Brian Rushton Holding steady

Brian Rushton,

BRITONS who enjoy seeing commentators eat their words will be happy. Contrary to all predictions, official statistics released on June 25th showed that child poverty stayed constant in 2013-14. Cuts to benefits for the working-age poor, combined with stagnant wages in the labour market, were widely forecast to push poverty up. Instead, it seems that falls in unemployment and tax cuts were enough to keep it in check. Iain Duncan-Smith, the work and pensions secretary, claimed the figures vindicated the government’s policy of reducing the benefits bill.

Median weekly income after tax, adjusted to be comparable with a household containing two adults and no children, was £453 ($712) in 2013/14, or about £23,500 per year. To be classed as living in relative poverty, a household must have an income below 60% of the median. That works out at £272 per week. Like last year, 15% of adults and 17% of children live in households in relative...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Ramadan ding-dong

Brian Rushton,

The crescent and the cross

BY THE bloody standards of Middle Eastern sectarianism, it is a slight affair. On the fourth day of Ramadan, dawn worshippers in Bradford found the wall of their husseiniya, or Shia mosque, daubed with the word “KAFIR” (infidel). But flare-ups, once rare, between Britain’s 400,000-odd Shias and 2.3m Sunnis are on the rise.  

Safdar Shah, one of the husseiniya’s founders, says that 30 years ago, when most of the city’s Sunnis and Shias arrived from the Pakistani side of Kashmir, they often prayed together. But over the past year leaflets denouncing Shias have circulated on city buses, and Sunnis have launched a boycott of two Shia-owned takeaways in Little Horton, a neighbourhood where over half the population is Asian. A flurry of tweets enjoin Sunnis to “stay away from Shia”. Community elders fear the identity politics sweeping the Middle East are seeping into Britain’s school playgrounds, prisons and mosques.

“We all condemn atrocities in Palestine, but Sunnis just shrug when Shias in Pakistan are massacred...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Smells like middle-aged spirit

Brian Rushton,

But will it all fit in the yurt?

TO JUDGE by the crowds making their way to Glastonbury Festival on June 24th, it is a good time to be in the music industry. This week nearly 200,000 revellers set up camp across several fields in Somerset, where the festival has been held nearly every year since it first started as a small, hippyish event in 1970. Now hundreds of live bands and DJs will perform on 90 stages over five days. Each punter pays £225 ($353) for the experience, which, thanks to the damp British weather, tends to be a muddy one.

Glastonbury is perhaps the most striking example in Britain of how big music festivals are booming. But as the demand for festivals becomes ever greater, a potential supply-side problem has started to become apparent. It hints at how the music industry has changed rapidly over the past ten years, and how it may need to adapt.

Over the past decade sales of recorded music fell sharply. According to the BPI, an industry body, income from recorded music fell from £1.2 billion in 2004 to just under £700m in 2014. The fall has slowed in recent years, partly because of the increase...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton The sweet spot

Brian Rushton,

DURING its industrial heyday, “Leicester clothes the world” was the proud boast of this East Midlands city. The once-giant textile and garment industry, however, is mostly gone, a victim of Asian competition. This knocked the stuffing out of the city. But now Leicester is in the midst of a comeback, led by a new generation of people like Charlie Evans.

Rather than clothing the world, she has the more modest ambition of putting a few stylish packs on people’s backs. While completing a graphic-design degree at the local De Montfort University (DMU) she came up with the idea of a cardboard backpack, made almost entirely of recyclable materials. She enrolled at a business boot-camp, called Crucible, at the university’s Innovation Centre, where she was given a stipend of £8,000 ($12,560) and the help of a business mentor. She has since started her own company and found a local manufacturer who will turn out the first 100 or so bags by September.

Ms Evans’s rapid ascent reflects Leicester’s wider story. In the UK Growth Dashboard, published on June 16th by the Enterprise Research Centre, a research outfit, the city surprised many by equalling London in producing the fastest-growing businesses in England. The county of Leicestershire trailed London, but outside the capital was equalled only by Oxfordshire.

An important ingredient in its success...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton No funfair

Brian Rushton,

TENS of thousands of anti-austerity demonstrators marched past his front door in London on June 20th, but David Cameron appeared not to be listening. Two days later, in a speech in Cheshire, the prime minister hinted at how he plans to cut £12 billion ($19 billion) from the welfare budget, to help close the £75 billion (4% of GDP) deficit by 2018-19. In the crosshairs are top-ups for the working poor, known as tax credits.

