John Harris on Bristol and Plymouth

The Guardian last week ran a series of articles by John Harris on the future of cities – urban despatches from within the UK. As well as Bradford and Manchester, his articles covered the two cities of the South West region, Bristol and Plymouth. Knowing both fairly well, I thought his accounts of the situations they face were excellent and should be read by anyone with the least interest in either place or in the south west.

He didn’t say so specifically, but Plymouth in the past lacked a significant middle class, as is revealed by this description of its housing stock:

Part of Plymouth’s problem is that until recently, we only had 56 houses in Band H council tax – 90% of Plymothians live in either C, B or A. So our council tax base is low.

So it possibly has more in common with Liverpool than Bristol. Harris starts his Bristol piece:

“Bristol is perhaps the one southern city which really feels independent of London,” writes Owen Hatherley in his brilliant architectural travelogue A New Kind Of Bleak.

An endorsement which I’m not sure I support. To me Bristol seems to have an inferiority complex with regard to London which leads it to overcompensate. This may worsen when rail electrification reduces the travel time by 20 minutes - as a Mexican president said, “so far from God and so close to the United States”*. It could also be an alternative explanation to Harris’s when he observes:

Bristol was the only English city to vote for an elected mayor in the referendums that took place in 2012, something put down to the apparent chaos of its politics (between 2001 and 2011, the old city council was led by seven different people) and the city’s ancient fondness for doing its own thing.

At which point a key difference between Plymouth and Bristol should be made clear. The latter actually is a meaningful conurbation surrounded by rural Devon, whereas the city of Bristol is merely the core of a built-up area which extends seamlessly into South Gloucestershire and North East Somerset. It’s not just because of the topography that Bristol’s public transport is incoherent and inadequate for its size. North East Somerset includes Bath which, although much smaller than Bristol, doesn’t do anything to mitigate the latter’s inferiority complex. From 1974 to 1996, these areas were part of the county of Avon, abolished by John Major’s Conservative government and, if meaningful devolution is to take place in future, probably needs to be re-established.

An article earlier this year, Bristol, the European capital of green nannying and bureaucracy, by Anthony Whitehead, gives a resident’s view of current life in the city. I posted here last year about the Royal William Yard redevelopment in Plymouth to which Harris refers.



*If Bristol is too close to London, Plymouth is probably too far from the capital for its own good. The M5 stops at Exeter, Plymouth airport is mothballed – Newquay or Exeter are the nearest at present - and GWR electrification gets no closer than Bristol, although other more marginal improvements to the rail service are programmed. [Added 10 November].

Constable at the V&A

Constable: The Making of a Master at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London aims:

… to offer a new interpretation of Britain’s best-loved artist. ... For the first time, Constable is presented alongside the old masters of classical landscape whose formal values he studiously assimilated. By combining the authority of their compositional ideas with a breathtakingly naturalistic vision that was entirely his own, Constable would ultimately transform the genre of landscape painting, and in the process shape the enduring popular image of the English countryside.

I wonder how many visitors will be surprised to learn that Constable (1776-1837), like other artists of his day, studied and emulated works by his distinguished predecessors. In his case these included Claude Lorraine (who influenced Turner), Rubens, Titian, Jacob van Ruisdael and, closer to home, Gainsborough and Thomas Girlin (an artist unknown to Your Paintings, it seems). The argument is manifestly well-made, for example by putting Claude’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (1646 left), with Constable’s Dedham Vale (1802, right):

And from Dulwich Picture Gallery, Jacob van Ruisdael’s Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem (c.1650-2, left) and Constable’s Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem, after Jacob van Ruisdael (1830:, right)

The exhibition also provides a chance to see some of Constable’s masterpieces in their original form, images that sadly are dulled by over-reproduction, for example The Hay Wain 1821:

and Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Ground, 1823:

There is much else that is far less familiar, for example the oil sketches which seem so ahead of their time like Brighton Beach (1824, below top) and Rainstorm over the Sea (1824–8, below, lower):

Constable tends to be associated with East Anglia (‘Constable country’), but, although he was not an adventurous traveller like Turner, he painted in the South West region beyond just Salisbury, for example nearby at Stonehenge, 1835:

and at Gillingham Mill, Dorset, (1827, below, top) and Weymouth Bay with Approaching Storm (1819, below, lower):

Constable: The Making of a Master ends on 11 January 2015. Although enjoyable and informative, a full ticket price of £14 seems high when so many of the works have come from public collections, particularly the V&A’s own.

No gain for the needy South West

A post earlier this month about the Scottish independence referendum said that the possible relocation of the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines to SW England would be revisited. 

Back in 2012 a post appeared here called Would Scotland’s loss be the South West’s gain? At the time there was a prospect of an independent Scotland no longer providing a base for the UK’s nuclear submarines and the Trident nuclear deterrent. The post explored the possibility of relocation of the deterrent and thousands of associated jobs to SW England and concluded:

Recent polling suggests that a majority of voters in Scotland do not want independence and if this continues until the referendum, the possibility of any gain does not arise. Otherwise, if the UK sans Scotland is to continue to be a nuclear weapon state, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative to Trident operating from HMNB* Devonport. A suitable armaments depot would have to be constructed there, or possibly in Cornwall, say by 2025. If this turns out to be not so much ‘implausible’ as impossible, something more radical might adopted, but probably would not be revealed until after the 2015 election. Otherwise Trident’s removal from the Clyde ought to be of considerable long-term net benefit to the economy of SW England in the form of jobs, and expenditure by households and on base support.

A key source for this post was Malcolm Chalmers’ and William Walker’s 2001 book, Uncharted Waters - The UK, Nuclear Weapons and The Scottish Question, although they had come to the conclusion that relocation to Devonport was implausible (page 120). A month later a follow-up post, What would be the cost of the South West’s gain?, appeared here. A cost figure which seemed to have some authority had appeared in The Times:

The cost of moving Britain’s four nuclear submarines from the Faslane base on the Clyde, along with stockpiles of warheads and missiles, could be £2.5 billion, according to former senior military commanders.

