, has been shown the door by the BBC as the presenter for this year's Chelsea Flower Show and is to be replaced by southerner, Monty Don, as the show kicks off this week with the special guests attending the first day today.  Mr Titchmarsh, when asked, said he wouldn't describe it as 'being dumped'.  

 

Ought a political and cultural blog such a Northern Voices to trouble itself about the goings on at the Chelsea Flower Show?  I went to my first Chelsea in 1979 when I took a day off from my job as a maintenance electrician at Holcroft Casting & Forgings in Rochdale to travel down on the overnight train to turn up at the last day of the Show the first thing on a Friday morning, and was charmed and excited by it.  And, I need hardly say that George Orwell, no less, wrote for Tribune about his experience of buying some rambling from F.W. Woolworths, and his then friend the old Italian anarchist editor of Freedom, Vernon Richards, actually cultivated rare vegetables for the London restaurant trade.   

As Chelsea begins it's worth mentioning that this year has been extraordinary in that last winter was so mild and in my window boxes in the northern town where I live the Geraniums have been in bloom virtually throughout the winter.  It has been such a strange sequences of seasons that Robin Lane Fox in last Saturday's Financial Times wrote: 

'It will be hard, even for the Chelsea Flower Show, to compete with our own gardens and the natural world next week' and '[w]e are having such a superb spring, three weeks ahead of the usual schedule, and as a result, the show will not have the traditional feel of an inauguration to the best of the British gardening year.'   

So much so that Mr. Lane Fox concludes: 

'When I go back to my own garden after my day's viewing, I don't expect to despair that it falls painfully below Chelsea's display  The weather has brought on the early irises,peonies and the best wisterias even before Chelsea will be showing them too.'  

 

The first of my peonies are about to burst into flower any day now, no I tell a lie they are opening today, and the early clematises are already in bloom.  We are almost wading through Icelandic poppies to our front door already.  

 At this year's Chelsea, Lane Fox urges us to seek out the exhibit of Brighter Blooms from Preston in Lancashire (site no. GPD21), this firm specialises in Zantedeschias, a family that includes the well known white-flowered arum lilies.  It is expected that this year the Zantedeschias should be in splendid form after the wet winter and very little frost to challenge them.  Mr. Fox further writes:  'Exhibitors from the north are almost always worth a visit as their nurseries specialise in plants we southerners can use less easily.  I like the sound of the Himalayan meconopses, or poppies, on show from Harper Hall Farm Nurseries near Durham (site no. GPF8).  This small nursery is trying to grow unusual items, a niche magnificently occupied by Kevoch Garden Plants from Midlothian, gold medallists in recent years who are continuing to show fabulous rarities and well-grown alpines suited to the wetter, shadier conditions in Scotland and much of the north (site no. GPD9).'  

 

With the triumph of the posh-speaking sleek southerner,Monty Don, over the Yorkshire lad Alan Titchmash for the presentation of the Chelsea Flower Show it only demonstrates that politics, regionalism and identity has relevance even in the realm of gardening, or perhaps I should say especially in the realm of gardening. 

Scruffy Workmen in Hoodies Wreak Havoc in Lovely Hampshire Village : Bosses say: 'Industrial Strife, NOT IN MY BACKYARD!'

