The scene, Alf Day has joined the RAF:
"Pluckrose who was also a sergeant, although it didn't suit him - not that a commission would have suited any better - his face was simply incompatible with Air Council Instructions: it had the wrong atmosphere and superiors took it amiss. Added to which he could never shut up.
'Well I didn't ask to come.' Peering over Alfred's head on the first day, beaming about at the hangar full of blue: men standing as if they could think to do nothing else: others searching as if they were late, as if they had lost something, or had been forgotten: others not alone, begining to be not alone.
'Matter of fact King asked me. I got a written invitation - through intermediaries, tht's just what you'd expect, but it should make a difference, you would think. Of course, I volunteered for this part. And not a soul's been civil to me since - except you.'
He beamed down and Alfred could see no doubt in him no unease, only this sense that he was being entertained. 'Wouldn't have turned up if I'd known. I mean it's hardly been efficiently organised, thus far. More like a total fucking shambles.' And amiability in his voice had made his searing not a personal thing, or angry, more of a musical addition. Truly. I mean, a man could catch his fucking death of cold here, for a start. And i suspect worse.'
Alfred, his words in alump under his tongue, ashamed of themselves, but getting out a decent- sounding, 'Yes.' He was keeping things short, sticking to the phrases he was safe with,the ones hh'd cut away from Staffordshire, that could sound fully RAF.
He still practised in his head.
Yo bin and yo bay. Yo doe and yo day.
You are, or you have been and you aren't, or you haven't been. You do and you don't, or you didn't.
Everything getting longer and longer when you started to say it that way - and harsh too, the h's everywhere to trip you, having to hack out each one.
I bin.
I am. I was.
The way I was. The soft way I was.
His dad had always said, 'Doe talk soft.' But he'd meant don't talk as if you're stupid, he'd meant Alfred was stupid. Now Alfred was talking hard."
What Black Country person on leaving God's country has not felt something similar?
It was a joy to read the Guardian’s G2 section on January 24th. There was a double page spread of an interview by Stuart Jeffries of Alison Louise Kennedy.
Better known as author Al Kennedy she had just won £30,000 from Costa for her novel Day. Well so what I here you say, well the hero of said novel, a former wartime Lancaster rear gunner – the bravest of the brave – returns to Germany to appear as an actor in a film about an escape from a prisoner of war camp like the one he had been held in having been forced to bale out over Germany.
Like a lot of that generation war had given his life a sense of purpose that civvy street failed to provide and in a way it was a journey back to where everything began to go wrong.
Jolly interesting full of all sorts of moral dilemmas about the British character and all that stuff except that the “hero” Alfie Day hail’s from Wednesbury.
Stuart Jefferies takes up the story,
“I tell Kenedy that my parents hailed from Wednesbury, the Black Country town from which Day escapes into the thrill of war, a place whose heavy industries the Luftwaffe tried but couldn’t quite finish off ( the Tories where more thorough) while the RAF was bent on reducing German cities to simulacra of the fires of hell.”
Good start methinks at least the interviewer knows where this wonderful place is!
“Why did she choose the Black Country boy as a hero?” Asks Jeffries.
(Not realising the heroic capacity of all Black Country folk).
“I knew about it because my grandparents were from there”, she says.
So another exiled Wednesbury family two in the same Guardian interview is this a first I wonder?
“Its an industrial area where people did very dangerous jobs and could be killed at any time, and extreme levels of poverty.”
So war may have come as a perverse sort of escape – on the can’t be any worse and you get fed and see the world – She sounds alrighyt this AL Kenedy.
Then she commits the coup de grace!
“She was drawn, too to the strange dialect.”
“There’s an enormous sense of humour in the way Black Country people speak. It’s very playful and very old language.”
What are you waiting for get down the bookshop!!!
A Further review from the OBSERVER :
"YOU CAN CALL ME AL"
In a rare interview, the elusive AL Kennedy unburdens herself on men, the joy of stand-up comedy and the worth of long walks
Geraldine Bedell
Sunday March 25, 2007
The Observer
Alison Louise Kennedy is contemptuous of this whole undertaking. 'Never mind the work, let's review the author,' she has written scathingly about interviewers on her website. 'Someone who sits alone for a hours at a time, typing, must be really fascinating and it beats having to think about anything, doesn't it?'
Her short stories and novels, the latest of which is Day, are often mordantly funny and teeming with startling images. Like her approach to interviews, though, they make no concessions: her writing is linguistically and emotionally demanding. 'It's like anal sex,' she explains when I ask her about her fiercely literary attitude to her work and her correspondingly confrontational presentation of it. 'If that's what I want to do to you and you're not into it, then go away, because that's what will keep happening.'
Before we can get on to anal sex, however, I go to see her at a Glasgow comedy club, where she has a regular gig as a stand-up. I catch my first glimpse of her as she's waiting to go on stage, bopping away with another performer in a corner. Having reread her books and studied her website's acidic reviews of her reviews, I have become so alarmed by her that I'm actually shocked to see her doing something so frivolous.
Her stand-up is startlingly good. She works the audience and makes the most of her cleverness with words, her knack for seeing things freshly. She has a great riff about people scraping moss off each other every morning in Scotland, but the audience seems most to enjoy the material about pubic hair. I learn that her father was from Birmingham and her mother from North Wales, that they went to Australia but then came back to Dundee before she was born and that they split up when she was quite small, which is more information than she ever appears to have divulged in an interview.
'It's a cartoon version of my childhood,' she says when we meet the next day in a tea shop near her home in the West End of Glasgow. She is particularly dismissive of physical descriptions of herself, but she has a strikingly high forehead, which seems to be permanently creased in a frown, and wears jeans, flat shoes and no make-up. One way and another, she appears to suffer very little from the usual female handicap of anxiety to please.
She says she doesn't give away more to interviewers 'because they don't ask interesting questions. Plus I don't particularly want ...' She tails off, but it's enough to make you wonder whether what she does give is another cartoon version. She has said in the past that she wouldn't be doing stand-up 'if my life wasn't completely shagged', and she continues to protest that she performs mainly because 'it's an analgesic'. She sighs, as though this is all too wearisome: 'I lost a friend who made me laugh a lot. He knew a lot about comedy and we used to share comedy and afterwards I had less access to it. I found I wasn't sleeping and I was passing the time by making things up.'
She doesn't want to talk about this friend, she claims, although she does mention him subsequently. She will say that he wasn't a lover. She once wrote obliquely about a male friend who, tormentingly, had sex with someone else in a hotel where she was also staying; whatever the exact nature of the betrayal, it was enough to end the relationship. For a while, she couldn't write fiction, producing instead the brilliant On Bullfighting.
It's tempting to think that AL Kennedy might be playing up her misery, cultivating the bleakness that is often said to characterise her fiction. There is an unflinching, exposed quality to her work: Day is about RAF bombing raids and requires the reader to enter the head of a man who is mentally disintegrating. She is sensitive to absurdity, to the imminence of what she calls 'the pantomime surprise of death'.
She vigorously denies courting unhappiness, claiming to think it's wholly unnecessary to successful fiction. She'd rather have joy, but it's simply not available. 'I have sex about once every five years. I've lived alone since I was 17. I am slightly tired. My life is not comfortable to me. But I am philosophical. It's just the way things have worked out.'