This figure’s possible provenance was explored and it was compared with the outturn of a couple of recent major projects audited by the NAO, the post's conclusion being:

Neither of these examples would suggest that £2.5 billion is a wild over- or underestimate.

In August 2014, a month before the referendum, Chalmers, who is now Research Director and Director, UK Defence Policy Studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), published (with Hugh Chalmers) a detailed analysis, Relocation, Relocation, Relocation Could the UK’s Nuclear Force be Moved after Scottish Independence? To which their answer was Yes - to Devonport and Falmouth:

with the conclusion:

A potential alternative to HMNB Clyde would involve relocating the submarine support functions of Faslane to HMNB Devonport and replicating the munitions-support functions of Coulport from scratch on a greenfield site north of Falmouth. Previous work undertaken at HMNB Clyde in preparation for the current Vanguard-class submarine suggests that this relocation plan could cost between £3 billion and £4 billion (gross, at 2012/13 prices), not including any costs associated with land purchase and clearance of existing buildings at the new munitions-support facility. 

Some of these relocation costs could be funded by the cancellation of planned upgrades to HMNB Clyde to prepare it for a successor to Vanguard. The UK currently anticipates investing £2.3–3.4 billion (at 2012/13 prices) in new infrastructure for a successor submarine. Even if only £500 million of this were dedicated to HMNB Clyde, the net costs of relocating HMNB Clyde may therefore amount to between £2.5 billion and £3.5 billion (at 2012/13 prices), together with any costs associated with land purchase and clearance.

Following the referendum result, the problems that might have arisen after independence, of which Trident’s future was just one, have moved off the political agenda. Although the possibility of Scottish independence cannot be ruled out for all time, it seems most unlikely that resourcing submarine relocation would be recommended in the UK’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) due in 2015. That this potential gain is now not forthcoming is regrettable, if only because Devon and Cornwall are in a poor way, as the Western Morning News recently demonstrated drawing on the ManpowerGroup Pay League. Apparently in terms of averages, workers in the Home Counties and London earn up to £17,000 more than in the South West where, at £24,400, annual pay is almost £3,000 lower than in the the UK as a whole at £27,200. A table gave details at local authority level within the SW Region:

The relocation of work from HMNB Clyde would have had greatest impact towards the end of the list (22, 25, 26, 30, 32 and 35).

Here is not there

A post about Madresfield Court and how it was depicted in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited appeared here on 3 June. The day before, The Times had published a photograph (below) of the return to Castle Howard of a vintage Rolls Royce used in the filming there of the Brideshead Revisited TV series. (A more detailed story appeared in the Yorkshire Post.)

The day after (4 June), a letter from Professor Emeritus (of architecture) A Peter Fawcett was published in The Times (£):

Sir, Although Hawksmoor’s baroque Castle Howard (picture story, June 2) will be forever associated with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, his real inspiration came from a building of a very different architectural persuasion: Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. The English Arts and Crafts designer CR Ashbee designed the library in 1902, and the chapel (which features prominently in the novel) is a fine assembly of artefacts from Birmingham’s Arts and Crafts workshops — a far cry from English baroque. Waugh visited Madresfield frequently, and members of its Lygon family owners also appear as prominent players in the narrative.

On 6 June, there were three more letters. Neville Peel thought that:

… Waugh, like other writers, had a variety of sources of inspiration. His description of Brideshead’s central rotunda reminds one of Ickworth and is very far from the Arts and Crafts of Madresfield.

David Bertram pointed out that:

Professor Fawcett deplores the use of the baroque Castle Howard as a visual shorthand for Brideshead, but there was good reason for its use in the TV film. In the novel Charles Ryder says staying at Brideshead signalled the end of his love for the medieval and his “conversion to the baroque”.

Nigel Thomas felt that:

A more obvious candidate is Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, which Waugh would have known through his friendship with Cecil Beaton and the Herberts. Waugh placed Brideshead in a Wiltshire park with a castle that gave its name to a Georgian successor. … Old Wardour Castle overlooks a lake that points to the new mansion on a nearby hill. The largest Georgian house in Wiltshire, Wardour Castle, has splendid interiors and a spectacular chapel. It too was the home to a Catholic dynasty, the Arundells.

which is a little ingenuous given that Sebastian Flyte tells Charles:

“… We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down, carted the stones up here, and built a new house.” (Book 1 Chapter 4)

and that New Wardour Castle is in the Palladian style (as is Ickworth), not baroque. On the other hand, a little later Charles remembers:

It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing room … from the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung hall, which stood unchanged as it had been designed two hundred and fifty years before; …

that would be circa 1675, which, while about a century before John Soane started work as an architect and James Paine’s designing New Wardour Castle, was only a few decades before Vanbrugh’s Castle Howard being built in a thoroughly baroque style.

At this point there is a danger of becoming one of those Sherlockians who argue about the exact location on Dartmoor of Baskerville Hall. Obviously it would be pleasing to think that Brideshead was in Wiltshire, South West England, but I suspect the region will just have to be satisfied with Waugh’s having spent much of his adult life there. Not only friendly with the Herberts, in 1937 he had married one, Laura, whose grandmother bought the couple Piers Court in Gloucestershire. In 1956 the family moved further west to Combe Florey in Somerset where Waugh died in 1966. He wrote Brideshead Revisited in Devon in 1944 while on unpaid leave from the Army.

Perhaps Waugh’s notion of baroque in the novel is more a metaphor for Catholicism than a Pevsner-like description of a particular building’s architectural style. His author’s note, "I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they” might be extended: “here is not there”.

