Last week’s £5bn Pride In Place initiative, disbursing £500m a year to 339 disadvantaged neighbourhoods for the next 10 years and putting responsibility for spending money on local social revival firmly in the hands of community leaders, is important. Not only because it will prove popular, but the approach – unleashing the bottom-up energy of local social entrepreneurs and community founders – potentially taps into a rich vein of social creativity.
Why not not tax people £5 billion and leave actual entrepreneurs – not social ones – to build what people actually desire with the money?
But to Will Hutton everything must be intermediated through the hute bourgeois, d’ye see? Actual people getin’ on wi’ stuff isn’t right. Not enough direction from and power to Willy.
See?
The aim, for example, would be for each British region and nation to have a globally competitive city, and there would be 12 “missions” with accompanying metrics – ranging from the issues above to R&D spend to numbers receiving high-quality training – which would eventually drive equality with London.
This from the same people who spent decades insisting no one ever be allowed to build anything new in either Birmingham or Coventry so as to spread the new to other towns.
Rebuild the Tyburn Tree.
unleashing the bottom-up energy of local social entrepreneurs and community founders
– to pocket much or all of the funds.
They may as well just pass the Globally Competitive Cities (Regions and Nations) Act to name the places that the state intends to be ‘globally competitive’ and save the time and money that’s going to be burned on this…
Another one to file under “might as well fucking burn it”.
How do I become a local social entrepreneur or community founder? Do I just declare myself as such? Because it seems a sure-fire way to get wealthy.
And WTF is a “community founder”? That Koresh bloke, for example? Charles Manson? Sun Myung Moon? Ngosi Fulani?
I don’t think local community leaders have much opportunity to get rich – the best way to become one is to earnestly believe in improving things for local people and do some lefty campaigning. You’ll get money to spend on stuff that doesn’t actually help, allowing you to campaign for more money. The reason it works like this is that in small groups of people a member can know what is best for the group, but for larger groups no member can (hence why free markets beat planned economies). A local group can be small enough to see how to improve things, but not big enough to make a difference (e.g. you can arrange moving of a public field to use it for recreation, but marking it out for sports risks trying to use it for some sport that is not popular enough to justify the expense).
“… each British region and nation to have a globally competitive city …”
Does any other country have people who think like this? Are they sitting around in third world slums wondering how they can compete with our third world slums?
Anything Wile E. Hutton writes should get a community note about that charity he allegedly ran into the ground in months.
On m’ ‘ead, son. Luvvly biscuits.
Gateshead and Middlesbrough were recently on their way to being competitive in take-aways. Government stopped it. No new ones allowed in the central area.
Willy’s a swine. Getting government out of the way never occurred to him
Which one of the
fourfivesix? cities in my region is going to be the one annointed as the Globally Competitive one, and get the boondongles?The one with the smallest proportion of indigenous.
“Not only because it will prove popular”
It won’t because it will get spent on “community leader” stuff. It’s like all that stuff about the EU, and how much was spent in some places that voted to leave. Yeah because it was spent on stuff people didn’t care about.
“The aim, for example, would be for each British region and nation to have a globally competitive city, and there would be 12 “missions” with accompanying metrics – ranging from the issues above to R&D spend to numbers receiving high-quality training – which would eventually drive equality with London.”
Why? With all the transport and fibre optic technology that we have, why do you need cities? There’s some very fine shoemakers flogging a load of expensive brogues around the world that are in Kettering and Earls Barton. Aston Martin are in the middle of nowhere. I’m working with a good little startup right now in Huddersfield. You can trade stocks while sat in a cafe in Devizes with a phone, so what’s to stop someone running a fund from Radstock or Olney or just anywhere? Even media that used to need cities and studios, that’s going too. Lots of these YouTubers are doing their thing from anywhere. Milwaukee, Arizona. There’s a load of filmmaking being done around South Wales, between Newport and Cardiff. You just need space for a studio and a way to fly Hollywood stars in and out.
Else the graft doesn’t work.
Firmly?
Once again, I’m reminded of the Sheffield, a City on the Move film from the 70s that plays over the beginning of The Full Monty.
I Believe In Miracles.
<i>…– unleashing the bottom-up energy…</i>
Given the usual associations associated with an organisation with “Pride” in its name perhaps a re-wording might be in order.
Money straight into the pockets of various Labour supporters…
Globally competitive cities? Yeah England already has three: The square mile City of London (excluding the rest of the metropolis), Oxford and Cambridge.
Bristol was once but ceased to be over a century before Will Hutton went to university.
@ Bongo Middlesbrough was not just competitive but a world leader under Queen Victoria and it remained competitive for a century. When I was young ICI Billingham – just across the river from Middlesbrough – was also a world leader; then we got Harold Wilson and the North-East’s industry was destroyed by Labour’s greed (on behalf of its union paymasters) and stupidity.
There’s an argument that the enormous rise in living standard in the US compared to the UK since 2008 is precisely because the state does not attempt to “revive” declining cities. It leaves them to die, while the workforce moves on to where the new action is.