Author Archives: Hilary
Graduates Into Employment….
Many young people want to remain in cities like Liverpool after their higher education, but opportunities to develop professionally if they do so are still often quite limited. So what exactly is a ‘graduate job’? And how do graduate jobs fit in with local economies?
There’s a brand new ‘Met Quarter’ shopping arcade in Liverpool city centre which looks quite interesting, so that was where we headed in search of some coffee, after a meeting in town this morning.
The new arcade is indeed worth a good look – all shiny steel and glass and smart labels – but there was one aspect of it that certainly wasn’t new to us. Our friendly and welcoming waitress was someone we already know because she’s a recent graduate. Like several others of her graduating year, she is employed in a capacity which gives her an income, but doesn’t really use her formal skills.
A conundrum for cities on the edge
This is a familiar problem for cities like Liverpool, perceived by bright young people to have excitement and ‘edge’, but with relatively weak economies.
The question which always arises in this context is, how long will a recent graduate stay in employment which doesn’t fit their recently acquired formal skills? Is it right to encourage young people to stay? Or should we be encouraging them to fly the civic nest, with a promise that we’ll keep in touch?
Liverpool has plenty of graduate incubators and ‘Graduates into Work’ programmes. Both have very important functions in the local economy. The former helps proto-type entrepreneurs to take their ideas forward; the latter, of course amongst other things, is often especially helpful for local graduates who already have their homes and families in Merseyside and need to stay.
The initial post-graduate years are critical
Is there an issue when young graduates remain in Liverpool in low-skill jobs, just at the time when they should be busily extending their experience and applying thier newly acquired knowledge?
Figures on graduate retention beyond a year or two are notoriously difficult to find for given locations. These are however crucial to our understanding of how the high skills agenda should be developed in an emerging economy such as Merseyside’s.
What some graduates and those with second degrees actually do after graduation remains a mystery, but the suspicion is that if they stay in a city like Liverpool they do not always fully use their new skills. Maybe we need to be honest enough on occasion to help them get experience elsewhere which, we all hope, they will later come back to Liverpool to use.
A fair exchange?
That young graduates want to stay and enjoy the vitality of a city such as Liverpool is excellent. Their enthusiasm and determination to make something of their lives here is something everyone warmly welcomes. But if we want these young people to develop their potential properly, we need to think of ways to establish a freeflow of skills and experience between our own backyard and other places.
Then, when the local economy really does come up to speed, we’ll have plenty of skilled and experienced people waiting, who already know us and want to be part of it.
Do Gender Pay Audits Bring Wages Down?
There’s a debate to be had about gender pay audits or reviews. To be effective, should they be compulsory and public? Do they have the desired effect on pay equality? And could they result in pay equity within given occupations, but even lower overall wages where the majority of the workforce is female?
The Fawcett Society reported recently that 30 years of equal pay legislation has taken us almost nowhere in terms of income equite between men and women. Apparently, it will be roughly another 85 years before we can hope to see this in reality.
In other words, sometime never… So obviously we’re not getting it quite right, despite the legislation.
Equal pay audits
One ‘solution’ which has been proposed is compulsory equal pay audits in employing organsiations The logic of this way forward is already being followed by some organisations such as the NHS (National Health Service, Agenda for Change) and socially responsible companies, where careful parity of pay against task is already established. But many businesses do not do it.
At least in theory such audits or reviews would ensure equal pay for equal work. This is something few would argue against.
Making it fair
But is there a snag, unless the audit is compulsory for everyone? If only some types of employment – for instance, in the third and public sectors – oblige by doing the decent thing, will that result in higher wages, probably for the usual parties, in other unmeasured and unreported sectors?
And would this also mean that wages in those sectors which are monitored take a general downward turn? – There is plenty of historical evidence of average wages falling in given occupations as numbers of women in them increase.
Maybe this is a bit like the situation reportedly found in Scandinavia, where people’s tax returns are posted for all to see? Cynics have been known to suspect that high earners sometimes find a haven for their money outside that declarable fiscal area… with the loss to the national economy which that is thought to entail.
Plugging the gaps?
How are we to deliver fair and equal return on endeavour without having ‘havens’ for those who consider themselves above that sort of thing? If there’s a sensible answer, many of us would be pleased to hear about it.
Tesco: Where Good Neighbours Are Good Business?
Tesco and the other huge supermarkets want to show socially responsible, how green and cuddly, they are. The test will be in how much they actually deliver – and the power to encourage them to achieve this lies much more than some have so far conceded with the communities in which they are located.