Lib Dem prospects in the South West

Next week London’s LBC radio will be going national on DAB, something that will almost certainly raise the profile of its weekday evening presenter, Iain Dale. Anyone who hasn’t heard of him should read his Wikipedia profile. I used to like going to his Politico's Bookstore and Coffee House until it closed and I have a few books from Biteback Publishing. A former Tory candidate, he used to blog as Iain Dale's Diary, later revived as Dale & Co where he recently posted Why The Libdems Will Win 30-35 Seats in 2015. In 2010 he thought they would get more than 59 – it turned out to be 57. He now reckons:

Of the 57 seats, I predict 35 will remain LibDem, 14 will fall to the Conservatives and 8 to Labour. But of the 35 LibDem Holds, I reckon only 13 are dead certs, 9 are hot bets, 8 are probable and 5 are rated as possible, but by no means definite. 

In the predictions … I have assumed that Labour will be the beneficiaries of most of the decline in LibDem votes across the country but that the Conservatives might benefit a little in the south and south west. The big unknown factor here is how the size of the UKIP vote might affect existing Conservative vote levels in many of these seats. I have tried not to make these predictions through blue tinted spectacles, but it maybe that I will have underestimated the impact of UKIP. I have also assumed that the LibDems will not win a single one of their top 20 target seats.

The last time I posted here about the Lib Dem prospects in the South West (2010 outcome above), I concluded:

If the Conservatives are to form a majority government after the 2015 election, as well as taking Labour seats in the North West and North East, they will have to take many of the 15 Lib Dem seats in the South West. My feeling is that the Tories will find that difficult …

So I was interested to see Dale’s opinions for the South West 15 extracted in the table and ordered by the size of the majority in 2010: The spectrum of his opinions from ‘DEAD CERT LIBDEM HOLD’ to ‘CONSERVATIVE GAIN’ match the size of the majority with two exceptions, as shown, Bath and St Ives. The first presumably would be ‘DEAD CERT’ if the present incumbent weren’t stepping down. Dale thinks that the Tories may not win the second because of their voters turning to UKIP.

I thought it might be interesting to use Electoral Calculus’s “make your own predictions” facility, (as featured in a recent post here about the main parties tying) which identifies which individual seats will change hands. The next table shows the Electoral Calculus (EC) predictions for the seats under three different scenarios. A is the EC Current Prediction on 6 February 2014, B is the state of the parties as assessed by the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham blog, Ballots and Bullets, on 13 January, and C is a guess at what a Lib Dem recovery and UKIP doing well, both at the expense of the main parties, might produce.

It’s interesting to see that at the highest level of support (37.6%) Labour gains Bristol West from the Lib Dems. It would also, according to EC, be able to take Conservative seats: Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, Kingswood, Stroud and Somerset North East. The last of these is Jacob Rees-Mogg’s seat.

Unless the Lib Dems retain more supporters in the South West than they have been able to do so far nationally, it looks as though they will be losing more seats than I thought.

The South West was Yellow in 2010

Recently a Graphic detail post on The Economist website made the well-known point that:

… identifying the political affiliation of parliamentary constituencies by colour on an ordinary, geographic map doesn’t quite work: not all constituencies are the same area, though each represents roughly the same number of people. As a result, expansive rural constituencies appear far larger than small but densely-populated urban ones. Thus, a geographic map appears very blue (for Conservative) because it over-emphasises rural constituencies. And Liberal-Democrats (in yellow) look as if they hold sway over one-fifth of the country, when in fact it is visually skewed by some big, sparsely-populated places. Labour's presence seems meagre.

The Economist’s remedy:

… was an equal-area "Dorling" cartogram (below), named after Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield. Part map, part graph, it let us depict every constituency at the same size, while keeping them in the approximate position and retaining the overall shape of the country. Because the variations in size of rural and urban constituencies are eliminated, the eye gets a far better sense of the actual distribution of political party representation.

The Economist also:

added another layer of information: the strength of political support, by shade.

In the South West region however, the original geographic problem doesn’t really apply. There are only four urban Labour constituencies so the Lib Dem and Conservatives share the low density rural areas and the visual skew is small (detail below from the Daily Telegraph).
 

In fact the Dorling cartogram (detail above) introduces distortions of its own in the South West by putting Labour-held Exeter and Plymouth in adjacent hexagons while separating the two contiguous Bristol Labour seats.

The Economist didn’t state that the results they were presenting were for the 2010 election. If the Conservatives are to form a majority government after the 2015 election, as well as taking Labour seats in the North West and North East, they will have to take many of the 15 Lib Dem seats in the South West. My feeling is that the Tories will find that difficult and it will be interesting to see if the local elections next week support my view.

Ian McEwan’s ‘Sweet Tooth’

Ian McEwan was, like me, born in the UK in the years just after World War 2, so it’s not so surprising that I was buying his early short stories when published in their racy 1970s covers (left) and have read most of his novels since. On the whole I enjoy his work more than that of the other British writers he is usually associated with: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and the late Christopher Hitchens.  Hitchens, unlike the others was not a novelist, and is the dedicatee of McEwan’s latest book Sweet Tooth.

Sweet Tooth has had plenty of publicity in the form of author interviews and reviews, mostly favourable. The novel is a complex mixture of spy story, love story, state of the nation in the 1970s (Memories of the Heath Administration, as it were) and literary incest. The opening sentences:

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. Within 18 months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing.

seem to give an accurate description of what is to follow.  The plot has been summarised up to a point in nearly all the reviews and I won't repeat it here.

Sweet Tooth is the code name of the security service mission and the novel is set partly in the Angletonian 'wilderness of mirrors' of the intelligence world and partly in academia, in particular the University of Sussex near Brighton where McEwan studied English Literature in the late 1960s. Sussex’s reputation at that time was much higher than it is credited with being in university league tables now. There is a strong personal element to the novel, for example the view of Oxbridge expressed by Serena’s lover, Tom Haley, a writer and academic at Sussex, is almost exactly that of McEwan in his recent BBC2 interview with Kirsty Wark. Haley’s short story, Lovers, which we read through the eyes of Serena, has more than a passing resemblance to McEwan’s short story, Dead As They Come, from In Between the Sheets (top right). Haley is, one might conclude, in many ways a McEwan might have been.

