(edited to remove old video that wouldn’t play)

I was down in Knutsford over the weekend for one of our annual Jake gigs there in aid of Oxfam.  I wasn’t completely satisfied with my own performance but it seemed to go down well enough nonetheless.  I concentrated more on Georges Brassens this year which was fun but brought home to me somewhat how much I really need to complete more adaptations and broaden my repertoire.

An unexpected benefit came out of the weekend following a conversation with one of my fellow performers.  Back in 2006 the BBC commissioned a series of six Radio Ballads.  The format is very simple – the voices of people caught up in the topic of the programme interspersed with specially commissioned songs from leading songwriters on the UK folk scene.   At the time I only caught the first of the programmes – “The Song of Steel” – when it was broadcast.   A one-off programme about the Miners’ Strike was broadcast a couple of weeks ago and was excellent.  Anyway I mentioned this to my colleague and he said that he had bought all of the cd releases of the programmes and had made copies to listen to in the car – which he passed onto me.

Those to which I have listened – “The Ballad of the Big Ships” about the shipbuilding industry on the Clyde and the Tyne and “The Enemy That Lies Within” (living with HIV/AIDS) – are quite brilliant.  I’ll need to track the cds down now as material of this quality is deserving of all the royalties they can get.

Back in my old blog I wrote a couple of train blogs

16/17 November 2007
Travelling from Edinburgh to Birmingham and the line is the same one via which, as a child, we would go from Derby where we lived to Newcastle and from their to Annfield Plain where my gran lived. The train finishes in Penzance and used to be known as The Cornishman but now is just an anonymous crosscountry train.

 

Derby was quite saddening to pass through: the great Derby Midland Station which I remember from my childhood was replaced some years ago by vandals disguised as architects and is now itself undergoing a thoroughgoing set of repairs. The tracks themselves, the arteries which pumped the lifeblood of the city in the late nineteenth century and the first three quarters of the twentieth – and which brought my ancestors on my Mum’s side to Derby from rural Hertfordshire – are now tracks on the branchline to nowhere: overgrown and gradually rusting away.

 

Sheffield, earlier on the line, was a mess with the fine buildings by the tracks gradually decaying, unused, alongside the old canals but lots of new developments of the office-park business architecture type – little boxes which will be themselves fit only for demolition in two decades.

 

It is this sort of trip through the Midlands which continues to make by blood boil for the insanity of the Thatcherite eighties when the industrial heart of Britain was ripped out still beating by snake-eyed priestly fanatics looking for fresh virgins to sacrifice to the gods of the market.

 

When we travelled north as children, Derby had the railways and Rolls Royce, Sheffield was producing steel, Annfield Plain was still producing coking coal which helped fire the steel mils at Consett and whole communities lived and worked and supported themselves. When we came to Scotland in 1969 there was still shipbuilding on the Clyde, mining and steel production at Ravenscraig. All have now gone save Rolls Royce and to a very limited extent railway engineering.

 

Now it is undoubtedly true that there was much to change in those industries and the way they were operated, and in recent times their environmental impacts would have come to the fore; but the methods of the reforms were akin to treating an ingrown toenail by amputation at the waist. All of the received wisdoms which underpinned this national suicide remain firmly in place. Watching David Cameron and the Tories try to crawl their way back into public affections makes me want to shake them by the lapels and ask do you think that we’ve forgotten? Sadly, for anyone under forty or so, the answer is yes, we have forgotten.

 

As the train passed through Tamworth where canal boats jostled along the banks there was a glimpse of a different Britain: not an imagined idyll but something better which still persists like a brief glimpse of Avalon through the mist. We now have a new mythic Britain, the myth of a service economy in which if you have a job it is unlikely that you’ll be able to explain (or perhaps want to explain) to anyone what it actually is that you do as you ‘generate wealth’. We are still chanting to the voodoo of the markets with their sub-prime greeds and stupidities: all brains but no intelligence. This is a new myth for a new Britain – but a poorer myth for a poorer Britain.