The ‘charm offensive’ by Tesco can’t be faulted. Their new 10-point plan says they are going to be ‘green and good’, and to blend in more with their retail neighbours, at least for the Tesco Express outlets. That’s genuinely good news all round.
It’s difficult to tell how much this intiative is in response to concerns, recently referred yet again to the Competition Commission, about large retailers who are ‘stoking up’ on land, and how much it’s just part of the retail learning curve that all sensible commercial businesses need to be on. My guess is it’s a combination of the two, but who knows?
And indeed, who cares? It’s what happens which matters in the business world and to the average customer, not why it may have happened.
Green and forward looking?
We can only welcome the promise to use totally bio-degradeable bags, to have clearer product labelling, to deliver bulk merchandise more considerately on the high street and to promote healthy eating. Tesco knows very well that these promises will have to be kept – there are plenty of people watching out there who would be delighted to find them failing to deliver these undertakings. (To quote Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, ‘The good neighbour tag could come back to haunt them, rather like the Tories with their Back to Basics campaign.’)
There are many debates to be had about Tesco, but the logic of the market still in the end applies. If enough people make a fuss, things will change. If they don’t, change may occur, but not at the same rate. The really clever businesses, of course, change in anticipation of what the fuss will later be about, not as an overt response to it. Maybe that’s the oft-commented genius of Tesco boss Terry Leahy?
Strength in numbers?
But for many local consumers the ‘real’ issue isn’t so much the logic of the market as the perceived ‘threat’ to local communities and smaller businesses. This concern is probably reasonable in many respects. Tesco and the other huge supermarkets have enormous resources and strengths and the little shop on the corner doesn’t. It might however be useful to remember that strength, for all parties, may lie in working together.
This could happen in two ways.
Firstly, have the small local businesses approached their bigger neighbours (or vice-versa?) to see what possibilities there are for, say, joint customer-faced training, local supplier support, promotion of healthy life-styles, community investment or anything else? Is there any real dialogue going on to test the depth and sincerity of the claim of the big stores that they want to work with their tiny neighbours? If there is, it’s not hit the headlines…
And secondly, what are local business leaders and advisors doing to help small enterprises to get together and act as one to ‘protect’ their interests against the giants? Wouldn’t this be a more constructive use of, say, council officials’ time – paid for by all of us – than carrying on endless local enquiries?
Convoluted logic
There’s a strange logic in the situation which often seems to come up, where on the one hand local activists persuade their council to oppose intended (and in many respects often much-needed) investment by the large interests, whilst at the same time most people in the community choose to shop in larger stores. Perhaps there’s a message here somewhere?
Less fuss about Tesco and their ilk hoping (until the current initiative) to open as long as they want to on Sundays (they can already do this in Scotland…), and more attention to the ways that local businesses can collaborate to serve their particular communities, might be quite a good idea. To quote Sharon Fraser, head of audit at Deloitte in the north, ‘Financial support could help the small stores improve their property portfolio.’ And what applies to property portfolios applies equally perhaps to other aspects of local business.
In the meantime, the ‘competition’ between the Big Boys to show their green and cuddly credentials can be no bad thing either.
Liverpool Botanic Garden, Edge Lane
The long-delayed Edge Lane developments, constructing an Eastern Gateway to Liverpool by 2007 / 8, are about to start. What a pity, then, that the historic Wavertree Botanic Gardens located just by the intended new route (and initiated in 1803 by no less a person than William Roscoe) are in such a state of neglect.
Flowers In Pots For All
The inner city is not an easy place to indulge green fingers, but there are many reasons why we all need to think about this. It’s not even just about fresh, healthy produce; there’s a really important issue of sustainability in all this. Let’s start with the hesitant late-night gardener in Tesco.
Late night shopping (feeling very virtuous because we’d just been to a dance and inter-active media event at Unity Theatre and had even stayed for the discussion afterwards)… so it had to be Tesco Old Swan if we wanted bread and coffee for the morning.
Inevitably, I gravitate to the plants and flowers stall – where else but the supermarket would you be tempted to buy seeds for weekend gardening at 11 p.m. on Friday night? A woman already there is eyeing a packet of French marigold seeds uneasily. Do I know anything about gardening?, she asks. She is thinking she might grow some flowers in a pot in the back yard
My ‘advice’ is limited by my own inexpertise. Perhaps it’s a good idea to use water-holding gel to guard against neglect of the seedlings (my own major misdeed) and, if a dry patch is likely, nasturtiums are both delightful and very forgiving. We chat on such things for a while and the woman moves on, clutching the marigold seeds doubtfully.