Serena is a Cambridge maths graduate but also an avid reader, a contrivance which presumably allows her to react intelligently to Haley’s writing without getting bogged down in the formal apparatus of lit crit. The use of terms like aposiopesis would hardly maintain the interest of the majority of McEwan’s readership, who are probably like Serena and only capable of a ‘base level of discourse’, as she puts it. I was intrigued by her background, as I remember a former colleague with an Oxbridge maths degree who had joined and left MI5 about 10 years before Serena. She was a brigadier’s daughter rather than a bishop’s, and had resigned not long after recruitment. What she did there I was never told, but I was left with the impression that it was boring. No doubt the work has since been transformed by IT as in most other organisations. Anyway, most of us have no real idea of what working for MI5 would be like then or now. Which makes former head of MI6 John Scarlett’s review of Sweet Tooth in the Daily Telegraph all the more interesting:

Is the backdrop of national crisis and MI5 stumbling correctly told and authentic? Up to a point. The novel is carefully researched.

He concluded:

Sweet Tooth is a fine and complex novel, the work of a master storyteller. It will absorb readers, of whom there will be very many. They should not go away thinking this is a true picture of the Security Service of 40 years ago. And why should it be? It is a work of fiction, not of history.

One thing he might have had in mind is the existence of the standing D-Notice system introduced in 1971. The existence of careful preparatory research is borne out by the book’s Acknowledgements which include Christopher Andrew’s The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (in the US, Defending the Realm) and David Cornwell (better known as John Le Carré) for “irresistible reminiscences”. At which point it might be worth noting the distinction between MI5 and MI6. MI5, the Security Service, as they explain on their website, protects the UK domestically from threats to security, whereas MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, collects foreign intelligence – and in the public’s mind is usually associated with James Bond. So it’s a little surprising when Serena states:

At work the one topic was war in the Middle East. Even the most light-headed of the society girls among the secretaries was drawn into the daily drama. … A wall map went up in our corridor with sticky plastic beads representing the opposing divisions and arrows to show their recent movements.

While McEwan is noted for being assiduous about his research - he spent weeks with surgeons while writing Saturday (2005) - he admitted to Kirsty Wark that he often makes mistakes. This is puzzling as he also told Wark that he hands his publisher a final draft which he expects to have to alter, although at the same time he gave the impression that disruptive suggestions were unwelcome. One can’t help thinking that a fact-checker could have improved Sweet Tooth in draft by removing, for example, the non-existent RAF rank of Flight Commander (page 55, more likely Wing Commander from the context). On the next page we are told that an MI5 colleague had, after Winchester, gone to Harvard where ‘he did a law degree and then another in psychology’. I may be wrong, but doesn’t admission to the Harvard Law School require a first degree? Haley seems to have an unusual academic pedigree too: a degree in English, then an MA in international relations, but the subject of his PhD is The Faerie Queen.

By contrast, at school Serena had been “a freak of nature – a girl who happened to have a talent for mathematics … Obviously, an exam in maths was far less effort than one in English literature” (oh sure) but on arrival at Newnham College, Cambridge she learnt at her first tutorial “what a mediocrity I was in mathematics”. “Gawky boys, unblessed by charm or other human attributes like empathy and generative grammar … leered as I struggled with concepts they took for granted. … I couldn’t succeed because I was like nearly all the rest of humanity – not much good at maths, not at this level”. I know of a girl who was at Oxford about ten years ago and in a similar position after getting good A levels – she transferred successfully from maths to psychology. However Serena “did my best to transfer out to English or French or even anthropology, but no one wanted me. In those days the rules were tightly observed.” But someone I know who went to Oxford in Serena’s day transferred soon after arrival from physics to law - if anything the rules are tighter now than then.

Serena tells us that at MI5 she was responsible for the registry files on Communist Party members in Gloucestershire:

In my first month I opened a file on the headmaster of a grammar school in Stroud who had attended an open meeting of his local branch one Saturday evening in July 1972.

But there was almost certainly only one grammar school in Stroud (rhymes with loud) with a headmaster at that time – oddly enough it was attended by Peter Hennessy, the historian of the modern British state, in the 1960s. Sometimes a devil can lurk in such details. According to Channel 4 News:

… the new novel's truthful parallels ran aground when his real-life publisher was forced to reprint the novel. The original Sweet Tooth had included a Sussex University English professor called Tom Healy - coincidentally the name of a genuine professor of renaissance literature at the university.

Matthew Cain, the Channel 4 News Culture Editor, interviewed McEwan in Leconfield House in Mayfair, one of the buildings used by MI5 in the 1970s and where Serena worked. The map below is taken from the endpapers of Christopher Andrew’s book. The blue stars show the Headquarters buildings used circa 1972. Serena’s recruitment interview took place at the location near Regent Street.

If my tone seems a bit carping, the only excuse I can offer is that McEwan’s attention to realism encourages nitpicking - Sweet Tooth features Martin Amis and other literary personalities of the day as well as numerous real places. Despite his distaste for us techies, “unblessed by charm or other human attributes like empathy” as we are, I always think McEwan is a Chateau Haut-Brion among authors and is to be appreciated, if one gets the chance, whatever the vintage. 2012 looks like a good year for both - fortunately for UK readers the price of Sweet Tooth is determined by Random House and Amazon and not by the weather and the Chinese.

Footnote

In a post last year, British Writers and British Art, I expressed some doubt as to whether in McEwan’s last novel, Solar (2010), one of the characters, Melissa, owner of three dance clothing shops, would have owned a Henry Moore maquette, and I rather sourly concluded that:

… I can’t help thinking that Henry Moore maquettes … are more likely to be found in the handsome houses of successful writers like … McEwan (in London’s … Fitzrovia, …) than in the humbler dwellings of … minor retailers.