What would make her comfortable? 'Occasional company,' she says. I am starting to find this self-pity slightly comical, so I say: 'I bet you've got a secret husband at home.' Perhaps she has too, because she answers: 'Yeah, I killed him and ate him.' She would like, she says, 'just to have people to talk to who you can actually talk to, which is quite rare'. Despite this, her whole life is an attempt to communicate. She acknowledges that this looks a bit paradoxical. 'Yeah, you spend your time shouting into a well. You don't often get the echo back. I spend a lot of time making stuff for other people. It's a huge relief if someone talks back to you in a way that gets your head running.'
I don't quite know how seriously to take this vision of lonely rooms, bereft of company, especially as, when the interview ends, we discover we have mutual friends and she enthuses about them and jolly party games they've played. But if at some level, AL Kennedy has decided to put her writing first, it has not been (at least from a reader's point of view) a pointless sacrifice. She has been on the Granta list of Best of Young British Novelists twice, but is still, in my opinion, underrated. She does things no one else can do, including write about sex better than anyone. 'Oh,' she says, 'but that's because I'm not really writing about sex at all.'
Day is the story of a Second World War tail gunner and prisoner of war who, in 1949, becomes an extra in a war film and tunnels back through his memories to discover what has become of him. It's not as blackly funny as her last novel, Paradise, about an alcoholic woman, but Kennedy insists this isn't because of the stand-up. 'It's not a very funny thing, the Second World War.' She then complains I've missed the two Max Miller jokes.
The big question is whether the images in AL Kennedy's books spring into her mind fully formed or whether they are the result of months with a thesaurus and endless revision. 'A lot of it's because my books are character-based,' she says evasively. 'If you want to make something appear fresh, you rely on the fact that no person has a voice quite like any other. With Day, I got a new vocabulary, because of the period and the military stuff and the mental state he's in, but, yeah, if you look at the rewrites, there are up to 150 or 175. Some of that will be commas, some of it will be major.'
I wonder if she shows the work to anyone or relies on her own sense of whether 150 revisions are enough. 'My friend who went away is the only person whose opinion I was ever interested in. He had a very interesting mind. There aren't that many people with good ears. My editor has a good ear, but you can only read something for the first time once. You commit yourself to doing something until it's right and then you learn what right feels like, tastes like, sounds like. It helps if you're obsessive-compulsive and you don't have any distractions.'
You can't help wondering if some of her moroseness derives from the ever-present fact of physical pain. (This will go up on her website in the glib psychobabble section.) She suffered an undiagnosed herniated disc between her shoulder blades for six months, by which time she had muscle wastage. She also fell off a horse and has a 'squint shoulder' and once broke her sacrum, which sometimes gives her sciatica. She has a special chair to write in, hard to envisage, in which her knees are above her heart.
The most common criticism of AL Kennedy's writing is that its craftedness can become oppressive. 'I don't think it's that,' she says. 'I think it's being in someone else's mind. That's fair enough: that's what I want to do to you. If you define plot by what's happening externally to the character, it's true there's no plot in my fiction, but I'm interested in the things people carry around that you don't necessarily see. I just want to get to the bits that interest me.'
For all the craft, the revisions, the foraging for the ideal phrase, AL Kennedy manages to be pretty prolific: she is 41, and Day is her fifth novel. There have been four volumes of short stories (she's working on a fifth right now) plus eight or nine drama scripts, a couple of works of non-fiction, regular journalism and, now, the stand-up. 'If you're quite a fast cook, you don't have children, you don't have pets and you've got no one to talk to, what else are you going to do?' she asks. 'I've got vast amounts of time to occupy.'
On the way home, I wish I'd told Alison Louise Kennedy to stop giving that bloke the satisfaction of knowing he's ruined her life. I don't suppose she'd have listened. She told me she wasn't good company and when I objected that this simply wasn't true, she conceded, 'for a limited period, OK. But I get bored very easily. If you were around all week, I'd want to kill you. I wouldn't tell you, even: I'd just go for increasingly long walks. Having achieved the joy of your friendship, I'd find it disappointing, as I find everything I attain.'
AL Kennedy: initial impressions
1965 Born in Dundee.
1986 Graduates in theatre studies and drama from Warwick University.
1991 Publishes first short-story collection, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains
1993 Completes debut novel, Looking for the Possible Dance. Listed among Granta's 20 Best of Young British Novelists.
1996 Booker Prize judge.
1998 Scripts C4 film Stella Does Tricks
2005 Performs stand-up in Glasgow and at the Edinburgh Fringe.
On her use of initials: 'The authors I first loved all had initials - JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, E Nesbit, ee cummings - and I actively didn't want to know who they were or have them get in the way of my enjoying their story and their voice.'
Tancred Newbury
· Day is published by Jonathan Cape on 5 April, £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Death of Outstanding Wednesbury Footballer
I thought this obituary of our Norman in the Guardian said it all. A man who won two championship medals and won the FA Cup scoring two goals in the final and won England caps. Who went on to play for Darlo! And ended up as a steward for the Saddlers. Modern players with far lesser talent and all their cash and status could not lace his boots. Those where the days our Norman scored his first goal for the club in a pulsating 4-4 draw with West Bromwich Albion in the FA Charity Shield. Yes Wolves and Albion shared the shield for six months each. The 1954 Champions and FA Cup Winners. Bill Shankly was wrong football is just a game and there are things in life that are more important but Normans life shone trough his football career.
Who would have thought that it would be so long before Wolves won the FA Cup again. Maybe they need more lads from Wednesbury in the team!
"Norman Deeley was a tiny ball of high-octane energy and verve that never lost its bounce during his medal-rich prime with Wolverhampton Wanderers at the end of the 1950s.
An irrepressibly dynamic goal-scoring winger versatile enough to thrive on either flank, he excelled as part of the second thunderously powerful combination moulded by the formidable disciplinarian Stan Cullis, helping to lift two consecutive League titles and the FA Cup, and earning England recognition along the way.
There was never very much of the effervescent Midlander. When he made his entrance onto the international stage at schoolboy level during 1947/48, he stood a mere 4ft 4in and was said to be the smallest ever to play for the team. Indeed, he was to grow only a foot taller, but he compensated amply in skill, determination and bravery for what he lacked in physical stature." Wrote Ivan Ponting in the Independent.
Obituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Deeley
Goal scorer in Wolves' FA Cup victory of 1960
Brian Glanville
Wednesday November 28, 2007
Guardian
Norman Deeley, a tiny winger for Wolverhampton Wanderers in their championship winning sides of the 1950s, whose pace, skill and opportunism made light of his size, has died aged 73. At 4ft 4in, he became the smallest ever schoolboy international for England in 1947, and even when full-grown, he was little more than a foot taller.
Born in Wednesbury, West Midlands, he attended Holyhead Road school. Wolverhampton Wanderers was a natural, local club to join and he served them well for 11 years. Perhaps the peak of his achievement was to score twice in the FA Cup final of 1960, though admittedly it was against a Blackburn Rovers team cut down to 10 men when their full-back, Dave Whelan, now owner of Wigan Athletic, was carried off with a broken leg. Already an own goal down, Blackburn still proceeded to play largely the better football, but as they tired, Deeley, operating on the right flank, but always ready to move into the middle, swooped twice.
