Tougher Love – Accrington and Cambridge – Athens and Munich

Now is the winter - I am content

Hi

Schadenfreude is fun.  Look what a mess those other guys are in.  Looting and burning in Athens, that’s the Mediterranean temperament.  Those occupations by students and demonstrations by dons last year in Cambridge are different.  We are different.

In June 2011 a Daily Telegraph leader wrote:

"Tougher love is needed if we are going to recover"

The leader identified the pernicious impact of low standards and the benefit culture on depressed areas. It highlighted the impact of inflated public sector salaries “the gold standard” in areas of high unemployment."

Controversial at the time, that understanding is now generally accepted.  But there is another, and hidden, side to the problem.  The “benefits” coin has two sides.

In Cambridge, "Silicon Fen," the City of London and other boom areas, there is also a pernicious impact.

 Enterprises are living in a false world of subsidy. Colleges and businesses are expanding, attracting new, highly paid talent and fuelling a continuing property boom.  This expansion is premised on the availability of low wage "subsidised" support staff.

Non-professional employees in Cambridge, on wages that would put them "on the pig's back" in Liverpool, eke out an existence thanks to subsidised "affordable" housing.  Teachers who are gold-plated in the northern regions can barely afford to rent in Cambridge let alone London.

Economic hotspot employers and their highly paid employees profitably take advantage of nationally averaged education costs, health costs, supermarket prices and ordinary wages.

Expansion decisions, and most importantly a balanced distribution of talent, depend on wage, salary, property and tax costs that are local, honest and market led.

A one size fits all treasury approach and 1970's national wage bargaining will ensure that our hotspot booms turn to bust and our depressed area busts continue bust.  (However remember that in this economic cycle the talent is internationally mobile.)

So Accrington or Cambridge, Athens or Munich, as I wrote on 27 September 2011:

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Hootenanny – Cameron and Salmond Party On

Hi

On 13^th May 2011 in a piece about the Alternative Vote Referendum I moved onto those bright lads Alec and David and in referendum terms the Big Yin.

So who is the strongest man, Billy?

Lucky, clever, ruthless, the winners, Salmond in Edinburgh, Cameron in London, will now turn on and destroy their common enemy.  They have the power and they have the time.

In 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, Cato the Elder’s “Delenda est Carthago” will become:

“Labour must be destroyed, completely.”

Just watch them create the next great British unwritten compromise: the best Fudge, creamy, delicious, thoroughly stirred and mixed, yet each ingredient distinctive and delicious, guaranteed to last three hundred years.

A United Kingdom of Independents under one monarch.  A Conservative England of sixty million people, an SNP Scotland of five million, a Clyde Cymru Wales of three million and a Unionist Northern Ireland of one and a half million, the family will support each other and survive.

Perhaps little Nick Clegg should morph the House of Lords into the Senate of the United Kingdom.

You heard it first from Jock.

Paws4Now

Jock

“Informed” Debate

Hi

In Hit theBuffers (Tues. 20 Sept. 2011) I promised to return to “Informed.debate.”

“What is Truth?”  said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.  Francis Bacon posed that great question in the sixteenth century and exposed the hole that is now at our centre in the twenty first century.

It is our now problem.  Few of us have time to stay for an answer.  There is so much to do.  Pour the whisky, watch football, glance at CNN News, go to bed, numbers are boring and difficult.  Tomorrow is another day.

You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time. (attributed to Abraham Lincoln.)

Today political parties, the political class, the bureaukratura, jointly and severally, have found the Achilles heel of democracy.  They have rewritten Abe Lincoln:

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