IS NO WHERE safe these days from those hordes of the uncouth horny-handed labourers. The miners can knock shit out of each other in our Northern towns and at Olgreave or up North in Sunderland, but now these people are invading the land of the southern swine at Lymington Town Sailing Club, or Limewood Hotel in the New Forest, or Highclere Castle in Hampshire where Downton Abbey was filmed, damn-it, this is all too much for the likes of southerners such as journalist Dominic Lawson, the brother of Nigella, in yesterday's Sunday Times, David Cameron in Parliament this week, and editor Paul Dacre's Daily Mail. These grimy-faced tribes of northern working-men have been descending on the doorsteps of managing directors and frightening the horses. It seems that this Leverage campaign by the Unite union is having a significant effect , because according to Dominic Lawson in yesterday's Sunday Times: 'that last week a manager at Grangemouth petrochemical facility in Stirlingshire – which had been besieged by the union's activists. It was during the school holidays and the director was telephoned by his wife to be told that a “mob” had appeared on their doorstep. Children in the street had apparently also been co-opted by this band of brothers “to portray me as someone evil... it had quite an impact on my kids. It is hard to find words for the lunacy of their behaviour.' Another director from the same firm Ineos has described his plight to the Daily Mail [31st, Oct. 2013} thus: 'They have send [sic] flying squads of protesters to dozens of businesses we have links with. The[y] put leaflets through the door of pretty much every house in Lyndhurst where we have our headquarters. My daughter received a poster explaining what a terrible person I am.' 'Lunacy' indeed! We know that these folk who run and write in newspapers like the Sunday Times, The Sun, and the Daily Mail, who are themselves incomers in leafy Cotswold places like Chipping Norton and Morton-in-the-Marsh don't want to have their lunches spoiled at their favourite restaurants by gangs of protesters waving banners and even in one case carrying an effigy of a giant rat. We all now know thanks to the widespread publication of the activities of some residents in the Home Counties whereby friends and neighbours of David Cameron such as Rebekah Brooks, former chief executive of News International, and Andy Coulson, former editor of the now defunct News of the World, may dwell in these leafy towns swap horses and shag each other's arses off. In The Diary of a Chambermaid, the French writer Mirabeau puts words in the mouth of Mademoiselle Célestine who draws the conclusion which the reader is also invited to draw: 'However much riffraff are vile, they are never as vile as decent people'.

Breast is Best Down South

BREAST-feeding is more fashionable down South than up North, according to new figures for 2012-13 reported in The Observer last Sunday. These figures suggest that in 2012-13, 327,048 women were not breast feeding their baby at all by the time they had their six to eight week check-ups. That represents just under half of all maternities. This is the first time breast feeding has fallen since the Department of Health began to collect and releasing the statistics in 2004.

PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN WHO INITIATED BREASTFEEDING:

Top five areas -                                           
Haringey Teaching PCT.......... 94.7%      

Wandsworth PCT................... 92.2%    

Lambeth PCT......................... 92.2%    

Westminster PCT.................... 91.5% 
  
Camden PCT.......................... 91.0%

Bottom five areas -
Hartlepool PCT.................... 39.4%

Knowsley PCT..................... 44.3%

Blackpool PCT..................... 51.0%

North Tees PCT.................... 51.9%

Liverpool PCT...................... 52.0%

The Observer journalist, Daniel Boffey, reports on a woman, Claire Jones Hughes, who was challenged by fellow diners in a cafe that she should be more discreet when breast feeding her four-month-old daughter. Mr Boffey adds 'this was [in] affluent, liberal Brighton' not among the natives of the North. Another customer backed Claire up saying: 'get into the 20th Century', and later Claire took a stand on the internet organising a 'flash-mob' of 60 mothers who took to the streets and fed their young-uns under the town's clock tower.

It's strange isn't it that today it is the posh southerners that believe 'Breast is Best' and flaunt themselves in public as the breast milk flows and the multitude lactates? I'm old enough to remember after the Second World War, when the Proletarian mothers up North used to do the same thing on the 17 Bus. Not only that but my wife, I and our six-month-old son, when in Spain in March 1964, shared a train carriage with Spanish soldiers bound to serve General Franco in Ceuta and other Spanish passengers on the then 24-hour journey it took to crawl from Albacete to Algerciras, and we all laughed and joked as the red wine and potato omelet were passed round the carriage as our son suckled on my wife's breast like a young goat. Children in Spain at that time were still young enough to be on the breast at six months old. Indeed, there were reports in some parts on the country that kids up to school age would still sample their mother's breast milk.