Altogether, he played 235 First Division matches for Wolves, scoring 75 goals and winning two Championship medals in successive seasons. The first came in 1957-58, when, in 41 appearances, thus missing but a single game, he scored 23 goals. The following season he scored another 17 in 38 appearances.
When things were going wrong for Wolves, he would do his energetic and intelligent best to put them right. As when, in the absence of the team's playmaker, Peter Broadbent, in a game lost 1-0 at Tottenham in September 1961, one wrote: "Deeley did his best to supply the lack of generalship but, well as he played, neatly as he controlled the ball, cleverly as he passed, a winger can do only so much, even when he wanders."
Deeley won two caps for England, on the ill-starred summer tour of South America: a 2-0 defeat in Rio de Janeiro by Brazil, when he was inevitably overshadowed by the explosive brilliance of his Brazilian opposite number at outside right, Julinho; the second in Lima, when Peru humiliated England, beating them 4-1.
In 1961-62 he left Wolves, and helped Leyton Orient to gain promotion to the top division, coming second in Division 2; he scored two goals in 14 games. Later he drifted into non-league, playing in turn for Worcester City, Bromsgrove Rovers and Darlaston, before retiring in 1974. He later worked at a community centre in Walsall and as a steward for Walsall FC. He lived on his at his late mother's home in Wednesbury.
· Norman Victor Deeley, footballer, born November 30 1933; died September 7 2007
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007ituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who would have thought that it would be so long before Wolves won the FA Cup again. Maybe they need more lads from Wednesbury in the team!
"Norman Deeley was a tiny ball of high-octane energy and verve that never lost its bounce during his medal-rich prime with Wolverhampton Wanderers at the end of the 1950s.
An irrepressibly dynamic goal-scoring winger versatile enough to thrive on either flank, he excelled as part of the second thunderously powerful combination moulded by the formidable disciplinarian Stan Cullis, helping to lift two consecutive League titles and the FA Cup, and earning England recognition along the way.
There was never very much of the effervescent Midlander. When he made his entrance onto the international stage at schoolboy level during 1947/48, he stood a mere 4ft 4in and was said to be the smallest ever to play for the team. Indeed, he was to grow only a foot taller, but he compensated amply in skill, determination and bravery for what he lacked in physical stature." Wrote Ivan Ponting in the Independent.
Obituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Deeley
Goal scorer in Wolves' FA Cup victory of 1960
Brian Glanville
Wednesday November 28, 2007
Guardian
Norman Deeley, a tiny winger for Wolverhampton Wanderers in their championship winning sides of the 1950s, whose pace, skill and opportunism made light of his size, has died aged 73. At 4ft 4in, he became the smallest ever schoolboy international for England in 1947, and even when full-grown, he was little more than a foot taller.
Born in Wednesbury, West Midlands, he attended Holyhead Road school. Wolverhampton Wanderers was a natural, local club to join and he served them well for 11 years. Perhaps the peak of his achievement was to score twice in the FA Cup final of 1960, though admittedly it was against a Blackburn Rovers team cut down to 10 men when their full-back, Dave Whelan, now owner of Wigan Athletic, was carried off with a broken leg. Already an own goal down, Blackburn still proceeded to play largely the better football, but as they tired, Deeley, operating on the right flank, but always ready to move into the middle, swooped twice.
Altogether, he played 235 First Division matches for Wolves, scoring 75 goals and winning two Championship medals in successive seasons. The first came in 1957-58, when, in 41 appearances, thus missing but a single game, he scored 23 goals. The following season he scored another 17 in 38 appearances.
When things were going wrong for Wolves, he would do his energetic and intelligent best to put them right. As when, in the absence of the team's playmaker, Peter Broadbent, in a game lost 1-0 at Tottenham in September 1961, one wrote: "Deeley did his best to supply the lack of generalship but, well as he played, neatly as he controlled the ball, cleverly as he passed, a winger can do only so much, even when he wanders."
Deeley won two caps for England, on the ill-starred summer tour of South America: a 2-0 defeat in Rio de Janeiro by Brazil, when he was inevitably overshadowed by the explosive brilliance of his Brazilian opposite number at outside right, Julinho; the second in Lima, when Peru humiliated England, beating them 4-1.
In 1961-62 he left Wolves, and helped Leyton Orient to gain promotion to the top division, coming second in Division 2; he scored two goals in 14 games. Later he drifted into non-league, playing in turn for Worcester City, Bromsgrove Rovers and Darlaston, before retiring in 1974. He later worked at a community centre in Walsall and as a steward for Walsall FC. He lived on his at his late mother's home in Wednesbury.
· Norman Victor Deeley, footballer, born November 30 1933; died September 7 2007
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007ituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
London 3 (St Pancras, Cross-Rail, Heathrow) West Midlands 0.
I have to admit, and all of my environmentalist friends with cringe when I say it but I do like to travel, and that means today a fair bit of flying. Not a huge amount, I travel by train when I can but this year I have flown about six times including two Atlantic crossings. Some years ago after a series of terrible journeys I made a pledge that whenever I went I would avoid going through Heathrow Airport at all costs.
Quite frankly it is a dump. What’s more it is a dump that may have access to all parts of the world from its runways, but on many occasions, which just happen to be the times you want to get there it does not have access to England.
What on earth the Government can be thinking of in trying to shoe-horn another runway between the M3, the M4 and the M25 is beyond me. One can only conclude that the Government have been captured by the Airport operator BAA. Although BAA seems to be in the static rather than the travel business, as they seem more interested in keeping travellers in the Airport as long as possible as captive consumers in their shopping malls, rather than in getting them quickly and safely into the air.
I remember on one trip I was forced to stay overnight at the airport to catch an early morning flight because it was impossible to guarantee that I could make the check in time in the morning rush hour. It still took me over an hour, despite the fact I could see the aeroplane to get from the hotel to the check in desk.
So my question is, even if you mange to demolish Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace to get the new runway down, how will the passengers disembark onto the surrounding infrastructure? We have of course been promised cross-rail but how long is that going to take to tunnel east-west under London?
As a railway fan I have greatly enjoyed the programmes on BBC about the redevelopment of St Pancras Station. What a wonderful inspiring building, but you don’t get much these days for £800 million pounds; the most glorious part of the architecture was built for us by our Victoria forefathers.
Nonetheless look what that investment has done for the image of London and the image of rail travel. It has given even that city of landmarks a new one and made travelling by rail almost sexy.
So where does that leave us in the West Midlands. Travellers from the region will be still be spending millions of pounds a year to get to Heathrow because our own Airport needs a longer runway for those inter-continental flights. There is potential capacity to be used at Birmingham Airport and at East Midlands Airport if the Government stops and thinks for a moment.
Add in some improved rail links to these airports which in the case of Birmingham are already quite good and you have relatively painless expansion. Look if a revitalised St Pancras can make the area around Kings Cross sexy just think what a strikingly designed new New Street could do for Birmingham.