 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stray rubbish?
(TS Eliot)

 

One of the things which I remember fondly from growing up in Derby was the Victorian/Edwardian properties faced in red and blue fired brickwork, often laid in intricate patterns and courses by master tradesmen. I particularly liked the use of this in what one might call the Railway Vernacular style of architecture which can still be seen in old stations, engine sheds, signal boxes and other ancillary buildings. Increasingly these are falling into dereliction and this contributed to the general sadness of which I wrote yesterday. The trip back hasn’t really alleviated that general disaffection – just the opposite! Approaching Sheffield there were a number of handsome but empty and rundown buildings and plonked in the middle of a scrap of marginal ground was a sign advertising “exciting business units; health and fitness”. With apologies to Tacitus

 

We have made a desolation and called it progress

 

20 July 2008

Unlike my entries on 16/17 November 2007, I’m coming back this time on the Virgin West Coast line, but the view from the train provokes much the same by way of reflection when passing through urban areas such as Wolverhampton. Just like coming back up last year through Derby, Rotherham and Sheffield on the other line, there are many, many sound but derelict fine red-brick premises doing nothing, surrounded and connected by a magnificent inland waterways network.

 

I am aware that there substantial issues of debate to be had regarding what I am going to write next, but my view of all of this, as the economy seems to be veering into recession, is essentially Keynesian: I think that there is a proper role for the government in putting capital into regeneration as a matter of public good, both to maintain liquidity in the system and to catalyse local growth and cohesion. This view relates generally to the provision of an infrastructure which supports creativity and innovation Further, I think that there are other imperatives at work here as well as the economic. There is a lurking toxicity in the national polity at present which has its locus for me in the potential outcomes of a heady mix of nationalism (not specifically Scottish Nationalism), an economic crisis and the perspectives which have led to the growth of the BNP in England. The danger is that instead of developing a positive pride in national, regional and local culture and society, we end up with political initiatives and media driven moral panics which accelerate a decline which will be exceptionally difficult to reverse. JK Galbraith writes in “The Affluent Society” that “…social well being and contentment require that we have enough production to provide income to the willing labour force” and I find myself in general agreement with that.

 

 

In the past week there has been some speculation here about the possibility of a State funeral for Margaret Thatcher when her personal Belgrano finally sinks. This has provoked a fairly predictable rash of comment from both her detractors and her supporters. One of the themes of this comment has been the degree to which the actions of here administrations can be regarded as “a good thing” and of such substantial importance as to be worthy of her recognition in the same way as was granted to Lord Wellington and Winston Churchill. My view on this is that, in one respect, it is too soon to say but my inclination is to think not, or at least not in a positive sense. My inclination on this derives both from the long term social consequences of the wilful destruction of the country’s industrial infrastructure with its human and social consequences and also from the fact that this was done in the name of a monetarist ideology which paid no attention to strategic consequences for social structures and cohesion. (I have avoided direct reference to Mrs T’s famous statement that “There is no such thing as society” because the whole context of her statement is more interesting than the simple seven words extracted from what she was saying. I still disagree with her, but one needs to be fair).

 

 

The monetarist orthodoxies of Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe and Nicholas Ridley squandered all that was good along with the problems which they perceived and were attempting to address. The consequences were mass unemployment, the stagnation of the available labour pool, intergenerational reinforcement of a ‘non-employed’ lifestyle and a tendency to put all of the Nation’s eggs in the service economy basket. And, of course, the whole sorry business led to New Labour.

 

 

And so the sights and sounds of the old industrial heartlands from the train. We now see what appears to be a recession which has been triggered by two things over the substance of which the government has little control, although some mitigation is not outwith the government’s hands. In the first place we have the price of oil (a lesson which we really should have learned in the early nineteen seventies); this in turn should lead us to consider the strategic imperative of removing our reliance on oil which in turn points towards the kind of areas to which the government should be encouraging R and D investment at an SME level. In the second place we have the consequences of unregulated short-termism and greed in the banking and financing sectors. The behaviour of the financial markets and the individual agents in them is both a consequence of the deregulatory dogma of Thatcher and her advisers and her ideological successors. It is also an interesting direct challenge to the prevailing market paradigms which do not take sufficient account of the institutionalisation of greed and stupidity and, indeed, themselves provide the intellectual cover for the institutionalisation of the greed and stupidity of those involved.

 

 

We are in interesting times and the abstract challenge is to find the kind of political leadership which can steer a strategic course through them.

I quote these at length because listening to the Radio Ballads re-awakened some of these thoughts in me.   Listening to the programmes, it is remarkable how much of the focus remains on the Thatcher years and their consequences.  I do not single her out as a single point of failure since clearly the strangling of capital investment in our industrial infrastructure and the extraction of “value” into the trouser pockets of shareholders had been endemic and worsening as had the entrenchment of working practices through the role of the Trade Unions.

But in the end the Grantham Grocer’s Daughter was the principal assassin and appears deliberately to have destroyed the infrastructure for ideological purposes and the “revolution” which she unleashed and which has been perpetuated by her ideological successors in Government over the years has led us to the pretty pass in which we now find ourselves.