About that time in the 1960s, while boys in Spain would stop playing football to grab a quick mouthful of their mother's milk, the newly affluent middle-class women in England were putting their children on the bottle as soon as they could.  For them the bottle became the new wet-nurse for the lower-middle-classes, but now it is the other way round and studies show that affluence in an area is a strong indicator of whether breast-feeding is taken up.  The tendency is also for white women to breast-feed less than those of minority ethnic groups.  Southwark and Lamberth, London boroughs with big ethnic minority communities, have the third and forth highest propotions of women who continue to breast-feed after two months, 81.8% and 76.6% respectively.  Yet, in Hartlepool Councillor Cath Hill, who is involved in children's services, says that while she regards breast-feeding as 'the most natural thing in the world, in Hartlepool breast-feeding is seen as unnatural and abnormal'.

There's nowt so queer as folk!

From Wiltshire Woman to Park Cakes, Oldham

Review of 'Trade Union Solidarity' - Spring Issue - 20-page A4 size jounal: Price £1: Inquires and subs. to ring Glen Burrows on 01278 450562

THE first issue of T.U. Solidarity appeared last Autumn at the time of the Manchester Tory Party Conference, with a picture of a woman from Wiltshire on the front cover, and the current issue has a lass from Birmingham, Becca Kirkpatrick, aged 28, a pugilist and female Jock McAvoy no less, illustrating the back cover.  Any magazine in the unions or on the Left these days, it seems, must consciously display a commitment to multiculturalism and gender balance.  In Solidarity magazine we have a range of photos of picket lines, because the editors have a policy of promoting the rank and file workers at the expense of the union officers.  Unfortunately, many ordinary workers don't appreciate this:  such as the woman I know at Park Cakes who turned Solidarity down flat when they approached her for an interview, because she was too frightened:  she told me that she didn't care about the Agency workers plight so long as the jobs of the permanent staff were safe. 

English workers are often shy when it comes to talking to the media, they also often distrust those who they see as 'troublemakers' on the shopfloor or in political parties.  These people crave a quiet life.  Thus, Solidarity had to get Julie Summersgill, the convenor of the Bakery, Food & Allied Union (BFAWU) at the Oldham factory of Park Cakes to give them an interview.

As luck has it, there are rank and file campaigns such as the Unite Rank & File Construction Workers, that contain activists who are less media shy.  Besides the article 'Rumble the Crumble: fighting the two-tier workforce at Park cakes' there is an article on the successful struggle against the attempt to impose new BESNA contracts in the building trade, which would have meant pay cuts for the workers.  The journal has a column interview with blacklisted electrician, Steve Kelly.

There are a few northern trade union branches and Trades' Councils  listed among the supporters of the Solidarity magazine, but the overwhelming majority are from down South, with a disproportionate number in the South West.  There is a noticeable lack of support in the North West, and this may indicate that Alex McFadden - the influential North West representative of the TUC JCC - is hostile to Solidarity. 

There's a northern interview with Brian Taylor of the Communication Workers' Union (CWU) at Capita India Mill, now a call centre in Darwen, Lancashire, where 80 workers went on strike in Autumn 2011 against a below inflation imposed pay rise.  We learn that Darwen and Blackburn belong to one of the most deprived areas in the country.  Brian Taylor tells us that only a minority of the 200 workforce are in the union, and of the pressure of the 70-second call targets, just as at Park cakes the workers fear that card-carrying union members will be victimised, and, he says, workers often join the union 'under the cloak of darkness'. 

The publication has no leader comment or editorial, so there is none of the preaching and party-lines one gets in other left-wing journals and sheets.  In this sense Solidarity is refreshingly free from people telling us what to think.  Hence, the journal is not a publication that treats its readers as cultural dopes:  its for mature workers not young students.  The contact editors are Dave Chapple in the South West, Shelia Cohen in London and Becca Kilpatrick in Birmingham:  if we were living in France we would describe these people as radical syndicalists; that is people who prioritise the trade union struggle for rights at work in preference to party politics and winning elections.  The trouble with British politics is that there are too many schoolmasters running the show, and it creates a form of politics that most ordinary English people either despise or can't relate to.  The language in Solidarity is straight-forward and clear, nowt fancy, it is shorn of slogans  Becca Kirkpatrick, the boxer, also refreshingly pays homage to 'agression (as) one of our vital tools (as trade unionists)' and thankfully, she is not proclaiming that dreadfully fashionable PC term 'assertiveness' in the workplace.