If we include in this the improved cross country rail connections that a new station could deliver and we are looking at a genuinely integrated transport strategy. Isn’t that what they have been telling us for years is the Holy Grail of transport thinking?
I can imagine at some point in the future when the airport is expanded all those planes land at Heathrow and all those people pile out into the terminal and realise there is no space to go anywhere and go straight back home. Like our Government they will never know that a place called England exists. Maybe then a future government will realise the missed opportunity they where presented with in 2007.
Quite frankly it is a dump. What’s more it is a dump that may have access to all parts of the world from its runways, but on many occasions, which just happen to be the times you want to get there it does not have access to England.
What on earth the Government can be thinking of in trying to shoe-horn another runway between the M3, the M4 and the M25 is beyond me. One can only conclude that the Government have been captured by the Airport operator BAA. Although BAA seems to be in the static rather than the travel business, as they seem more interested in keeping travellers in the Airport as long as possible as captive consumers in their shopping malls, rather than in getting them quickly and safely into the air.
I remember on one trip I was forced to stay overnight at the airport to catch an early morning flight because it was impossible to guarantee that I could make the check in time in the morning rush hour. It still took me over an hour, despite the fact I could see the aeroplane to get from the hotel to the check in desk.
So my question is, even if you mange to demolish Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace to get the new runway down, how will the passengers disembark onto the surrounding infrastructure? We have of course been promised cross-rail but how long is that going to take to tunnel east-west under London?
As a railway fan I have greatly enjoyed the programmes on BBC about the redevelopment of St Pancras Station. What a wonderful inspiring building, but you don’t get much these days for £800 million pounds; the most glorious part of the architecture was built for us by our Victoria forefathers.
Nonetheless look what that investment has done for the image of London and the image of rail travel. It has given even that city of landmarks a new one and made travelling by rail almost sexy.
So where does that leave us in the West Midlands. Travellers from the region will be still be spending millions of pounds a year to get to Heathrow because our own Airport needs a longer runway for those inter-continental flights. There is potential capacity to be used at Birmingham Airport and at East Midlands Airport if the Government stops and thinks for a moment.
Add in some improved rail links to these airports which in the case of Birmingham are already quite good and you have relatively painless expansion. Look if a revitalised St Pancras can make the area around Kings Cross sexy just think what a strikingly designed new New Street could do for Birmingham.
If we include in this the improved cross country rail connections that a new station could deliver and we are looking at a genuinely integrated transport strategy. Isn’t that what they have been telling us for years is the Holy Grail of transport thinking?
I can imagine at some point in the future when the airport is expanded all those planes land at Heathrow and all those people pile out into the terminal and realise there is no space to go anywhere and go straight back home. Like our Government they will never know that a place called England exists. Maybe then a future government will realise the missed opportunity they where presented with in 2007.
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
The Politics of Migration: Does the Government know if we are coming or going?
The dust appears to have settled on the Hastilow affair so maybe we can begin to have a grown up debate about migration. Not since the debate on unemployment in the 1980’s have government statistics been so mistrusted.
The most recent official government estimates, crudely based on surveys of people arriving and leaving at our airports, show approximately 1,500 migrants arrived to live in the UK every day during 2005.
Now just admitting that can cause some political apoplexy, a definite case of the meaning of things lying not in the things themselves, but in our attitudes to them.
Our Government, naturally want it both ways; they want the benefits of large scale migration without acknowledging any costs or implications. Having failed miserably to increase UK productivity - output per worker, the way left to increase national output is to increase the labour force. For them the arrival of young workers into Britain is a testament to our “flexible” deregulated labour market as migrants go on to add vastly to GDP.
To employers too, relatively undemanding workers are also a good thing, especially if they require low levels of training and can be hired and fired as business demands require.
For the macro economy then this influx of new workers is an unequivocal good thing. I must admit as someone who has no children but who quite likes the idea of having a pension I too welcome these hard working young migrants.
That deregulation is of course less of a good thing when you find out that thousands of illegal migrants are employed by private security services.
When you look at the impact on the micro, the individual, level it begins to look less rosy. Large scale migration puts pressure on all public services, policing, hospitals, and schools but especially on scarce housing resources.
If you are stuck in a low paid job have poor skills and have now to compete with a young graduate, who probably speaks better English than you do, but who works for very low wages, is not an experience to make you feel welcoming.
It is not just at the bottom end of the labour market that competition for jobs with migrant workers is having an impact. England and Liverpool star Steven Gerrard has called for quotas in the Premiership to protect the national team.
And large scale migration is not the only challenge, globalisation, and huge technological change, can for many people be very disorientating. It is easy for the cosmopolitan elite to forget that most of Britain has been demographically stable for a long time; millions do not travel abroad, have no interest in or access to the internet, and do not see why they need to change.
It is understandable therefore that politicians will seek to articulate the concerns of many of these people. After all why else would the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, talk about “British jobs, for British workers” in his party conference speech?
But the data masks a huge amount of coming and going. Thousands of people are also leaving the country. Net around a 1000 people per day are leaving. Half of those leaving are British citizens heading for Australia, Spain and France to build what they see as better lives for themselves.
My guess is that many of those Eastern Europeans who have come to Britain may well too soon begin to return home as many are now returning to Ireland and India. So what is really interesting about these patterns of migration is that there is a huge churn in the numbers. At this point slightly more of those coming to Britain are staying than those leaving but it would be foolish to make tough proposals on immigration until we have better data and a better understanding of just what is going on.
Our weakness as a nation and what made Nigel Hastlows position so very difficult is that we cannot stop this roundabout and get off. The position we are in is that we need migrant workers to sustain the economy and large parts of our public services.
There is nothing to be proud of in having the NHS staffed by Doctors and Nurses recruited from the health services of developing countries. Nor is their anything to be proud of in having so few English players turning out for our premiership football teams.
But that is where we are. If we are to compete successfully in this global labour market for skills and talent then we need a fundamental long term shift in both the attitudes and the skills of our citizens.
For me this will have been achieved when a new Arsene Wenger selects eleven Englishmen to turn out for Arsenal in the Champions league. Now that may well be a long time in the future and will certainly require a process of better education, training, and skills acquisition but most importantly in motivation and attitude. Crude quotas and knee jerk reactions however will not make the process of facing up to our weaknesses and addressing them any easier.
The most recent official government estimates, crudely based on surveys of people arriving and leaving at our airports, show approximately 1,500 migrants arrived to live in the UK every day during 2005.
Now just admitting that can cause some political apoplexy, a definite case of the meaning of things lying not in the things themselves, but in our attitudes to them.
Our Government, naturally want it both ways; they want the benefits of large scale migration without acknowledging any costs or implications. Having failed miserably to increase UK productivity - output per worker, the way left to increase national output is to increase the labour force. For them the arrival of young workers into Britain is a testament to our “flexible” deregulated labour market as migrants go on to add vastly to GDP.
To employers too, relatively undemanding workers are also a good thing, especially if they require low levels of training and can be hired and fired as business demands require.
For the macro economy then this influx of new workers is an unequivocal good thing. I must admit as someone who has no children but who quite likes the idea of having a pension I too welcome these hard working young migrants.