Plans already announced to freeze benefits until 2017-18 and reduce the annual household benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000 could save more than £1 billion a year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a think-tank. Tightening the rules on disability benefits and taxing them could save another £1.5 billion. But after ring-fencing pensions and child benefit, two of the biggest chunks of the £220-billion annual welfare bill, Mr Cameron is left with only about £110 billion that is open to cuts. The most sliceable parts are tax credits and housing.

These benefits have boosted the incomes of many low-paid Britons. But Conservatives argue that they subsidise companies and landlords. “Business knows the state will top up if only the minimum wage is paid,” says Christian Guy of the Centre for Social Justice, a right-leaning think-tank. “And landlords let properties to the state, which then pays off their...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Cruising, for now

Brian Rushton,

“I’M GOING to where the challenges are greatest.” So declared Mark Carney when he was appointed governor of the Bank of England in November 2012. “Britain needs the very best...and in Mark Carney we have got him,” purred George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer, at the same time. Soon after Mr Carney assumed office, Britain’s economy took off; today it soars. That suggests the world’s only glamorous central banker should congratulate himself on a successful transatlantic rescue mission when he celebrates two years in the job on July 1st. In reality, monetary policy has been mostly on autopilot. Mr Carney is still waiting for the right moment to change course.

In late 2012 the economy was sluggish. But by the time Mr Carney had crossed the Atlantic, the recovery was already under way; in the first half of 2013, while Mr Carney was readying himself for the job, GDP grew at an annualised rate of 2.5%. House prices had begun to rise and share prices had returned to their pre-crisis high.

That did not stop Mr Carney from pushing the throttle on his arrival, with “forward guidance”: a conditional promise not to raise interest...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton The end of industry

Brian Rushton,

TRUDGING from the mineshaft, black with coal-dust from their plastic helmets to their steel-capped boots and naked legs, the Hatfield miners appear as a vision from a former age. The three-metre thick Barnsley seam they have spent the past eight hours clawing at is, in fact, merely half a mile underground. Yet the geo-economy which, over the course of three centuries, it has brought into being, sustained and sometimes blighted, in pit villages across South Yorkshire and machines, factories and power-stations across Britain, is almost dead now.

At their peak, shortly before the first world war, the deep mines of Yorkshire, Durham, South Wales and other sedimentary places, engines of the Industrial Revolution, employed over a million men and boys. They were the foundation of the modern British economy, “a sort of caryatid”, wrote George Orwell, “upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported”. But mining has ever since been in decline, marked by sudden bursts of pit closure more divisive, and calamitous for the communities affected, than any other aspect of Britain’s deindustrialisation. Twenty-three pits closed in 1985,...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton They do

Brian Rushton,

A RAINBOW parade will whirl through London on June 27th to mark Pride, a weeklong gay jamboree. Britain’s “LGBTQ+ community”, the term used by the march’s organisers to cover the ever-broadening spectrum of human sexuality, has plenty to celebrate. Since 2005 gay couples have been able to form civil partnerships, marriages in all but name. Since 2014 they have also been allowed to wed (except in Northern Ireland).

Civil partnerships already conferred marriage-like rights and obligations. So before the parliamentary vote on equal marriage in 2013 traditionalists such as Philip Hammond, now the foreign secretary (who declined to fly the rainbow flag over British embassies this week, in contrast to his predecessor), opposed the law on the basis that “there was no huge demand for this”. It turns out that they were wrong. Given the choice, most gay couples are opting to marry—and many in civil partnerships are converting.

Last year the Office for National Statistics reported that 1,409 gay couples tied the knot in the first three months of the new law. That was nearly as many as formed civil partnerships during the...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton A warrior against mediocrity

Brian Rushton,

“CHRISTOPHER”, Sir Chris Woodhead’s general-studies teacher reportedly once wrote, “must learn to convince rather than cudgel”. By the end of Sir Chris ’s six years as head of Her Majesty’s Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), nearly all the teachers in the country agreed.

An energetic reformer, in favour of traditional teaching methods over the pious orthodoxies of the “progressive” education wing, Sir Chris produced mixed feelings. After he resigned as head of Ofsted in 2000, he was awarded “villain of the year” by the Today programme, but also placed second as “hero of the year”. He had been supported by Tony Blair, then the prime minister, but had been at odds with David Blunkett, the education secretary. He had raised teaching standards; on his watch the government closed more than 100 failing schools and worked to improve 604 more. But he had infuriated schools, the unions and, finally, the Labour Party. He once famously declared that 15,000 of England’s...Continue reading

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