Cultural North: 'Well I'll Go To Buxton!'

OBSCURE OBJECTS OF DESIRE IN DERBYSHIRE

THIS year's Buxton Festival that ends on July 25th, is a treasure trove of lesser-known works of opera.  Chris Draper, who writes in Northern Voices 13, never mentioned the Buxton Opera House in his feature 'Six O' the Best Northern Theatres'.   And yet, Buxton for these few weeks in July is the cultural capital of the North, even though it tends to be overshadowed by Glyndebourne and Edinburgh in Scotland.  Buxton describes itself as 'a happy marriage of music, opera and books'; it also includes talks on literary subjects together with recitals and chamber concerts.

The opera house, dating from 1903, has 900-seats and is in the centre of town near the central park.  The Festival is dominated by works of opera, and this year there is the Sibelius opera 'The Maiden in the Tower', the Strauss comedy 'Intermezzo', Handel's oratorio 'Jephtha', Mozart's 'Idomeneo' and Gluck's Iphigenia operas.  Handel's biblical drama is about the Israelite warrior Jephtha, who unwisely promises that if he is victorious he will sacrifice the first thing he sees on returning home.

There was a double bill chance to hear the Sibelious opera with Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Kashchei the Immortal'.  George Loomis in the Herald Tribune writes that the Sibelius opera 'lacks theatricality', but that 'Rimsky-Korskov's dramaturgical skills never seemed more potent than when "Kashchei" got going after the intermission'.  As well as these Buxton Festival productions there are some guest productions such as Metastasio's libretto 'L'Olimpiade', the plot of 'L'Olimpiade' involves a trick by an ancient Olympics contestant to get a better athlete to compete in his name with tragic results.
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The printed version of NORTHERN VOICES 13, with all sorts of stuff others won't touch and may be obtained as follows:
Postal subscription: £5 for the next two issues (post included)
Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' at
c/o 52, Todmorden Road, Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH.
Tel.: 0161 793 5122.
email: northernvoices@hotmail.com
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The Olympics, London & the Militarised State

TODAY we learn that G4S can't supply 10,000 security staff for the Olympics as planned, and that the Home Secretary, Theresa May has had to plead with the Ministry of Defence to let her have thousands more service personnel to do the job as security-men at the London 2012 Games.  I wonder what the squaddies are saying about that?

Ironically, only last Friday in the Herald Tribune, Jules Boykoff and Alan Tomlinson were writing about the International Olympic Committee (ICO):  'Most worrisome, perhaps, is that the I.C.O. creates perverse incentives for security officials in host cities to overspend and militarize public space.  The I.C.O. tends to look kindly on bids that assure security, and host cities too often use the Games as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stock police warehouses with the best weapons money can buy.'

Mr. Boykoff and Mr. Tomlinson further say visitors to London 'would be forgiven for thinking they had dropped in on a military convention.'  They write:  'Helicopters, fighter jets and bomb-disposal units will be at the ready.'  Before this recent mishap by G4S about 13,500 British military personnel were expected to be on patrol, that would be 4,000 more than currently serving in Afghanistan.  Now, it seems, that figure will have to be revised upwards.

Admittedly, the Government are right to be concerned to protect our capital city and the Games, but as Boykoff and Tomlinson say 'there is such a thing as excess - and surveillance and weaponry are not a panacea.'  Symbolically, having London presenting an image of a militarised state is is hardly conducive to the Olympic ideals of peace and understanding.  These critics suggest that today it is the growing size of the Games that is the problem - 'Gigantism' - and argue that competitions 'drenched in privilege, like the equestrian events, should be ditched' as should 'pseudo-historuical events like Greco-Roman wrestling' and events with high start-up costs should be changed for ones needing less resources like tug-on-war and running events 'like trail running and cross-country'.