That deregulation is of course less of a good thing when you find out that thousands of illegal migrants are employed by private security services.
When you look at the impact on the micro, the individual, level it begins to look less rosy. Large scale migration puts pressure on all public services, policing, hospitals, and schools but especially on scarce housing resources.
If you are stuck in a low paid job have poor skills and have now to compete with a young graduate, who probably speaks better English than you do, but who works for very low wages, is not an experience to make you feel welcoming.
It is not just at the bottom end of the labour market that competition for jobs with migrant workers is having an impact. England and Liverpool star Steven Gerrard has called for quotas in the Premiership to protect the national team.
And large scale migration is not the only challenge, globalisation, and huge technological change, can for many people be very disorientating. It is easy for the cosmopolitan elite to forget that most of Britain has been demographically stable for a long time; millions do not travel abroad, have no interest in or access to the internet, and do not see why they need to change.
It is understandable therefore that politicians will seek to articulate the concerns of many of these people. After all why else would the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, talk about “British jobs, for British workers” in his party conference speech?
But the data masks a huge amount of coming and going. Thousands of people are also leaving the country. Net around a 1000 people per day are leaving. Half of those leaving are British citizens heading for Australia, Spain and France to build what they see as better lives for themselves.
My guess is that many of those Eastern Europeans who have come to Britain may well too soon begin to return home as many are now returning to Ireland and India. So what is really interesting about these patterns of migration is that there is a huge churn in the numbers. At this point slightly more of those coming to Britain are staying than those leaving but it would be foolish to make tough proposals on immigration until we have better data and a better understanding of just what is going on.
Our weakness as a nation and what made Nigel Hastlows position so very difficult is that we cannot stop this roundabout and get off. The position we are in is that we need migrant workers to sustain the economy and large parts of our public services.
There is nothing to be proud of in having the NHS staffed by Doctors and Nurses recruited from the health services of developing countries. Nor is their anything to be proud of in having so few English players turning out for our premiership football teams.
But that is where we are. If we are to compete successfully in this global labour market for skills and talent then we need a fundamental long term shift in both the attitudes and the skills of our citizens.
For me this will have been achieved when a new Arsene Wenger selects eleven Englishmen to turn out for Arsenal in the Champions league. Now that may well be a long time in the future and will certainly require a process of better education, training, and skills acquisition but most importantly in motivation and attitude. Crude quotas and knee jerk reactions however will not make the process of facing up to our weaknesses and addressing them any easier.
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Black Country Dialect II
I have been thinking about the revival in the Black Country dialect in the 1980's. Of course the theory is that it is a residue from before the Great Vowel Shift and its persistence is due to a sense of isolation, lack of social mobility and the small number of educational opportunities for what is a region of a million people.
After all Wolverhampton has had its City status for a very short time and a University for only a little while longer. Economically the sub-region was probably in economic decline from the end of the First World War. With larger scale industry developing in the North West, Birmingham and places like Coventry. The Black Country today is still a place of small firms and family owned businesses.
Well in the sixties and seventies the Black Country had been undergoing a marked change in its fortunes with high levels of development. With relatively progressive local authorities improving education and the communications of the place, an area notoriously difficult to get around.
Then came Mrs Thatcher and more importantly Geoffrey Howe, his budget put paid almost overnight to large swathes of Black Country industry. Much of which was admittedly fairly low in terms of skills, technology and therefore productivity. The scale of the disaster was such that the area is only now beginning to recover from the devastation that the almost total collapse of manufacturing had on the area.
Culturally this political polarisation lead to alternative comedy and punk rock. The Black Country was no exception to this but something else also happened. The culture fell back on itself. There was a renaissance in the Black Country variety show, The Black Country Night Out. It was almost as if we fell back on the old gags, monologues and songs to keep our spirits up.
This variety show, made local stars of Dolly Allen, "Hello, me luvers!" and Tommy Mundon, and others like the king of dialect doggerel, Harry Harrison, well known for his dialect verse in the Black Country Bugle and Jon Raven, folk singer and collector of traditional Black Country ballads.
I remember Dolly Allen telling the joke about the westkit or waistcoat in around 1987, forty years after it was mentioned in Ingram’s book about the North Midlands. She I have no doubt had never heard it from a book but was part of the oral tradition.
This variety show toured almost continually with various changes in personnel although the very dark days of that recession. A cheap way to go out and keep up your spirit and make you feel good about who you where and where you came from and about the resilience which had kept the place going. This was I think why the close social fabric held the place together through these dark days. Whether it has also held us back as times have change is another matter!
But I have no doubt that the dialect revival a badge of local pride was revived thanks to Mrs Thatcher.
After all Wolverhampton has had its City status for a very short time and a University for only a little while longer. Economically the sub-region was probably in economic decline from the end of the First World War. With larger scale industry developing in the North West, Birmingham and places like Coventry. The Black Country today is still a place of small firms and family owned businesses.
Well in the sixties and seventies the Black Country had been undergoing a marked change in its fortunes with high levels of development. With relatively progressive local authorities improving education and the communications of the place, an area notoriously difficult to get around.
Then came Mrs Thatcher and more importantly Geoffrey Howe, his budget put paid almost overnight to large swathes of Black Country industry. Much of which was admittedly fairly low in terms of skills, technology and therefore productivity. The scale of the disaster was such that the area is only now beginning to recover from the devastation that the almost total collapse of manufacturing had on the area.
Culturally this political polarisation lead to alternative comedy and punk rock. The Black Country was no exception to this but something else also happened. The culture fell back on itself. There was a renaissance in the Black Country variety show, The Black Country Night Out. It was almost as if we fell back on the old gags, monologues and songs to keep our spirits up.
This variety show, made local stars of Dolly Allen, "Hello, me luvers!" and Tommy Mundon, and others like the king of dialect doggerel, Harry Harrison, well known for his dialect verse in the Black Country Bugle and Jon Raven, folk singer and collector of traditional Black Country ballads.
I remember Dolly Allen telling the joke about the westkit or waistcoat in around 1987, forty years after it was mentioned in Ingram’s book about the North Midlands. She I have no doubt had never heard it from a book but was part of the oral tradition.
This variety show toured almost continually with various changes in personnel although the very dark days of that recession. A cheap way to go out and keep up your spirit and make you feel good about who you where and where you came from and about the resilience which had kept the place going. This was I think why the close social fabric held the place together through these dark days. Whether it has also held us back as times have change is another matter!
But I have no doubt that the dialect revival a badge of local pride was revived thanks to Mrs Thatcher.
Friday, 19 October 2007
Yo cor spake roit!
I had the chance to do a lecture on the sociolinguistics of the Black Country.
Here are the materials I used to explain the place to people unfortunate enough not to know the plerce.
Basically the dialect of the Black Country seems to preserve the way people in England spoke before the great vowel shift!
