The Public The Public Don't Want

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17, 2008

The Public The Public Don't Want

A nuclear waste dump? No, it's sixty million quid's worth of art

Commenting on our recent post suggesting local authorities should get more power over regeneration cash, Snapper from West Brom reckoned they'd simply waste it: "Witness the nationally lambasted 'arts centre' known as tHE pUBLIC. £50 million so far and rising".

I made a mental note to investigate said arts centre (pic above). But as it happens, the S Times has saved me the trouble:

"AN arts centre nicknamed the “pink elephant” – a black box with curly pink window frames that has already swallowed almost £60m of public money – has admitted no paying visitors since it opened as its main gallery does not work.

The gallery of interactive digital displays that was supposed to attract queues of people to The Public in West Bromwich, has had to be roped off because of electrical problems. Even free concerts and other events held at the centre have attracted few visitors. One performance, by the soul singer Aisha, drew an audience of just 17 people...

With the centre producing almost no income so far, except from hiring out space for business events, Sandwell council, which owns and runs the building has been forced to give it an extra £3m. This comes on top of the £14m already provided and £500,000 a year in running costs.

A further £13m has been provided by the European Development Fund and Advantage West Midlands, the regional development agency."

Blimey. This ticks almost all known money wasting boxes - arts hand outs, unfit for purpose, post-modern neo-Stalinist state architecture that will need demolition in 20 years (or earlier), EU hand outs, Regional Development Agency hand outs... the centre only needs an equal opportunities buttock clenching zone and they'll have the full set.

And just check out the attractions posted on its website. For example, this very weekend artist Michael Pinchbeck will present (?) his "four year live art project called The Long and Winding Road. He packed a car with the belongings of his brother and drove to Liverpool where his brother died in 1998. The car tours to galleries and festivals until 2008 when Pinchbeck will drive the car into the River Mersey. Admission will be on a first-come-first-served basis." 

Don't all rush at once.

In recent years, these tax-funded art centres/galleries have sprung up all over the country. We've blogged quite a few on BOM, both the huge amounts that have been spent on them, and the ludicrous things they put on (including those outstanding photos of "a man holding his penis" at the Baltic Centre Gateshead - all that was left after the police seized the other exhibits on child porn grounds).

So why've we got to have them? The claim is generally that they help regenerate all those frightful Northern places Policy Exchange wants to close down. But as we blogged here, there is absolutely zip evidence they succeed in that. Plus, many of these centres have been built in places that don't need regeneration - like just down the road from the Major and I.

The truth is that they are the product of the top-down arts and regeneration industries. With Whitehall funding, local councils figure they might as well go along with the whole nonsense - what harm can it do? Only later do they work out they're left holding the maintenance and upkeep baby.

And as for local residents, they don't get any say at all. Often, they have no idea the thing is being built until it starts taking shape. So it's hardly surprising they don't flock to events.

Unwanted, unsupported, and a long-term burden on local council tax payers.

It makes you want to scream.

PS Is Pinchbeck's car journey art? Well, like the man said, if he says it's art, it must be art. I just don't see why I should pay for it, that's all.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 2008

Fending Off The Bear

We've just watched a TV doc with ex-spychief Stella Rimington reviewing Britain's changing attitude to Russia over the last century. Very interesting, especially since she finished it before the invasion of Georgia.

She ended by asking whether we will ever feel able to trust the Russians? I must say I know very little about Russia other than what I've seen in the news over the years, plus those James Bond instructional vids. But I sure don't trust them. And post-Georgia, I'm guessing fewer of us do than at any time since the Cold War.

Especially since in some ways, we are in worse shape now than we were back then. Sure, in theory, back then they could incinerate us whenever the mood took them. Yet post-Cuba, most of us could see that in practice, MAD did work. And we weren't dependent on them for anything, other than plots for John Le Carre spy novels.

Today, not only can they still incinerate us, we also face that scary energy dependence, with gas imports set to soar as North Sea production falls away.