 

Doing Business in the Southern Olympics

LAST Friday in the Herald Tribune, Jules Boykoff and Alan Tomlinson wrote:  'Although the I.O.C. (International Olympic Committee) has been periodically tarnished by scandal - usually involving the bribing and illegitimate wooing of delegates - those embarrassments divert us from a deeper problem:  The organisation is elitist, domineering and crassly commercial at its core.'   The revival of the Olympics by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in the 1890s was down to an assembly of princes, barons, counts and lords to help co-ordinate the Games.  It seems that in the present crop of 105 I.O.C. members still have a good chunk of royalty including Princess Nora of Liechtenstein, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Prince Nawaf Faisal Fahd Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia. 

Then there is the commercial end of the Games, Mr. Boykoff and Tomlinson write:  'The I.O.C. has turned the Olympics into a commercial bonanza.  In London, more than 250 miles of V.I.P. traffic lanes are reserved not just for athletes and I.O.C. luminaries but also for corporate sponsors.  Even the signature torch relay has been commercialized:  The I.O.C. and its corporate partners snapped up 10% of the torchbearer slots for I.O.C. stakeholders and members of the commercial sponsors' information technology and marketing staffs.  Michael R. Payne, a former director for the committee, has called the Olympics "the world's longest commercial".'

Good business for some of these folk down South!

Plastic Mountains Down South?

OLYMPIANS MOVE MOUNTAINS:  To make it look more rural, rumour has it that they are going to make green plastic hills for a mountain biking event!  These games are 99% London-centric.  Reminds me of the millions wasted on the millennium celebrations down there, while up in Eccles, Greater Manchester we did not have a functioning public toilet for 11 weeks.  No one told these organizers that thousands come to watch the Tour de France over its huge distance.  Ignorance also about the great hotels, b.+ bs, eating places and coach companies in Britain's mountain areas.  An argument against having bike races up here is that some of the traffic jams around the mountains last along as ten minutes(Olympic quip).  Do not also tell the organizers that most Londoners are dreading the chaos to come.  Research suggests that the cycle racing will be at Hadleigh Farm where they have covered it with rubble to look 'mountainy'.  I think thats in the area of Hadleigh Wood, on the Hertfordshire border one of Greater London's poshest neighborhoods.  That should keep us Northern oiks away.

martin g.

Five Alternative Theatres Down South!

Mika Ross-Southall, writes in the Financial Times of the first Elizabethan open-air Theatres:  'Behind a pub in Shoreditch east London, the remains of the Curtain - believed to be the the second purpose built theatre in London - have recently been discovered by archaeologists from the Museum of London who believe the site is one of the best preserved examples of Elizabethan theatre in Britain (Built in 1577).'  Others include the 'Theatre (1576-1597):  built by James Burbage... the Theatre became the playhouse of the Lord Chamberlain's Men' when the lease expired it was dismantled by the Burbages and relocated and rebuilt as the Globe in 1599.  The Globe (1599-present) was located near the Rose, and was made from reused timber of the Theatre, though this did burn down during when the thatch roof caught fire during a performance of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII. A new Globe was built on the same foundations with an audience capacity of 3,000 and a tiled roof.  In 1997, a reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe was opened with a production of Henry V.  The Rose (1587-1606):  built by Philip Henslowe in 1587, south of the River Thames on Bankside.  It had three tiers and an audience capacity of around 2,000.  The Swan (1595-1600s):  Built in 1595 on Bankside, it was the biggest theatre in London and the only playhouse with a surviving pictorial record of its interior.
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The printed version of NORTHERN VOICES 13, with all sorts of stuff others won't touch and may be obtained as follows:
Postal subscription: £5 for the next two issues (post included)
Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' at
c/o 52, Todmorden Road, Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH.
Tel.: 0161 793 5122.
email: northernvoices@hotmail.com