The The Great Vowel Shift was a gradual process which began in Chaucer's time (early 15th Century) and was continuing through the time of Shakespeare (early 17th Century). Speakers of English gradually changed the parts of their mouth used to articulate the long vowels. Simply put, the articulation point moved upward in the mouth. The vowels, which began being pronounced at the top, could not be moved farther up (without poking into the nose); they became diphthongs1. The upshot has been that the Anglo-Saxons lived (like the Scottish still do) in a 'hoose', and the English live in a 'house'; the Anglo-Saxons (like the Scottish) milked a 'coo', and the English milk a 'cow'; an Anglo-Saxon had a 'gode' day and the English have a 'good' one; an Anglo-Saxon had 'feef' fingers on each hand and the English have 'five'; they wore 'boats' on their 'fate' while the English wear 'boots' on our 'feet'. The Great Vowel Shift is still continuing today in regional dialects; many speakers are now trying to move the topmost articulation points farther up, producing new diphthongs.
So we do genuinely spake Shakespeares english!
“There is nothing throughout the length and breadth of England to compare with the Black Country. It is unique. Much of its appearance is due to a man-made landscape created during the last two centuries, in a ruthless exploitation of its mineral riches. It is a separate and distinct area and not, as often supposed, an extension of Birmingham.”
Louise Wright, The Heart of England, Robert Hale, 1973.
“Iron, coal, limestone and clay, has made the Black Country what it is today.”
Richard Traves, Keeper of Industrial Archaeology Dudley Museum, 1977.
“You have to walk through the Black Country to feel its visual impact. For a start, some of is most fascinating places have no road: it is a region of continual surprises, hidden oddities, sudden, astonishing views. People who have not seen it for themselves will imagine that I am being absurdly romantic to say that it can be indescribably beautiful.”
Caroline Hillier, A Journey to the Heart of England, Paladin, 1978.
When Satan stood on Brierley Hill
And far around he gazed,
He said, ‘I never shall again,
At Hell’s flames be amazed.’
Traditional Ballad.
“I spent the better part of two days staring at this Black Country. The first day was fine and fairly bright. I went from Birmingham through Smethwick and Oldbury to Dudley, which seemed to me a fantastic place. You climb a hill, past innumerable grim works and unpleasant brick dwellings, and then suddenly a ridiculous terracotta music-hall comes into sight, perched on the steep roadside as if a giant had plucked it out of one of the neighbouring valleys and carelessly left it there; and above this music hall (its attraction that week was Parisian Follies) were the ruins of Dudley Castle. I climbed a steep little hillside, and then smoked a pipe or two sitting by the remains of the keep. The view from there is colossal. On the Dudley side, you look down and across the roofs and steeply mounting streets and pointing factory chimneys. It looked as if a great slab of Birmingham had been torn away and titled up there at an angle of forty-five degrees. The view from the other side, roughly I suppose to the north-east, was even more impressive. There was the Black Country unrolled before you like some smouldering carpet. You looked into an immense hollow of smoke and blurred buildings and factory chimneys. There seemed to be no end to it.”
J.B.Priestley, English Journey, William Heinemann, 1934.
“The walks of my childhood were treeless and smoke blighted: they lead me by black canals and among huge slag heaps where no grass could grow, where the sun rarely shone, where a man at night could read his newspaper by the glare of the blast furnaces, lividly reflected in the dense low sky. There was not much to choose in those days between the dingy town and the dingy landscape outside it, except the town abounded in stirring rough-and-independent speech, while the country showed hardly a sign of life and was apparently the habitation of an underground race.”
Henry Newbolt, Letter to the people of Bilston, 1927.
“Black Country people are like their landscape, unbeautiful, unsentimental, with no time for the trimmings of life, but often a warm, if rough, hospitality hides behind the forbidding exterior. Black Country speech is hard for an outsider to understand. It contains inflexions no longer used in everyday English. I bin, thee bist, we bist, yo bin, they bin are declensions of the verb to be. Will becomes woon or woot and a is often sounded as o. Can you translate these? “We `day arf goo coming back in that theer chara.” “Poor owd Alf’s jed, let’s ‘ope ‘e’s gone were we think he ain’t.” Black Country humour is also characteristic, “What are you looking for , Ned?” a collier was asked by his friends . “I’ve lost me weskit,” Ned replied. “Why, y’ foo’ y’ gotten it on!” “Ah, so I have,” exclaimed Ned. Now if yo hadn’y tode me I’d a gone wiaht it.”
J,H.Ingram, North Midland Country, Batsford, 1947-8.
“But let me say before it has to go,
It’s the most lovely country that I know;
Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on
The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.
Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is my ideal scenery.”
W.H. Auden, from, A Letter to Lord Byron, Collected Longer Poems, Faber and Faber, 1968.
“Then we have the evidence of the Black Country dialect, which local historians stoutly maintain is basically Anglo-Saxon and not the refined ‘Kings English’ of the early universities. The dialect is hard for strangers to understand. …the dialect is more genuinely Old English than can be found elsewhere in England, and since Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century using a version of the Mercian dialect, Black Country readers can identify with parts of his writing because they speak or ‘spaken it’ The suffix ‘en’ is one example, for older Black Country people especially will talk ‘of gooin up the housen’. ‘Dun yo knowen who’s got old Ayli’s place?’ they might enquire, whilst ‘Just watch the folken all go by’ appears in an ancient rhyme. ‘Aferd’ for ‘Afraid’ and ‘keche’ for ‘catch, are other Chaucerian examples. …..No commentary on the Black Country would be complete without examples of the hundreds of dialect jokes frequently based, oddly enough, on death and funerals but not indicative of undue morbidity.”
Harold Parsons, The Black Country, Robert Hale, 1986.
Here are the materials I used to explain the place to people unfortunate enough not to know the plerce.
Basically the dialect of the Black Country seems to preserve the way people in England spoke before the great vowel shift!
The The Great Vowel Shift was a gradual process which began in Chaucer's time (early 15th Century) and was continuing through the time of Shakespeare (early 17th Century). Speakers of English gradually changed the parts of their mouth used to articulate the long vowels. Simply put, the articulation point moved upward in the mouth. The vowels, which began being pronounced at the top, could not be moved farther up (without poking into the nose); they became diphthongs1. The upshot has been that the Anglo-Saxons lived (like the Scottish still do) in a 'hoose', and the English live in a 'house'; the Anglo-Saxons (like the Scottish) milked a 'coo', and the English milk a 'cow'; an Anglo-Saxon had a 'gode' day and the English have a 'good' one; an Anglo-Saxon had 'feef' fingers on each hand and the English have 'five'; they wore 'boats' on their 'fate' while the English wear 'boots' on our 'feet'. The Great Vowel Shift is still continuing today in regional dialects; many speakers are now trying to move the topmost articulation points farther up, producing new diphthongs.
So we do genuinely spake Shakespeares english!
“There is nothing throughout the length and breadth of England to compare with the Black Country. It is unique. Much of its appearance is due to a man-made landscape created during the last two centuries, in a ruthless exploitation of its mineral riches. It is a separate and distinct area and not, as often supposed, an extension of Birmingham.”
Louise Wright, The Heart of England, Robert Hale, 1973.
“Iron, coal, limestone and clay, has made the Black Country what it is today.”
Richard Traves, Keeper of Industrial Archaeology Dudley Museum, 1977.
