Which would you rather save – your local library or a County Hall paper-pusher?
What a curious double life I lead. Half the week I’m your disembodied commentator from the world of high finance — my anonymity protected, as I truffle for City gossip, by a portrait drawing that (I’m told) doesn’t look like me at all. For the other half, I’m one of the north of England’s most hyperactive citizens, blundering like Flashman from one battlefield of the cuts debate to the next.
Last week, for example, I was discussing library closures on Monday, police manpower reductions on Tuesday, the crunch in higher education on Wednesday, and doomsday scenarios for the arts on Thursday and Friday. The real impact of all this on community life is becoming daily more apparent, but what is most interesting to observe is how the level of public acceptance varies with the degree of honesty displayed.
The Arts Council, for example, seems to have kept its client base well informed and to have created a decently transparent process that will lead, next month, to the announcement of which arts companies have made it into the funded ‘national portfolio’, and which will be left to fend for themselves. Likewise our local police inspector, tasked with telling us that there is now a single constable and one uniformed ‘community support officer’ to cover our vast rural area, assured us he is doing his best, reminded us that we have remarkably low crime levels, and left us feeling reasonably content.
Elsewhere, the approach is less frank. Councils have sought to present library closures, of which there could be more than 400, as a fait accompli. But they have met a wall of protest and legal challenges, and their arithmetic is far from persuasive. In North Yorkshire, 22 libraries are under the axe unless communities come up with ‘Big Society’ (that is, cheap) solutions to keep them open. But the average running cost last year was just £35,000 per library, while the county employed more than 100 managers on salaries of £50,000 or more — including the very officers who declare that libraries must go in order to protect more essential spending items, such as themselves. For the loss of just 15 County Hall paper-pushers, in effect, our treasured network of libraries could be saved.
Local government secretary Eric Pickles has done similar sums, and his beady eye has fallen on the bloated rollcall of senior local government officers left behind by Labour. Meanwhile, fellow citizens, listen carefully to what you are being told, or not told. Where cuts make sense, accept the logic and move on. But where you suspect cuts are being rushed through to protect the empires and salaries of the cutters, give ’em hell.
Ambition and direction
‘Vince is rattled,’ said an acquaintance who had just survived a bruising encounter with the Business Secretary. ‘He was rattled by Lambert’s speech, and he’s even more rattled by Pfizer.’ Sir Richard Lambert, the departing CBI chief, used his farewell platform to castigate the coalition for failing to articulate ‘ambition and direction’ in its policies for growth through business investment. The pharmaceutical sector is regularly claimed as an example of how government policies on science and innovation have combined with private investment to keep Britain at the top. Yet now the US giant Pfizer is closing its research facility in Sandwich, where Viagra was developed, so it’s no wonder that ministerial morale is detumescent.
But the real mistake of this government and the last has been to go on boasting about the brilliance of our drug labs long after the industry itself decided that better prospects lie in Asia — where good scientists come cheaper, regulation is lighter, and there are billions of new customers. Fraser Nelson made that point in Spectator Business way back in 2008. In this as in many sectors, east is where the action is, despite what Merryn Somerset Webb says on page 25. And as Alex Brummer adds, UK companies with the best prospects are those that succeed in selling eastwards. That’s the ‘ambition and direction’ we urgently need to nurture.
Rock-solid Ronnie
A postscript to centennial tributes for Ronald Reagan. I sat very close to him when he spoke to a gathering in London in 1991 to raise money for projects in Eastern Europe. He had passed his 80th birthday, and the murmur beforehand was that he was no longer capable of much more than a genial greeting. But in fact he delivered the best encapsulation of the moral basis of free-market capitalism I’ve ever heard. The phrase ‘building a better life through work, imagination and risk’ lodged in the memory; I don’t suppose he wrote it but I’m sure he meant it and I was impressed by his rock-solid technique. He read from a deck of cards until he reached his peroration, when — making sure we could see he was doing so — he slipped the cards into his pocket and carried on to the end without a missing a beat.
And he finished with quite a good joke about the failure of the Soviet system. A Muscovite receives a call from a bureaucrat telling him that he has at last been allocated the new car he applied for many months before. The bad news is it won’t be available until 10 a.m. on a specified date two years hence. The recipient checks his diary. ‘Could you make it the afternoon? That’s the morning the plumber’s due to come.’
Diamond libraries
A neighbour tells me she’s heard on the radio that Barclays chief Bob Diamond is in for a £9.5 million bonus. ‘Can’t you ask him to save our library?’ I point out that if Bob pooled his pay-out with the £3.6 million to which the trade minister Lord Green is entitled as a farewell from the chairmanship of HSBC, and the £2.4 million bundle awarded to RBS boss Stephen Hester, between them they could offer a year’s reprieve for all the threatened small-town libraries in England. A gesture like that might even herald the end of the ‘period of remorse and apology for banks’ to which Bob recently referred. The ball’s in your court, chaps.
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