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Six O' the Best Northern Theatres & the need for the Arts in the North

Christopher Draper in Northern Voices 13, now on sale, tried to judge the best theatres in the North, many serious politically minded people dismiss these kind of articles on the arts and northern cooking in Northern Voices as trivial, but earlier this month Simon Schama wrote a piece in the Financial Times on William Shakespeare arguing that 'almost before there was a true political and institutional "England", there was a theatre of England.'    Some folk will say, and have said, that we are wasting space filling up our publication with stuff on films, gardening, regional beer, or tea time treats, when we could be analysing the economy and the national deficit. 

Simon Schama writes of the Bard:  'Shakespeare would not be the great poet-philosopher he is were he not to have spoken to the universal condition of humanity, but in the beginning he didn't address himself to humanity at large but to the English.'   It was a need for identity of place that he address himself to in an England that was not yet then fully born.  Schama argues persuasively that:  'This peculiar sense of English belonging, kindled in the theatre and then projected on to the streets, fields and villages of the country, had begun in the time of the first Elizabeth, and Shakespeare was its great virtuoso.'

Thus, Northern Voices (NV) commits half of the coverage in its journal to our Northern culture, food, drink, history and the arts.  That it why we supported the Touchstones Challenge campaign to protect the arts in Rochdale; listed the Manchester & Salford Film Co-op; reviewed the 'Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer' Ford Madox Brown exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery; interviewed Eddy Hopkinson on his second-hand bookstall on Church Street in Manchester; backed the Tameside TUC campaign for a Blue Plaque for Spanish Civil War hero, James Keogh in Ashton-under-Lyne; as well as surveying the clash of the classes in Sheffield in the 19th Century and covered a football story on Glossop North End in N.V.10.
_______________________________________________________

The printed version of NORTHERN VOICES 13, with all sorts of stuff others won't touch and may be obtained as follows:

Postal subscription: £5 for the next two issues (post included)

Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' at

c/o 52, Todmorden Road, Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH.

Tel.: 0161 793 5122.

email: northernvoices@hotmail.com
_______________________________________________________

North-South Divide & the Euro!

SELF-TAUGHT ECONOMIST Edward Hugh, a British blogger living in Barcelona since 1990, was long ignored when he predicted the downfall of the euro zone. Surviving on a starvation diet with a part-time income from teaching English to the natives he fired off blog after blog into a Web wilderness forecasting the folly of North European Governments in trying to establish a united currency with the Mediterranean nations to the South. How could the aging, tight-arsed Germans ever survive with the lavish living youthful folk of Southern Europe (including Southern Ireland) wielding their credit cards?

Mr Edward Hugh is no-longer an unnoticed lonely blogger, as the euro is driven lower by the day. Indeed not, he is now being courted and offered jobs (all of which he has thus far turned down) by the likes of the International Monetary Fund and Hedge Fund managers. Only last week he had to borrow money from friends to address a conference of politicians and business executives in Madrid. Mr Hugh's message is simple as explained in yesterday's International Herald Tribune: '[S]ince Spain and other struggling countries of the euro zone like Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Italy cannot devalue their common currency unilaterally, they have little choice but to endure what would essentially be a 20% internal devaluation instead.' This means that their public and private sector wages need to fall by roughly that amount if those countries are ever to restore competitiveness, lift exports and bring in cash needed to pay their debts. A daunting prospect!

Germany is a nation of savers with an average age of 45 and this is rising. It's a nation of skinflints, who save up and has kept wages under control while building up export industries. Contrast this with the younger Portugese, Irish, Greeks and Spaniards (the 'PIGS') who chuck their money about, going on borrowing binges, driven by a demand for new homes and consumer goods, resulting in housing bubbles that burst. In the end they couldn't compete with the tight Germans, Dutch and the North Europeans. It's not nice being one of the PIGS these days!