At Cambridge Serena has an affair with a history don, Tony Canning, who introduces her to MI5. In his cottage:

… was a bright Mediterranean scene of whitewashed houses and sheets drying on a line. It was a watercolour by Winston Churchill, painted in Marrakech during a break from the Conference in 1943. I never learned how it came into Tony’s possession.

Most of Churchill’s watercolours are at Chartwell, but there is nothing particularly improbable about Canning owning one (although the Conference was at Casablanca and Marrakech was a subsequent holiday).

I was interested to read in an interview with McEwan in the Guardian that the Fitzrovia house which had featured in Saturday has just been “replaced with a flat in Bloomsbury and a house in Gloucestershire”. Gloucestershire (Serena’s CP specialism) is in SW England, a region where writers like to spend at least some of their time – John Le Carré in Cornwall and Jeanette Winterson, also in Gloucestershire, come to mind. By the way, Frome (rhymes with plume) is a town in Somerset in SW England, but on high ground some distance from the area known as the Somerset Levels.

Unemployment among the South West’s young

To judge from his tweets Ben Bradshaw MP (@BenPBradshaw) is firmly engaged with his Exeter constituency. On 19 July he tweeted:

JSA is Job Seekers Allowance, paid to those who are eligible and between 18 and pension age.

Taking the tweet literally, in Exeter in June 2012 for every 100 18 to 24 year olds who had been in receipt of JSA for more than a year, a year earlier there would have been been only 20. Looking for the actual numbers, I turned to the relevant House of Commons Library Research Paper (Unemployment by Constituency, July 2012, RP12/41 dated 18 July 2012), in particular:

Table 1B which shows that in June 2012 the total number of JSA claimants in Exeter was 2039, up by 23 from a year earlier. Of these, 475 had been claiming for more than 12 months, up by 290.

Table 2 which breaks the 2039 down into 645 aged 24 and under, 1055 aged 25 to 49 and 330 aged 50 and over (9 have been ‘lost’ presumably because of rounding to the nearest 5).

The Venn diagram below brings these numbers together, but the size of the overlapping area which corresponds to those on JSA for more than a year AND aged 18 to 24 is undefined (x):

However, the Economy & Tourism Unit of Exeter City Council produced an Economic Trends Report in November 2011 which provides this data for October 2010 and October 2011 as being 25 and 30 respectively (page 5). Interpolating for June 2011 gives an estimate of 28. Again turning to the HoC Library Research Paper a year ago (Unemployment by Constituency, July 2011, RP11/58 dated 13 July 2011), it is possible to produce a similar Venn diagram for June 2011. And also x can be estimated as about 140 ie’fivefold’.

The implications are pretty startling. The total number of unemployed in Exeter has changed little in a year and the proportion aged 18 to 24 has remained 32%. But the proportion of the 18 to 24s on JSA for more than a year has gone from 4% to 22% in the 12 months since June 11. In the same period for the over-24s the movement was from 11% to 24%. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) Regional Labour Market Statistics, July 2012 show that this trend is apparent among the 18 to 24s across the whole South West region:

As can be seen, the fivefold increase in Exeter is below that of the SW region which is showing a more than sevenfold increase (725%). The SW region had nearly twice the national (UK) movement in the ONS data for the same period, which is up 405%.

Reporting Exeter youth joblessness

A few posts back, I remarked that there are only two Labour-held parliamentary seats in England west of Bristol. One of these is Exeter where the MP is Ben Bradshaw, who was Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport in the Labour government up to 2010. Like many MPs he makes use of Twitter (@BenPBradshaw), and on 15 March he tweeted this:

Dreadful #Exeter and SW long term youth (18-24) joblessness rates up massive 230.8% & 183.6% respectively Feb 2011 - Feb 2012 #toryfail

I was a bit alarmed by the figures he quoted, not because of underestimating the seriousness of youth unemployment across the UK, but for numeracy reasons. I am wary of percentages, which are after all only a form of fraction, when they are greater than 100 (although I’m 110% committed to this blog of course), especially when they come with a decimal place and so have four significant figures.

The formula for expressing a year on year increase as a percentage is pretty simple. If a year ago there were M of something and now there are N, the calculation is:

Percentage increase = (N – M) * 100 / M

So, if 1000 youths were jobless in Exeter in Feb 2011 and 3308 were jobless in Feb 2012:

(3308 - 1000) * 100 / 1000 = 230.8%

but Exeter isn’t in Greece, and more than three times the number of jobless than there were a year ago seems a bit surprising. Helpfully, every month the House of Commons Library produces a Research Paper which “contains labour market figures for parliamentary constituencies, as well as a summary of the latest national and regional statistics” and the March 2012 issue (RP 12/12) contains the data for February 2012. Table 2 on page 39 shows that in Exeter the number of Job Seekers Allowance claimants who are 24 and under in February 2012 was 725, an annual % change of 13.3. The equivalent number of claimants in the March 2011 issue (RP 11/26), at Table 2 on page 35, was 640. Using the calculation above:

(725 – 640) * 100 / 640 = 13.3%

as in RP 12/12.

There are no detailed regional statistics in the Research Papers but RP 12/12 has some relevant graphics. On page 6 there is a chart (below) which shows that the South West has the lowest unemployment level of the English regions.

There are also maps showing the unemployment rate in the South West:

and the change in the claimant count:

While some nearby constituencies are worse (top quintile), Exeter is not well-placed in the fourth quintile, but on both these measures the situation is far poorer in the North East (below).

It may be that Ben Bradshaw has made use of some other data which do substantiate the figures in his tweet. If so, the discrepancy with the situation which the House of Commons Library Research Paper seems to be indicating ought to be addressed.