I've been trying find a simple summary of how this dependence looks, and what the options are. The best I've come up with is this presentation by Jonathan Stern of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. It's an interesting and easy read, with a bunch of nice charts, including this worrisome projection of declining European gas production (billion cubic metres, excluding Russia):

There are obviously no easy answers. But I'd sleep a whole lot easier if we ignored the hippies and the BBC and just cracked on with those new coal-fired power stations and nukes. Being dependent on the bear doesn't appeal somehow.

PS Have you caught any of the BBC's marathon radio season 1968 - Myth or Reality? The BBC reckons 1968 was a seminal year. But hang on, I thought, I was alive in 1968, and I don't recall it being especially seminal. Well, no more seminal than Summer of Love/Six Day War 1967, say. Or Kennedy shot/Beatlemania 1963 (which IIRC was reckoned to be the seminal year of the sixties in a BBC TV doc made sometime in the early 70s). Yes, 1968 did feature the brutal Russian suppression of the Prague Spring and various other stuff. But there are many years with world shaking events. Will this latest Russian brutality mean that in 40 years time, the BBC will be doing 2008 - Myth or Reality? I hope not - it should have been privatised long since.

News From BOM Correspondents- 7

The days of catapults and GP home visits

Latest news and links from BOM correspondents:


Heath Robinson Spy Plane grounded

In yet another MOD procurement disaster, the £227m Phoenix spy drone has been scrapped:

"The biggest problem was landing. The surveillance pod was slung under its belly, so the spy drone had to flip on to its back to avoid damaging the equipment on landing. But too many crash-landed and bits fell off. 

The answer, the technical wizards decided, was to fit an airbag on the top of the fuselage to cushion the impact after the flipover process had been completed. The solution worked but the Phoenix began to look like a Heath Robinson contraption, and its reputation as a reliable enemy gun spotter took a hammering when many of them were “lost”, either having been shot down by sharpshooters as they buzzed noisily overhead like a model airplane or having taken off and failed to come back."

Those boffins, eh? What can you do with 'em? You will recall the famous Dambusters scene (above) with Barnes Wallis using a Heath Robinson catapult to fire marbles across an old bathtub set up under his washing line (actually if you're under 40 you probably won't have seen it before because the film is now only available under the counter - its blatant anti-EuroReich attitudes, it's whitism, including unrestricted use of the N word, and its middleclassism, all place it well beyond the human rights pale).

The real problem - as ever - is unlikely to have been the boffins themselves, but crazy specs laid down by MOD. Or more fundamentally, their ridiculous insistence on buying British/European rather than just buying something that works - ie off-the-shelf US drones which work perfectly well (see all previous blogs on MOD procurement cock-ups gathered here).

(HTP Jeremy Poynton)

83% Roads Overspend

We've blogged the useless Highways Agency before (eg here). It routinely gets rock bottom scorecards from the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, which recently concluded the Agency "has lost budgetary control".

Its latest fiasco involves the small matter of a £3.7bn cost over-run on its current road building programme:

"41 road projects which had been calculated to cost £4.45bn will now cost taxpayers £8.12bn – a rise of almost 83 per cent.

... one stretch of the A14 between Ellington and Fen Ditton in Cambridgeshire had risen from an estimated £490m in 2003 to £1.2bn... improvements to a stretch of the A46 between Newark and Widmerpool, in Nottinghamshire, will run to more than three times the original costing of £82m...

The Highways Agency is criticised for basing its inflation predictions on the retail price index, which tracks the prices of household items, at a time when high global demand for building materials means inflation in the construction industry is much higher."

Duhhh. How were they s'posed to know?

As we've suggested before, the HA may well be Britain's very worst quango.

Except for all the others of course.

(HTP, again, Jeremy Poynton)


NHS Walk-In Redirect

BOM readers are familiar with NHS Redirect - the phone-in service for scaring the pants off you and advising you to get to hospital immediately (eg see this blog). Apparently, those NHS Walk-In Centres - the ones Labour set up to provide a cheaper alternative to GPs and hospitals - are exactly the same.

The Ferret Fancier highlights a story from Pulse, where their senior reporter sampled one such centre. The reporter had a persistent cough so he dropped into a centre, rather than go through the hassle of making a GP appointment (cf how in the pre-NHS Dambusterworld, he wouldn't have done either - the kindly Doc would have motored over to see him).