Why didn't the professional economists spot this dilemma that Mr Hugh has been bleating on about? The problem with academics like most of those in the teaching profession is that they have an occupational disease which weds them to a belief in formulas and cookbook thinking. Mr Hugh says they are so 'beholden' to 'their promiscuous but essentially useless' economic models and that they easily miss foreseeable consequences. This is what the epistemological anarchist and philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, once called 'Professional incompetence; incompetent professionalism'.

Struggling Cities outside the M25

We're reproducing this article from Regeneration & Renewal following our article about similar issues 2 days ago. The full article can be read after the 'read more' link below.

'Jobs Deficit' - Sarah Townsend, regen.net, 7 June 2010

Policymakers should seek to boost the potential of buoyant cities with a track record in generating private sector employment in order to compensate for imminent public sector cuts, an urban policy think-tank has urged.

North-South Health Divide

The Regional Trends 42nd report out today says the North East, North West, and Yorkshire and the Humber have lower life expectancy and higher mortality rates from cancer, respiratory and circulation diseases compared to England's average. This disparity between the North and South, says the Office forNational Statistics, has shown little change despite the previous government's pledged to cut it. Today's issue of The Times states: 'England remains a country of health and wealth divides, with those in the North likely to be poorer and live shorter lives more prone to serious illness'.

'NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE': NORTHERN CITIES IN CRISIS

CHRIS DRAPER in Northern Voices No.10 [Summer/ Autumn 2009] claimed of his top 'Six o' Best' Northern Towns that three of them - York, Leeds and Scarborough - were in Yorkshire. Yesterday's Yorkshire Post quoted a report by the Centre for Cities think-tank as identifying a serious 'jobs deficit' of 69,000 facing Yorkshire as a whole: 69,000 'lost' jobs. It shows that even before the recession hit that many areas were struggling with Barnsley, Doncaster, Bradford, Hull and Huddersfield losing private sector jobs. Now says the Yorkshire Post: Hull and Sheffield face a combine deficit of almost 40,000 jobs - almost 20,000 each. The fear now is that as public sector cuts are threaten another 'North-South divide' could develop. The Deputy Prime Minister and the MP for Sheffield Hallam, Nick Clegg, said at the weekend that he was determined to avoid the mistakes of the 1980s, which led to a huge gulf in job prospects between the North and the South. Clegg told his audience: 'We'll take good measures so these cities in the North, our great Northern cities, are given the support they need.'

None-the-less, it seems that outside of places like York (that came top town in Chris Draper's article) the region east of the Pennines has missed out on the New Labour boom. Meanwhile, the Institute for Public Policy Research North has called on the northern regions to 'carve out their own futures, define their own regional economic identities and transform their public services'. An editorial in the Yorkshire Post argues that Brown's claim to have abolished boom and bust is 'increasingly hollow' and that there are some places where the Brown boom never happened. It goes on to call for a clearing away of the 'regulatory thickets [and red tape] that have been strangling the private sector'. This may of course be code for an attack on health and safety regulations at work.

The difficulty is, as the Financial Times editorial suggested last Saturday, that down South there are 'The stifling cliques of Westminster' that rule us: 'Nepotism is, thankfuly, no longer an everyday feature of public life. But the political gene pool is still too narrow. The state is controlled by a tightknit professional class.' Both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer came out of the Conservative Party secretariat (David Cameron worked briefly as a PR executive). Then, we learn that the four leading candidates for the Labour leadership (though representing Northern constituencies) come from what the FT calls 'the nomenklatura' and the editor goes on to to say: 'Britain is run by white men, roughly 40 years old, with little or no experience outside national politics.'

The FT claims the road in Britain to power is clear: 'There is now a well worn path from 20-something bag-carrier to 30-something MP.' The result is a highly centralised system with 'few rivil routes in local government through which politicians can rise.' Hence, there is little hope of regions like Yorkshire carving out its own identity or being liberated in a centralised political regime like this, were all the politicians look much the same however they try to make themselves look different when elections beckon.