ADDENDUM 18 APRIL

Gillian Ayres in Bath and on tour

Andrew Lambirth recently expressed his disquiet at David Hockney’s being designated as our Greatest Living Painter following the death of Lucien Freud:

If there must be the title of Greatest Living Painter, then award it to someone who actually uses paint in an inventive and interesting way: to Leon Kossoff, Gillian Ayres or Frank Auerbach. The publicity-hungry Mr Hockney does not deserve it.

Now there is an opportunity to assess Gillian Ayres’ work in the form of a selection of prints (and a small number of paintings) making up a selling show at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, Gillian Ayres RA Paintings and Prints 1986 to 2011. The boldly colourful abstract pieces on show (Song Beneath the Stars, below) are probably too narrow in range to be able to bear out Lambirth’s suggestion, certainly by comparison with those in the Tate’s collection.

Ayres, who was born in London in 1930, has strong links with SW England having taught at the Bath Academy of Art (at Corsham Court) in the 1960s and lived in north Cornwall since 1987. Not long after arriving there she was interviewed by Art Cornwall, and in their film provided some interesting views on her form of Abstract expressionism which introduces representational forms. She collaborated with a local printmakers’ collective, 107 Workshop in Melksham, Wiltshire, to produce the limited editions on sale.

Gillian Ayres RA Paintings and Prints 1986 to 2011 continues at the Victoria Art Gallery until 21 March. Bath is the first stop on the exhibition’s tour and the Alan Cristea Gallery website will no doubt have details of the later venues in due course.

Would Scotland’s loss be the South West’s gain?

January 2012 marked the beginning of a long debate in Britain on Scottish independence, which will conclude with a referendum in 2014. Some complex problems are starting to emerge, among them an independent Scotland’s EU membership and what currency it would use. Another is the future of Scotland as a base for the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines and the Trident nuclear deterrent. The four Vanguard class submarines with Trident operate from Faslane, part of Her Majesty's Naval Base (HMNB) Clyde in the Firth of Clyde. Their nuclear warheads are currently stored at a facility at Coulport, nearby. The MoD is constructing a jetty at Faslane for use by the Astute-class submarines after 2017. The deterrent issue was discussed at some length by William Walker, Professor of International Relations at St Andrews University, in an article in Scotland on Sunday on 8 January. He concluded:

A Conservative-led government will be inclined to take no chances. Preserving the nuclear deterrent and Westminster’s absolute power of decision will, when attention focuses, strengthen desires to engineer the Scottish government’s resounding defeat in the referendum. But it cannot fight its corner by arguing that Trident’s survival in Scotland is cause for rejecting independence. Nor can it argue that it will impose its will, come what may.
The nuclear issue, therefore, contains political traps for both Scottish and UK governments. Don’t be surprised if they treat it warily in the referendum campaign.

A few days later in the Financial Times (£), James Blitz reported a Ministry of Defence official as saying:

Coulport is a major piece of infrastructure and it would cost billions to replace. There would certainly have to be discussions about the cost of moving that infrastructure, which would be phenomenal.

The FT also quoted Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute as saying that one of the biggest concerns facing the MoD after independence was that it would take about 10 years to build a replacement storage facility for the Trident warheads. He believed that London would have to ask the government of a newly independent Scotland to continue maintaining the deterrent at Faslane and Coulport for up to a decade.

The MoD seems to be reaching similar conclusions, according to James Kirkup in the Daily Telegraph on 27 January:

The Scottish naval base currently used to arm submarines with Trident nuclear missiles is the only site suitable for the task and building another could take up to a decade, ministers have been told.
… The MoD believes Faslane’s facilities could be replicated at an existing English naval base. But the Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Coulport is unique in the UK. It is equipped with highly specialised and sensitive equipment for safely moving missiles and warheads and incorporates hardened concrete bunkers to store them. A source said: “Berths would not be a problem – there are docks on the south coast that could be used without too much fuss. But there simply isn’t anywhere else where we can do what we do at Coulport, and without that, there is no deterrent.”

Though, to make sense of the first sentence above, presumably Kirkup’s source meant “there simply isn’t anywhere else [at present]”.

In 2001 Chalmers and Walker authored Uncharted Waters - The UK, Nuclear Weapons and The Scottish Question, which anticipated the problems which are now emerging (they thought independence would arise “in the next ten or twenty years”, page161). Trident is based on the Clyde because of decisions made in the early 1960s about its predecessor, Polaris. Their book was able to draw on documents released in the 1990s by the National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office) to explain why Polaris had been located at Faslane and Coulport, and why other locations on the UK’s Atlantic seaboard had been rejected. Among the latter were Portland, Devonport and Falmouth in South West England and Milford Haven in Wales, the rest being in Scotland. In this light Chalmers and Walker went on to examine the problems posed by relocating Trident outside Scotland after independence.

Chalmers and Walker concentrated on Devonport and Falmouth as the only possibilities. Devonport would take on the Faslane role with the Coulport capability being reproduced either there or near Falmouth. Drawing on the 1960s Polaris work, they anticipated considerable safety and planning problems at both locations and estimated the cost to be at least £B2 at 2000 prices. Having ruled out overseas basing, they came to the conclusion that relocation was implausible (page 120) and turned to examining continuance in Scotland and nuclear disarmament as the only options.

At this point it is worth noting that when Chalmers and Walker were writing, shortly after the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, the UK intended to hold a stockpile of less than 200 operationally available warheads (previously a maximum of 300). In the Blair government’s 2006 Defence White Paper, The Future of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Deterrent, Cm 6994, this figure was reduced to fewer than 160, and the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review cut it further to no more than 120. There might therefore be scope for any replacement for Coulport being on a reduced scale in comparison to the current facility. As civil engineering projects go, it would be a much smaller undertaking than HS2 or a new airport in the Thames Estuary, “Boris Island”. Again encouragingly, The Times on 7 February (£) reported that senior civil servants will be required to attend a major projects leadership academy

:“The leadership academy will provide them with the skills and tools they need to manage these programmes successfully, ensuring they are delivered on time and on budget,” [Sir Bob Kerslake, the new head of the Home Civil Service] added. The academy will be managed by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority, which was set up in 2010 to oversee big schemes. It now looks after 200 projects that are worth about £400 billion.