“You have to walk through the Black Country to feel its visual impact. For a start, some of is most fascinating places have no road: it is a region of continual surprises, hidden oddities, sudden, astonishing views. People who have not seen it for themselves will imagine that I am being absurdly romantic to say that it can be indescribably beautiful.”
Caroline Hillier, A Journey to the Heart of England, Paladin, 1978.
When Satan stood on Brierley Hill
And far around he gazed,
He said, ‘I never shall again,
At Hell’s flames be amazed.’
Traditional Ballad.
“I spent the better part of two days staring at this Black Country. The first day was fine and fairly bright. I went from Birmingham through Smethwick and Oldbury to Dudley, which seemed to me a fantastic place. You climb a hill, past innumerable grim works and unpleasant brick dwellings, and then suddenly a ridiculous terracotta music-hall comes into sight, perched on the steep roadside as if a giant had plucked it out of one of the neighbouring valleys and carelessly left it there; and above this music hall (its attraction that week was Parisian Follies) were the ruins of Dudley Castle. I climbed a steep little hillside, and then smoked a pipe or two sitting by the remains of the keep. The view from there is colossal. On the Dudley side, you look down and across the roofs and steeply mounting streets and pointing factory chimneys. It looked as if a great slab of Birmingham had been torn away and titled up there at an angle of forty-five degrees. The view from the other side, roughly I suppose to the north-east, was even more impressive. There was the Black Country unrolled before you like some smouldering carpet. You looked into an immense hollow of smoke and blurred buildings and factory chimneys. There seemed to be no end to it.”
J.B.Priestley, English Journey, William Heinemann, 1934.
“The walks of my childhood were treeless and smoke blighted: they lead me by black canals and among huge slag heaps where no grass could grow, where the sun rarely shone, where a man at night could read his newspaper by the glare of the blast furnaces, lividly reflected in the dense low sky. There was not much to choose in those days between the dingy town and the dingy landscape outside it, except the town abounded in stirring rough-and-independent speech, while the country showed hardly a sign of life and was apparently the habitation of an underground race.”
Henry Newbolt, Letter to the people of Bilston, 1927.
“Black Country people are like their landscape, unbeautiful, unsentimental, with no time for the trimmings of life, but often a warm, if rough, hospitality hides behind the forbidding exterior. Black Country speech is hard for an outsider to understand. It contains inflexions no longer used in everyday English. I bin, thee bist, we bist, yo bin, they bin are declensions of the verb to be. Will becomes woon or woot and a is often sounded as o. Can you translate these? “We `day arf goo coming back in that theer chara.” “Poor owd Alf’s jed, let’s ‘ope ‘e’s gone were we think he ain’t.” Black Country humour is also characteristic, “What are you looking for , Ned?” a collier was asked by his friends . “I’ve lost me weskit,” Ned replied. “Why, y’ foo’ y’ gotten it on!” “Ah, so I have,” exclaimed Ned. Now if yo hadn’y tode me I’d a gone wiaht it.”
J,H.Ingram, North Midland Country, Batsford, 1947-8.
“But let me say before it has to go,
It’s the most lovely country that I know;
Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on
The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.
Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is my ideal scenery.”
W.H. Auden, from, A Letter to Lord Byron, Collected Longer Poems, Faber and Faber, 1968.
“Then we have the evidence of the Black Country dialect, which local historians stoutly maintain is basically Anglo-Saxon and not the refined ‘Kings English’ of the early universities. The dialect is hard for strangers to understand. …the dialect is more genuinely Old English than can be found elsewhere in England, and since Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century using a version of the Mercian dialect, Black Country readers can identify with parts of his writing because they speak or ‘spaken it’ The suffix ‘en’ is one example, for older Black Country people especially will talk ‘of gooin up the housen’. ‘Dun yo knowen who’s got old Ayli’s place?’ they might enquire, whilst ‘Just watch the folken all go by’ appears in an ancient rhyme. ‘Aferd’ for ‘Afraid’ and ‘keche’ for ‘catch, are other Chaucerian examples. …..No commentary on the Black Country would be complete without examples of the hundreds of dialect jokes frequently based, oddly enough, on death and funerals but not indicative of undue morbidity.”
Harold Parsons, The Black Country, Robert Hale, 1986.
Monday, 24 September 2007
No Longer a Wonderful Life at Northern Rock
So the Bank of England has had to effectively nationalise the mortgage bank Northern Rock to save it. A “run on a bank” what an old fashioned phenomenon. We have seen the astonishing sight of thousands of customers queuing to get their money out of a bank something not seen for generations. This means that as a “brand” Northern Rock will almost certainly disappear and an institution that has served the North East well will vanish into some global conglomerate.
To me there are two sets of greedy people here who have destroyed a valuable North Eastern Institution firstly the “customers”. This institution was not so long ago a safe and boring building society doing dull things like providing mortgages for its members and dull but predictable returns on the savings of another (or sometimes the same) set of members.
Many of those panicking to get their life savings out of the Northern Rock today had earlier sold their membership in the Building Society to become shareholders in the new bank. Freed from the constraints of “building society-dom” the “management” of the new Bank has been, to say the least, innovative in generating profits for its shareholders.
Mervyn King at the Bank of England it seems to me tried to explain the rules of the private sector to the Rocks and its customers ie that this is a private business and private businesses from time to time go bust; that is a fact of life. Whatever form of regulation we employ some businesses will always go bust. Asking a private business to behave like a public institution is like asking a cat to be a dog.
Of course the sight of a private business going bust was too much for the political class and they bounced the bank into a bail out. Not the policy, of course, if the business had been going bust out of sight or happened to be in the “old economy”, of say manufacturing or mining or agriculture, you know the ones that actually produce things. Gordon Brown the architect of the current deregulated financial services infrastructure wants the current state of affairs to continue as long as possible or at least past the next election.
The second issue is the business model the management employed. This was to give mortgages to almost anyone who passed through their doors and to raise the cash to fund these mortgages from the wholesale money market. There is no doubt that the new Bank played the globalisation game very well. They sourced cash where it was cheap and resold it in the UK where it is, contrary to the protestations of our Chancellor of the Exchequer, expensive. UK interests rates being amongst the highest in the developed world.
Nothing wrong with this - unless you are trying to balance the nation’s books. This is what Tesco do with underpants or vegetables: exploiting the opening out of the global economy and the strong pound to buy cheap and sell expensive. For Northern Rock this was fine until August 9th. The surpluses in the Middle East and Russia from high oil prices and in China from its huge trade surplus could be happily recycled through complex financial instruments to buy houses in the USA or here in the UK.
This was always going to end in tears cheap “tic” from overseas was never going to last for ever. If an individual constantly borrows to fund their current expenditure their bank manager would not be too impressed. We, following the US, have been using cheap credit, not to invest in productive capacity or new products but to fund current expenditure.
The amount we save in Britain is pathetic, we have had fifteen years of continuous economic growth, but instead of using this to build up our industries and to create a product base of goods and services the world wants to buy, we have simply gone shopping. The only thing we have built is a £1.3 trillion mountain of personal debt. It is no good saying, as I heard the Director General of the CBI say on that the radio, that 80% of this is secured against housing.
