Conversations
in a
small town
Rear Window
6 May 1999
Stock
A poem
Tessa Ransford
The Oxford English Dictionary gives 69 definitions of ‘stock’’. When it means a fund or store, the word evokes the trunk, or stock, of a tree, ‘from which the gains are an outgrowth’. Collapse occurs when you prune the tree so heavily that it dies. Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows.
George Monbiot,
Weekly Guardian,
24 October 2008
Take stock
make stock
root and stock
stock up
clear stock
stocks and shares
Stock the larder
stock the shelves
lock and stock
stock and barrel
Farm stock
herd and flock
choc a bloc
build on rock
Woodstock
tree stock
leaf and fruit
good stock
Cut and dock
now stump
now dwindling
now finished
shock
shock
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London, land of the
feral megarich,
has the lot
Christopher Harvie
I
Scotland: ‘a faraway country of which we know little’? Judging by the reports on our election in the London press this seemed the going opinion. As far as the journalists themselves were concerned, one of them had – fatefully – become the only Scots story.
It wasn’t just the problems of Mr Marr and Dr Brown – whose £50,000 a speech makes one wonder what he might get if he were competent at economics. The machinery of the Union was itself faulty. The West Coast main line, modernised at a cost well north of £10 billion, was severed at the weekend because of ‘track improvements’ between Warrington and Carlisle. A means of easing congestion on the crowded bank holiday roads was decanting passengers into buses. I reached Aberystwyth four hours late and may have been among the more fortunate.
In comparison, the machinery of the ‘United Kingdom of London’ works pretty well. I can claim to have established a bridgehead in metrostudies back in 1983 in a Fabian pamphlet that argued the London left would try to steer the financial centre through ‘servitor-capitalism’ – supplying the beast with its cultural victuals and being rewarded with cash and jobs. At this time Edinburgh, as an alternative, was doing much of the city’s business more soberly, with rational, low-key management personified by the Royal Bank’s Charlie Winter. Now London has the lot, but the demise of the Scottish banks has so far figured nowhere in this election.
Wickedness is back on the football terraces? Or are things more connected – and complicated – than they seem? A recent piece in the Financial Times by Simon Kuper concentrated on the world-wide threat of football manipulation by global betting syndicates, who knew and cared even less about the Boyne or Ninety-Eight than the bought-in gladiators who are paid to kick the ball. Instability is meat and drink to folk in smoke-filled rooms in the Gulf or Shanghai – and, I’d guess, to parts of the more clinical world of ‘moral hazard’. We ought not to discount either bunch from any investigation.
II
The point is not that London has cleaned up its act. The fleshposts are still on call to offer booze, bling and girls to the feral megarich. Plenty of low-paid labour, unvisited by legal protection, lies to hand. But the machine works far better than it once did. The place learned from the horrors of the 1987 Kings Cross fire. The expanded central business district which stretches from there east to Stratford and south to docklands is built for and round first-rate public transport, from Eurostar and the city airport to the tube and the docklands light railway, the lifts and escalators of Canary Wharf. And only two hours away lie the two other bits of the hub: Brussels and Paris.
Though much of London remains a Dickensian muddle, this crucial piece of heart-and-lungs isn’t. You can see why the city fathers in the late 1990s, confronted with a clever IRA campaign of economic targeting – a third major bomb would have finished the place – fixed a way out through the Good Friday agreement, plus massive public subsidies. If Scots get more than the regional subsidy average – £ 116 for every £100 spent in the English regions – Londoners get £ 170.
III
The guru who supplied the last bit of information was weel-kent: Prof Iain McLean of Nuffield, Oxford, doing a dramatic slash-and-burn election routine on Scottish investment and public service administration last week in the Hootsmon. McLean and I go back to Munro-bagging in the depths of late-1960s winters, and he now occupies the politics post once graced by Sir David Butler.
Butler came from an epoch when political science was so popular his twin Professor Robert McKenzie got himself and Swingometer on to the Morecambe and Wise show. But I don’t accept the McLean line that public sector workers are more toxic than lawyers and bankers, which London has in superabundance. Or politicians and their retinue moonlighting in alien fields like literature and history: politics being an area where identification is guaranteed to triumph over competence, as with the Thoughts of Broon.
Oddly, what emerges from McLean is an intriguingly provincial angle on the whole business: a preoccupation with inter-regional transfers rather than with the health and sustainability of the central machine. If the lessons of 2008 were that bankers had played merry hell with regulation – ‘moral hazard’ covering the more accurate epithet ‘daylight robbery’ – and Gordon kept the machine running by robbing workers and savers by ‘quantitative easing’ – aka ‘devaluing the currency’, McLean wasn’t really interested in altering this. Instead he argued energetically for cutting back provincial expenditure, wanting to scrap the Edinburgh tram and the Borders railway – something of a contradiction from the man who devised the funding package for the Tyneside metro back in the 1970s and has lovingly restored the Welshpool and Llanfair railway.
IV
Alf Young was doing some similar agonising yesterday about the costs of renewables generation. But what do we need the power for? Space heating and air conditioning takes up about a third of energy output, but our housing is poor (scraping into category C) by European thermal standards. A car produces annually three times its weight in CO2. The evidence of overeating and lack of exercise is everywhere present in the land where MacMillan and Dunlop perfected the push-bike. In Stirling 82% of council employees went to work by car, 11% walked or ran; 4% went by bus, 2% by bike, 1% by train. In Copenhagen 39% walked or biked. Weaning us off our perverse enjoyment of being Europe’s Greater Springfield can’t be anything but win-win.
In green-red Baden-Wuerttemberg giant supermarkets are frowned on by planners and no way is Sunday the day of the big shop: heavy lorries are banned from the motorways at weekends. Do we know how much it costs simultaneously to heat up and cool down our giant supermarkets? The big four always announce – besides how many jobs they bring – how environment-friendly their latest building is, which makes you wonder how unfriendly their previous sheds were, even leaving aside the enduring transport costs of goods in and loaded cars out. As for the urban consequences of the malls, visit anywhere that has received their full-throttle attentions: Inverness, Keith, Galashiels.
Memo to new MSPs: if you want the quiet life, don’t mess with the British – and proud of it – retail consortium and don’t mention Tesco in a speech which might just be published or go online. Sir Terry Leahy’s intelligence service, in my Holyrood day, made Big Brother look like Blue Peter. Down that road of commodified lives lies the incivility that Kenneth Roy noted in Ayr, framed in the dusty shop windows of its streets. What’s decaying is not just urban variety but those local firms – and farms – which could produce skilled citizens.
Where youngsters eager to use their hands cannot get respect, mentoring, skills and adequate reward they will be at risk from the cheap booze, fast food and dimwit media that will be all that’s left. They deserve better.
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