One might wonder if acquiring these useful skills will reduce or increase staff turnover in the civil service, given recent data from the Institute for Government.

Returning to the question posed by this post’s title, obviously, if a long-term agreement to continue basing Trident in Scotland could be secured, there would be no possibility of any benefit to South West England. However, the Scottish National Party (SNP), in its booklet Your Scotland, Your Future, states:

We’ll get rid of nuclear weapons here in Scotland as part of our commitment to a world free of the nuclear threat.

and

We’ll fund and supervise the full range of public services, preserve and develop equality and human rights, and be responsible for our own foreign affairs, defence and security. That means we can remove nuclear weapons from our shores …

One can only wonder about the external diplomatic pressures that might be brought to bear on the SNP. France, like some other European countries, for domestic reasons has little sympathy for secessionist movements anyway. If Whitehall, as a consequence of Scottish independence, had to move towards nuclear disarmament, it would leave France as the only nuclear weapon state in Europe, a status which other countries like the US and Germany, and possibly France itself, might not welcome.

So, if the SNP secured a majority for independence and entered into negotiations, they might at least offer some form of transitional period for Whitehall to make other arrangements. But the RN remaining permanently would require the SNP to offer HMNB Clyde a status akin to the Cyprus Sovereign Base Areas (a model not considered by Chalmers and Walker). Even then, Trident replacement is expected to be in service until 2055 or so (Cm 6994 Table 7-1) and the question arises as to whether an independent Scotland might one day change its mind and renege on an agreement made back in 2015. Such a prospect might lead Whitehall to conclude that a new Trident base within 10 years was an unavoidable consequence of Scottish independence.

Implicit in Chalmers and Walker’s assessment was that Trident basing in the South West would be unpopular on safety and environmental grounds and that it might be detrimental to tourism, particularly in the Falmouth area. They conceded that:

The traditional association of Plymouth and Devonport with the Royal Navy could make sustained protest from local people less likely than at an alternative site. (page 111)

However, they made no assessment of the employment opportunities which rebasing might bring. According to Wikipedia, HMNB Clyde is the base for “3,000 service personnel, 800 of their families and 4,000 civilian workers”. [All] Some [-FIRST COMMENT BELOW] of these people (certainly their jobs) would move south along with the submarines they support. In the independence negotiations Scotland might aspire to a navy the size of Denmark’s, which, if half were based on the West Coast, could have about 1500 service personnel at Faslane (IISS The Military Balance 2011, page 100). So the apparent gross gain to the South West might have to be offset by the allocation of some RN elements, not all from HMNB Devonport, to the new Scottish Navy. Nonetheless the balance would be a considerable boost to the local economy in the South West which has suffered over the last twenty years from the reductions in defence expenditure after the end of the Cold War.

One consideration which, as far as I can tell, has not been much discussed, is the situation which David Cameron would be facing as Prime Minister in 2015, just before an election, if the 2014 referendum were to favour Scottish independence. The dissolution of a union going back to 1707, however historically significant, might in fact not carry a major political price. None of the other Westminster parties will have any alternative to offer and the English (and Welsh) electorates may  not be too sorry to see the back of the Scots by the end of the independence campaign. However, over the years opinion polls have shown a majority of the population believing that the UK should retain a nuclear deterrent. A Conservative PM would almost certainly want to avoid UK nuclear disarmament on his watch and brought about almost by default. He might be expected to pursue, or at least wish to be seen to be pursuing, whatever rebasing options are available.

There are, of course, other possibilities.  However, as Walker pointed out in his January 2012 article:

… the 2007 decision to replace Trident with a “like-for-like” system is already being reconsidered in Whitehall, creating options for relocation. A Cabinet Office study of alternative systems, presided over by a Liberal Democrat minister, is under way. But it lacks sincere backing across government. For the Conservative Party, it is a harmless concession to coalition partners uncomfortable with the replacement decision. In any case, its recommendations are unlikely to affect the nuclear force’s location. The options receiving most attention – a slimmed down Trident (three boats rather than four) and adaptation of the Astute-class submarines to take “dual-capable” missiles (carrying conventional and nuclear warheads) – would not rid Scotland of nuclear weapons.

And then there is the local political situation. The westernmost part of the South West England peninsula has long provided a core of seats for the Liberal Democrats, the other constituencies, with two exceptions in Plymouth and Exeter, returning Conservatives in the 2010 election. Proposed boundary changes would have been to the LD advantage in 2010, according to number-crunching by Guardian Datastore, (below).

If the LDs go into the next election with lower poll ratings than in 2010, the Conservatives will expect to take some of their seats. How the two parties would choose to play the possibility of Trident rebasing at Devonport to their own advantage is not easy to assess. On this particular issue, voters may be pulled one way by expectations of jobs and economic benefits and the other by their perceptions of the environmental impact and nuclear safety.  For sure, by then the LDs can be expected to be looking for opportunities to differentiate themselves from their coalition partners.

Coincidentally, David Cameron visited Plymouth on 3 February. According to the local paper:

About 150 Dockyard and Naval Base workers attended a ‘PM direct’ session where they put questions to Mr Cameron. He told them: “I am a strong believer in the nuclear deterrent. The work you do here is vital.” ...
Amid moves towards a Scottish independence referendum, the Prime Minister said: “Obviously I want Scotland to vote to stay in the United Kingdom. But if Scotland wasn’t in the United Kingdom, then defence facilities would have to be based within the United Kingdom, if I can put it that way.”
… the Prime Minister’s visit halted refit work on the Trident submarine HMS Vigilant. David Cameron and his party were allowed to tour the submarine in 9 Dock without safety equipment including hard hats, after work was stopped in some areas.