Houses simply keep some of us dry and give us somewhere to sleep. They do not do anything else they are sometimes stores of wealth but they do not create it; they are not businesses, they produce no products, no exports, and no real wealth. What Northern Rock and other mortgage banks are actually doing is disastrous for the long-term health of our economy.
The old building societies may have been dull but they recycled money in the localities they served. The old Northern Rock raised money in the North East and invested it in the North East. Like the Building and Loan Association in Bedford Falls in Frank Capra's classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Mortgage holders and savers were to a large extent sheltered from the global economy. And when in the film there was a run on the Savings and Loan Association, Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey could stand on the counter and tell each saver who their money had been lent to make a new home.
Well Northern Rock, or more precisely the Northern Counties Building Society since 1860 and the Rock Building Society since 1865 before they merged to form Northern Rock in 1965, had been doing just this for almost a century and a half.
What the new Bank has been doing however is siphoning money out of the North East to give it to people across the other side of the world, whilst with their lax lending rules contributing to the inflation in house prices.
Just as the Banks who were funding the sub prime sector in the US have gone on strike, so have the banks that were funding Northern Rock’s huge expansion in the mortgages it gives. It created one in five of Britain’s mortgages in the first half of the year. That appears unlikely to continue in the second half. Who will now go to them for a mortgage?
This management team have destroyed a Northern Institution. I doubt if the new owners of this mortgage debt will be so keen to identify with the North East and support North East Sport, charities and the arts as they will have little need to attract savers from that part of the world after all only a quarter of their borrowing came from individual savers whio are now somewhat few and far between.
Unlike in the film the savers will not be able in this case to sve the bank we as a nation simply do not save enough. We are a nation living on credit and it has just been turned off.
Norther Rock are not alone in this model of lending, other mortgage banks like the Alliance and Leicester and Bradford and Bingley are also exposed, although not to the same extent as Northern Rock but they will all be affected by the increase in interest rates for inter-bank lending. There is bound to be some knock-on effect into the housing market with mortgages getting harder to come by.
Some slow down in the rate of UK House price inflation is certainly welcome, but with so much of our economy tied up in housing this could have a serious impact. Also were does this leave the great success story of the UK’s financial services sector? This past weeks global TV pictures haven’t done its reputation much good and the North East has lost a true champion that survived the Boer War two world wars and the depression and great crash but could not survive contemporary greed .
To me there are two sets of greedy people here who have destroyed a valuable North Eastern Institution firstly the “customers”. This institution was not so long ago a safe and boring building society doing dull things like providing mortgages for its members and dull but predictable returns on the savings of another (or sometimes the same) set of members.
Many of those panicking to get their life savings out of the Northern Rock today had earlier sold their membership in the Building Society to become shareholders in the new bank. Freed from the constraints of “building society-dom” the “management” of the new Bank has been, to say the least, innovative in generating profits for its shareholders.
Mervyn King at the Bank of England it seems to me tried to explain the rules of the private sector to the Rocks and its customers ie that this is a private business and private businesses from time to time go bust; that is a fact of life. Whatever form of regulation we employ some businesses will always go bust. Asking a private business to behave like a public institution is like asking a cat to be a dog.
Of course the sight of a private business going bust was too much for the political class and they bounced the bank into a bail out. Not the policy, of course, if the business had been going bust out of sight or happened to be in the “old economy”, of say manufacturing or mining or agriculture, you know the ones that actually produce things. Gordon Brown the architect of the current deregulated financial services infrastructure wants the current state of affairs to continue as long as possible or at least past the next election.
The second issue is the business model the management employed. This was to give mortgages to almost anyone who passed through their doors and to raise the cash to fund these mortgages from the wholesale money market. There is no doubt that the new Bank played the globalisation game very well. They sourced cash where it was cheap and resold it in the UK where it is, contrary to the protestations of our Chancellor of the Exchequer, expensive. UK interests rates being amongst the highest in the developed world.
Nothing wrong with this - unless you are trying to balance the nation’s books. This is what Tesco do with underpants or vegetables: exploiting the opening out of the global economy and the strong pound to buy cheap and sell expensive. For Northern Rock this was fine until August 9th. The surpluses in the Middle East and Russia from high oil prices and in China from its huge trade surplus could be happily recycled through complex financial instruments to buy houses in the USA or here in the UK.
This was always going to end in tears cheap “tic” from overseas was never going to last for ever. If an individual constantly borrows to fund their current expenditure their bank manager would not be too impressed. We, following the US, have been using cheap credit, not to invest in productive capacity or new products but to fund current expenditure.
The amount we save in Britain is pathetic, we have had fifteen years of continuous economic growth, but instead of using this to build up our industries and to create a product base of goods and services the world wants to buy, we have simply gone shopping. The only thing we have built is a £1.3 trillion mountain of personal debt. It is no good saying, as I heard the Director General of the CBI say on that the radio, that 80% of this is secured against housing.
Houses simply keep some of us dry and give us somewhere to sleep. They do not do anything else they are sometimes stores of wealth but they do not create it; they are not businesses, they produce no products, no exports, and no real wealth. What Northern Rock and other mortgage banks are actually doing is disastrous for the long-term health of our economy.
The old building societies may have been dull but they recycled money in the localities they served. The old Northern Rock raised money in the North East and invested it in the North East. Like the Building and Loan Association in Bedford Falls in Frank Capra's classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Mortgage holders and savers were to a large extent sheltered from the global economy. And when in the film there was a run on the Savings and Loan Association, Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey could stand on the counter and tell each saver who their money had been lent to make a new home.
Well Northern Rock, or more precisely the Northern Counties Building Society since 1860 and the Rock Building Society since 1865 before they merged to form Northern Rock in 1965, had been doing just this for almost a century and a half.
What the new Bank has been doing however is siphoning money out of the North East to give it to people across the other side of the world, whilst with their lax lending rules contributing to the inflation in house prices.
Just as the Banks who were funding the sub prime sector in the US have gone on strike, so have the banks that were funding Northern Rock’s huge expansion in the mortgages it gives. It created one in five of Britain’s mortgages in the first half of the year. That appears unlikely to continue in the second half. Who will now go to them for a mortgage?
This management team have destroyed a Northern Institution. I doubt if the new owners of this mortgage debt will be so keen to identify with the North East and support North East Sport, charities and the arts as they will have little need to attract savers from that part of the world after all only a quarter of their borrowing came from individual savers whio are now somewhat few and far between.
Unlike in the film the savers will not be able in this case to sve the bank we as a nation simply do not save enough. We are a nation living on credit and it has just been turned off.
Norther Rock are not alone in this model of lending, other mortgage banks like the Alliance and Leicester and Bradford and Bingley are also exposed, although not to the same extent as Northern Rock but they will all be affected by the increase in interest rates for inter-bank lending. There is bound to be some knock-on effect into the housing market with mortgages getting harder to come by.
Some slow down in the rate of UK House price inflation is certainly welcome, but with so much of our economy tied up in housing this could have a serious impact. Also were does this leave the great success story of the UK’s financial services sector? This past weeks global TV pictures haven’t done its reputation much good and the North East has lost a true champion that survived the Boer War two world wars and the depression and great crash but could not survive contemporary greed .
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