Waste of time - the nurse checked his blood pressure and then told him she wasn't qualified to diagnose the problem anyway. Maybe it was TB. TB! He's never even considered that. He should make an appointment to see his GP asap. And try not to panic in the meantime.

What have these centres cost us? Not sure. But we do know that NHS Redirect costs us £150m pa, and according to a stinging NAO report, less than half actually saves costs elsewhere - ie it's costing us around £100m pa net extra pa (egsee this blog).

Buying Gold

We've blogged the government's £800m programme to breed a race of Olympic superathletes many times (eg here). This morning, we learn how it's less a matter of breeding superathletes, than concentrating on sports that require expensive kit:

"Take the Yngling sailing event for women - at which Great Britain won gold in 2004. Only about four crews at present compete in the UK, withfewer than 100 competitive crews on the planet. Why? Because it costs more than £20,000 to buy a decent boat. You may as well include Formula One in the Olympics. In rowing, sailing and equestrianism there were 186 medals on offer at the last Olympics. Not one was won by an athlete from a low-income nation."

And in cycling, those whizzo hi-tech bikes now cost tens of thousands, so again you can buy advantage.

There's one other point, which we've mentioned before:

"58 per cent of Great Britain's gold-medal winners at Athens in 2004 went to independent schools. In the past three Olympics 45 per cent of medal winners went to the non-state sector. Given that only 7 per cent of children attend independent schools, and assuming that sporting talent is spread evenly, this is a striking demonstration of how Olympic success is driven by wealth as well as by ability. Either way, the 93 per cent who attend state schools are chronically under-represented."

Setting on one side the fact that for forty years state schools have nixed competitive sports, the recipe for cost effective medal acquisition is now clear. Forget about spraying around £800m to all and sundry: we should use the cash solely to buy top flight kit/horses for privately educated competitors. Everyone else is on their own.

(HTP gallantloser)

PS According to C4 News, we're currently 7th in the Beijing medals table. Hurrah! Three places higher than Athens. However, on a population adjusted basis we're only 26th. And adjusted for GDP we're 43rd. But the good news is that adjusted for"human rights" we're 5th! Maybe only C4 News would have a medal table adjusted for human rights. Well no - the BBC would have too if they'd thought of it. What about a table adjusted for obesity? We'd probably be second behind only the US.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 2008

MadWorld - Into The Abyss

I've already juiced your money, slaughtered your job, and torched your home... now it's your turn

So how's Gordo getting on with that re-re-re-relaunch?

According to the leaks, it comprises just two items: £100m on laptops for poor kids so they can play on pirated copies of MadWorld (pic above), and £600m on fuel vouchers for his chosen clients (ie families on welfare). All the rest of us will get is the bill.

And it looks like this whole shoot-em-up nightmare is rampaging into our homes faster than you can say In the name of God go!

• Inflation accelerating- CPI currently 4.4% and RPI 5%. The Governor of the Bank of England - the man charged with keeping it at 2% - admits it will go higher still
• Sterling collapsing - against our trade weighted basket of currencies, sterling is now down 13% over the last year... and the inflation pressure is up even further
• Unemployment taking off - now up to 5.4%... so just since Tuesday, theMisery Index has pushed up a further 0.2% to 10.4% (compared to just 9.6% in May 1997)
• Public finances disintegrating - in the first three months of this financial year the government clocked up a £20.4bn deficit, £8bn worse than last year... the collapse in the housing market on its own means a £3-4bn budgetary hole, and this morning's FT brought news that Merrill Lynch is charging $29bn of its global sub-prime losses against UK tax - which means they will pay no UK tax at all for several decades! (HTP Joan W)
• Home repossessions soaring - despite constant assurances that "it was much worse under the Tories", the latest stats for home repossession orders show they are already running at around 112,000 pa (2008 H1 sa), and climbing fast; that's actually only 30,000 less than the 143,000 recorded at the height of the Tory mess in 1991... so watch this space (and remember the stats next time Yvette Cooper tries to make out the Tories were worse).

So WTF are you going to do?

It's too late to say you're sorry for ever voting in these clotheads, and I'm afraid you've missed the boat on switching everything into gold bars and shipping out. So you're stuck.

I suggest you arm yourself with a big chainsaw.