So, “Would Scotland’s loss be the South West’s gain?” Recent polling suggests that a majority of voters in Scotland do not want independence and, if this is sustained until the referendum, the possibility of any gain would not arise. Otherwise, if the UK sans Scotland is to continue to be a nuclear weapon state, there doesn’t seem to be much alternative to Trident at some point in the future operating from HMNB Devonport. A suitable armaments depot would have to be constructed there, or possibly in Cornwall, say by 2025. If this turns out to be not so much ‘implausible’ as impossible, something more radical might be adopted, but probably would not be revealed until after the 2015 election. Otherwise Trident’s removal from the Clyde ought to be of considerable long-term net benefit to the economy of the South West in the form of jobs, and expenditure by households and on base support.

ADDENDUM 18 FEBRUARY

On 16 February David Cameron gave a speech in Edinburgh making the case for the Union. The Times (£) report the following day included the following:

… The Prime Minister’s gambit of promising Scots more devolution came amid warnings that Britain’s nuclear deterrent would be put at risk if Scotland voted for independence. The cost of moving Britain’s four nuclear submarines from the Faslane base on the Clyde, along with stockpiles of warheads and missiles, could be £2.5 billion, according to former senior military commanders.
Admiral Lord West of Spithead, the former First Sea Lord, said that the enormous logistical challenge would help those arguing that the £20 billion Trident renewal should not go ahead.
“There must be a real possibility that it would be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back in keeping an independent deterrence,” he said. …

ADDENDUM 30 MARCH

A newer post looks at the cost issue further.

ADDENDUM 25 OCTOBER

Also see http://westernindependent.blogspot.com/2012/10/update-on-royal-navys-trident.html

United States of Anglophonia

In a recent comment piece in The Times (£), David Aaronovitch, no doubt with tongue firmly in cheek, proposed that the UK, having given up on Europe, should join the USA rather than go it alone. His proposal was that:

… the nations of the United Kingdom become the 51st, 52nd, 53rd and 54th states of what might be known as the United States of America and the East Atlantic.

Admittedly,

Joining the US would mean Prince Charles not succeeding to the throne after his mother, but would also suggest that this was nothing personal. The Royal Family would continue in theme-park fashion, with hundreds of millions of additional fans in the other states.

which in part matches someone else’s predictions. He concluded:

Reader, as we enter 2012, please say that you too can see by the dawn’s early light, catching the gleam of the morning’s first beam, the contours of our Atlantic destiny.
Switzerland? Meh.

I don’t think Aaronovitch would make much of a negotiator. Consider. The population of the USA is about 313 million and that of the UK a bit over 62 million. Our accession would therefore represent a 20% increase in the number of US citizens and so would justify the number of states in the union increasing from 50 to 60. The population of a state is about 6.2 million on average but ranges from that of the smallest, Wyoming with just over ½ million, to the largest, California with nearly 38 million. So Aaronovitch’s proposal that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each become states seems quite reasonable (see table below).

However, England would then need to be divided into the remaining seven states, and while this might be problematic (to put it mildly), the existing nine regions provide a basis for this to be done as the diagram below shows.

The obvious two candidates for removal are the North East by merger with Yorkshire and the Humber, together a respectable 7.5 million population, and the East Midlands by merger with the West. But the combined Midlands would be 8.7 million, so shedding Worcestershire and Herefordshire to the South West would be in order. The latter could be raised further to about 5 million population if the bloated South East were to lose Oxfordshire. The result would be a set of seven states-to-be with populations between 5.3 and 7.4 million, nicely straddling the US average.

And finally, on a parochial South Western note, in his article Aaronovitch suggested that Wales would take on the nickname of the Dragon state. Here in the state of South West England, although Plymouth was the final departure port of the Pilgrim Fathers, we would probably have to make do with Mayflower state (after their ship), Pilgrim being already in use for Massachusetts.  Also, there might be an interesting first senatorial race in a part of the UK which up until the last election had become mostly split between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. If all the Conservatives (blue in the UK) become Republicans (red in the US), and Labour (red) moved entirely to the Democrats (blue), would the Liberal Democrats just stop being Liberal so Democrats would win both Senate seats? As they used to say in these parts, a pig would win with a blue ribbon!

Great fun, but it ain’t going to happen! Anyway Puerto Rico and Washington DC are ahead of us in the queue.

(UK population statistics 2010/11 from ONS, here)

Early October in SW England!

After a disappointing cool and grey summer, southern parts of the UK have been experiencing record-breaking temperatures since late September, and the exceptional spell of weather has persisted into early October. This field of poppies, photographed today, had been ploughed and farrowed in mid-summer.

SW England Redefined

MIT researchers have produced a novel means of assessing the UK's regional boundaries:

"Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space?  This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions.  Given a geographical area and some measure of the strength of links between its inhabitants, we show how to partition the area into smaller, non-overlapping regions while minimizing the disruption to each person's links.  We tested our method on the largest non-Internet human network, inferred from a large telecommunications database in Great Britain.  Our partitioning algorithm yields geographically cohesive regions that correspond remarkably well with administrative regions, while unveiling unexpected spatial structures that had previously only been hypothesized in the literature.  We also quantify the effects of partitioning, showing for instance that the effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive for the human network than that of Scotland.
Carlo Ratti, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Francesco Calabrese, Clio Andris, Jonathan Reades, Mauro Martino, Rob Claxton, Steven H Strogatz - PLoS ONE, 2010"

Their method is explained on YouTube, and at this point, where the existing boundaries are superimposed, it indicates that the South West ought to lose East Dorset which, unsurprisingly, prefers to communicate eastwards: Bournemouth, Southampton etc.  Otherwise, quite a good fit, as would be expected for a peninsular region of an island.  It doesn't look as though the detail supports Cornish nationalism, given the would-be statelet's interaction with Plymouth on the other side of the border.