NW Business Interests Unite To Save Key Turkish Airlines Advertising Strategy

But he'll still go I think, 'cos he's had his feet held to the fire. I mean look at this picture from Weds game and note the correct use of the apostrophe. That's not the Stretford End we all know and love, is it? That somehow has a ....well, slightly more corporate feel don'tcha think? I think his rather low rent agent got stuffed by the PR machine of a large organisation who had fought the world class Spice Girls/Beckham PR machine to a high scoring draw some years before. That's gotta hurt and is no basis for a long term relationship.

Plus, of course, both the dressing room and the fans now detest him and no amount of goals are ever going to restore those relationships entirely.

But he's more likely to go in the summer than January. In either event, the club is going to make a fortune when he does go and he's passed up the chance to ever be the front man for a insurance company TV ad trying to project a subliminal message of reliability.

Addendum: final comment, via that weekly footie photoshop competition at the Guardian

Localism: Politics and Management Collide

Three currently Tory led West London Councils are considering merging services. This sort of thing has happened before in small local Districts, but never with authorities of such size. Collectively, they serve a population of getting on for 600,000 people. The three are already merging their children's services departments - aka education and social care for kids - and now they seem to want to go further and bring together their environmental health and corporate services. Savings of £50m-£100m are being claimed as possible, though I suspect this is more total Bollix than Total Place.

This stands somewhat in contradiction to any political narrative based on the 'localism and devolution of powers' theme aka the Big Society. Flippy Rick has covered this general subject more than once and, at a general level, I'm more on board with his entertainingly-jaundiced managerial eye for all the things that can wrong with either localising or centralising initiatives than absolutely convinced that Bigger is always Better. Nonetheless, I would concede that it is not inherently impossible that savings can be made through economies of scale in various areas.

What's interesting here of course is that two of the councils - Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea - are solid true blue Tory heartlands but the third, Hammersmith and Fulham, swings back and forth between Labour and the Conservatives every few years. Conventionally, it has generally been considered that electing a Council of a different stripe might, just might, mean that something changed. But if your Council is locked into long term contracts to jointly employ staff with other bodies who deliver an integrated service - whoops, sorry, to offer a common package of consumer choices (sic) - exactly how possible is this going to be? Doesn't it threaten to reduce the role of Councillors to funny people who shout at each other in the Council Chamber for no readily identifiable reason while the slick professionals get on with their terribly efficient way of doing stuff?

Now, let's be clear, I'm not coming over all dewy eyed and 'Heimat' in contemplating any of the existing London Boroughs. Most of them have existed in their current form for less than 2 generations and few command any real deep seated affection from their populations. I've never considered myself a 'Lambethian' for instance and I'd rather snigger at anyone who did. It would be like feeling patriotic about one's Water Company.

But the traditional deal is that, every generation or two since the late 19th Century, central government sets up a commission to look at all this and take soundings and proposes new boundaries - this may often take account of appropriateness of scale but also is driven by politics and community identity. What these West London Councils are seemingly proposing is very different from that - they're creating a permanent Tory controlled Local State with default Tory policies hard wired into their key services. It's management trumping politics.

And it's wrong.

University Fees: Driving Down House Prices in the Long Term

Righty-ho: as widely prophesied, it has come to pass: the state isn’t simply cutting stuff, it’s withdrawing from whole areas. Specifically it is withdrawing from funding most undergraduate tertiary education.

Frankly, this is a surprise to me - in its' sequencing at least. I thought they’d first go for Social Care for the elderly. But the same three card trick is likely to be played in that field as well: first issue ominous but anonymised threats of financial Armageddon; then set up a commission or special study to look into creating opportunities for creating individual debt obligations to cover the gap; and then sit back and wait for the providers to conclude that their only hope is to persuade the ‘consumers’ that the only serious game in town is to take on additional financial risk personally. Bingo! You’ve re-defined the boundaries between the obligations of the state and the basic social finance requirements of individuals. Something similar happened in pensions and housing a generation ago.

& therein lies the problem. Well, therein lies the problem if, like me, you’re 52 year old father of two kids who’ll go to Uni in the next seven years and also the son of a 88 yr old in a registered care home. Oh, and did I mention that the mortgage doesn’t get paid off till I’m 63? Don't talk to me about the 'squeezed middle' matey, I got there some time ago...

I can pay my mortgage. I can make a contribution to Mum’s care home fees. I can even give the kids a bit towards their Uni costs (crossed fingers). But, fuck me, I’m going to struggle to do all three things. & I got an essentially free tertiary education, and Mum does qualify for quite a bit of public subsidy in that care home.

So how is it going to be for the next generation up - the people who’ll enter working life with huge debts from tertiary education, increasingly ageing parents (that’ll be me, I suppose) and the need to somehow acquire a mortgage and a home in their late twenties or early thirties? Not so wonderful I’d guess. In fact I really doubt that people in my position in 20 years time will be able to bear such a triple burden of debt. So they’ll box and cox, like we all do. They’ll not be willing to risk quite so much in any particular debt obligation.

So: who’s volunteering to tell the Daily Mail that this move to cut Higher Education funding is going to drive house prices down?

P.S. 'Course, if I were one of those bug-eyed Marxist wallahs,I might make some point about the way unproductive (aka finance) capital constantly seeks to re-order the world to create more opportunities for it to reproduce itself. But that would just be extremism of a most old fashioned stripe and hardly welcome in today's Big Society. I'll leave that to the entirely non Marxist Richard Murphy.

My New Favourite Pop Song: Pass It On...

Stolen shamelessly from Stroppy.

P.S. I did consider whether I was too old for taking enjoyment from this sort of fantasy revenge. Then I listened to the song and it made me so happy, I decided not....

