Re: [A-List] New economy bull: cooking the books

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Mark writes:

I was recently in Lanarkshire and a more depressing place would be hard to
find unless elsewhere in the Celtic Fringe (the Rhondda for eg). But these
dour, depressing kirk-ridden villages, where the victorian extractive and
metal-bashing industrial heartland became modern social graveyards, will
never come back to life, will they?

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Very unlikely in my view. Regional policy in the UK died when Thatcher took
over in 1979 -- previous governments had targeted investment in those areas,
most famously Harold Macmillan forcing British Steel to locate a plant at
Ravenscraig in south west Scotland, rather than in South Wales where they
wanted it. The scale of the devastation caused by Thatcherite policies
forced even her to implement a very small scale type of regional policy
called "enterprise zones" in which the government threw money at anybody
promising to invest in the area, leading ultimately to the location of
Japanese car plants in the north east of England (another depressed and
depressing region, along with the old coal fields similarly laid waste by
Margaret). The metropolitan bias of Blair continues the Thatcherite policy
drift but without Conservative Party pretensions to the landed classes in
the shires (hence the Countryside Alliance). What is really required is some
sort of Wasteland Alliance, hinted at very gently by Hugo Young in
yesterday's article on UK politics, about which more later. Meanwhile much
greater attention to the development of underdevelopment within the core is
required if only to correct for the myopic and apologetic crap that
routinely gets peddled by state/corporate cheerleaders and hack economists
applauding the "new economy", "new prosperity", etc.

Michael