The Centre Stirs...

David Marquand:

I'm worried, not because the Government is departing from New Labour's legacy, but because it's sticking to it. Here, I believe, both Government and Opposition are engaged in a phony war. Despite all the furious charges and counter-charges that echo through the Westminster air, they are both on the same side. They both want to return to business as usual as quickly as they can. They disagree furiously about the route, but they agree about the destination. They want to get back to the sunlit uplands of ever-rising material prosperity, fuelling and fuelled by ever-rising consumption, both public and private. Both are dominated by short-term policy wonkery. Neither seems to have grasped the need for a new politico-economic paradigm, post-Keynesian, post-socialist, post-Thatcherite, post-national and above all post-affluence. I don't carry such a paradigm in my knapsack, I hasten to add. But I feel in my bones that this is what used to be called the left should now be working on.

Now, ignoring for a moment the rather impressive number of usages of the prefix 'post' in that, er, post, isn't this interesting? We have the primary academic representative of the line that runs from Crosland to New Labour (via the SDP) saying the game is now up, and the current froth of politics represents little more than a churning of outdated verities.

I think he's right. I just don't think that prefixing the word 'post' before every previous paradigm is particularly helpful. Challenging the inherited meaning of 'affluence', for instance, seems to me to be pretty vital - re-defining it as meaning something different: an 'affluence' of equality, resource sustainability and greenery springs to mind as the objective. &, of course, I'm not willing to concede we're in a world that is, by definition, post socialist.

Famously - and I can recall getting a lot of stick for this 25 years ago - Marquand, despite being then in the SDP, wrote regularly for Marxism Today. Quite who was trying to exercise hegemony over whom might still provoke a pub argument or two with friends to my Left. But if the would-be generals of the -so far - imaginary armies that are supposed to resist the coming cuts are to put flesh on their 'strategic' posturings, they must find a language which calls people who conceive of themselves as 'centrist' to the banner, as well as the thin ranks of the more committed Left. So it is always worth maintaining that dialogue with people like Marquand in my view.

Red Meat for the Tunbridge Wells Conservative Club Lounge Bar

Cameron has floated plans to take away basic security of tenure from new entrants to socially rented housing. This is a big step - and an important one.

It's important but not, of course, practical in any way - he's just fired the starting gun for a hail of factually based correction from Shelter, the Churches, the Chartered Institute of Housing and every Tenants' Organisation in the land and we all know what happens when 'factually based correction' hits the fan.

If implemented, this idea would create homelessness, hugely increase routine housing management costs in social housing, increase rather than decrease the benefit traps Ian Duncan Smith is supposedly unpicking, lead to all sorts of undesirable 'hard cases' making unwelcome new housing law and - here's the rub - almost certainly increase the number of people in the private rented sector, which, not being subject to rent control, is more expensive than social housing. In short, it would cost the state more money. So it ain't going to happen.

My best guess is we'll see a familiar cycle of small pilots followed by a range of minor tinkerings with tenure law and a dribbling away of the original political motivation that reduces to some small funding programme designed to produce a few hundred, at best, specially designed new tenancies that automatically convert to shared ownership when and if the family income reaches a certain point.

No, the importance of this announcement is that it the first sign of the end of the 'glad confident morning' for this government and the harbinger of the shit-storm they are going to face once the autumn budget is announced.

This idea is really not like the 'Free School' initiative where Tory plans can be arguably claimed to be seeking to mobilise the positive aspirations of the Daily Mail reading classes. I don't actually think that's true, but the fact that Gove has undoubtedly played his hand very badly so far doesn't mean it remains anything but a positive hand in principle. The Education policy tries to reach out to so called 'aspirational' Britain.

This housing policy doesn't: it seeks to mobilise the prejudices and ignorance of the Tory heartland.It's red meat for the Tunbridge Wells Conservative Club Lounge Bar. It offers a 'tin-ear' to every other strand of opinion and, indeed, to the pesky constraints of reality. It is therefore important in a symbolic way: it ain't going to happen, but it is a way station along the path to what a contributor to one discussion over at Blood and Treasure described as 'Thatcherism without the Falklands'.

Shiny Dave looks a little less shiny this morning. That moderate veneer is starting to peel.

By Grand Central Primary School I Sat Down & Wept

Coming to a status conscious household near you: a chance to spent $1000 preparing your 4 year old to get into the kindergarten of your choice. (via). These people are the market leaders it seems:

There are so many things to worry about when applying to top public and private schools in NYC. We, at Bright Kids NYC, will take away the anxiety associated with prepping for the appropriate tests so that you as parents can focus on the rest of the admissions process.

It is brutal out there for parents with young children. The public gifted and the private school entry in New York City is getting increasingly competitive, particularly for young kids. If you are serious about gaining admissions to a top school, you must get serious about preparing your child for the appropriate tests.

They say social mobility stopped more or less dead with the cohort born in 1970. That makes a kinds of sense - those were the last people who grew to maturity as the West went through the shift from needing lots of both skilled and unskilled manual jobs into a world where there are many more white collar workers, more and more layers of which get deskilled or simply routinised into 'call-centre type' work experiences as the years tick by. The opportunities for advancement out of routine or dirty or dangerous or simply boring family work traditions are not widening as they were when I grew up - they're narrowing. & no amount of guff about 'the knowledge economy' coming to save us is going to change this fact.

So education becomes a frantic, scary, elbows-out-push-your-neighbour-aside scramble to get on that ladder. 'Cos now it's one-in-and-one-out for the class with the nice life.

& 4 year olds start studying for tests - and the class that can afford it bribes its way to the top.

This is a human disaster.