Shops, jobs and flowers for everyone?
Old Swan is a part of town which faces many challenges. Much of the housing stock is derelict Victorian, doubtless magnificent in its prime but now ‘student’ flats, or else back-to-back terrace. The unemployment rate remains high and the educational attainment is well below average. Tesco is the only major store on the area, and a very significant local employer; and it stocks gardening products which, if my late-night encounter is anything to go by, tempt first time green fingers.
None of this justifies the particular business strategies which some say the superstores adopt. But perhaps it does point to a few important considerations about economic development of a run-down area, and it also tells us that people still hope for better – why else buy flower seeds?
And why is there so little that grows in the lives of people in Old Swan? There’s nearby Newsham Park, curently a topic of hot debate amongst those who value green space, and the Edge Lane (Wavertree) Botanic Garden – would that it had the same recognition and status as its contemporaries in e.g. Birmingham! But not much else.
Green fingers from the start
When then can we expect that inner-city chidlren will learn routinely how to grow things at school? When will we start to think carefully about more allotments and other community growing space for grown-ups? In what ways can we help with the active use of gardens and allotments in the city? When will we start to teach children (and their mums and dads) about seasonal, lcaol prodcue? And how can we link the urge to see things grow with wider matters of health, diet and environment?
These are matters of sustainability in the long-term; and if they start from marigolds in a pot from Tesco, that’s an interesting conjunction too.
Anti-mother Discrimination And Reluctant Parenting: A Solution?
A recent survey suggests young people prefer material benefits to babies. But maybe hesitation about starting a family is more about uncertainty whether one’s parenting will be good enough, than in wanting ‘more’ materially. And there is hope for the future of young families, not least in the support which Sure Start programmes are now beginning to deliver across the country.
The Guardian / ICM poll on attitudes to having children, reported today (2.5.06), demands careful reading.
The Guardian editorial on this important survey identifies some critical issues about contemporary attitudes to families and parenting. Now that young women and men feel equally free to pursue serious careers it is unsurprising that both should be cautious about producing babies; though this does not self-evidently suggest that babies are not valued of themselves. Perhaps rather it’s concern about whether potential parents can provide ‘good enough’ care for their intended offspring which holds them back….. That, and the certainty that mothers still can’t win when it comes to combining work and parenthood.
It is true that, as the Guardian leader says, there is a role here for government in supporting families and parenting, but it’s less than accurate in suggest that this nettle has not been grasped. Amongst a range of initiatives is the national Sure Start programme, now developing across the country.
Sure Start programmes support parenting
Local Sure Start programmes in many places are working on the issues which underlie current concerns of parents and potential parents. By 2008-10 there will be Children’s Centres all around the country, catering not ‘just’ (as Sure Start programmes currently do) for less advantaged young families, but for everyone. They will aim to accommodate the crucial fact that, as one parent commented, it ‘costs a lot’ financially and personally to go out to work when one has children.
Sure Start and the anticipated Children’s Centres still face many challenges, but they are genuinely good news….. look out for National Sure Start Month, in June.
Ironically, because Sure Start and Children’s Centres have so far focused on less advantaged families, they have not yet reached the chattering classes; so no-one’s noticing them. Soon however these programmes will be at a place near you, and to everyone’s benefit.
Acknowledge it or lose it?
It would be a sad irony if, in having started where it matters most of all, the government were not now to be given the credit for what will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity really to make a difference to the prospects of families of every sort – including those of hardworking professionals of both genders – right across the nation.
May Day
May Day has been with us for centuries. Its overt meanings, and even the actual date, may change, but the sense of taking a day to do something different and more personal remains. People in every age and every part of the world have welcomed the onset of Summer and the chance to throw a party.
It’s May Day today. The first of May, that unequivocal date which, unlike the contested first day of Spring (is it the vernal equinox on 20/21 March, or the newer BBC version on 1 March?), is firmly set in the European calendar.
When I was small I genuinely thought that May Day was about Morris Dancers and Maypoles. We lived in villages in Hampshire, Wiltshire and then Gloucestershire, and my father was a rural science teacher who took his local community involvement seriously – so we all enjoyed a flavour of the festive rituals of many centuries, and are none the worse for that.
Holding on to traditions and ideas
I suppose that in some ways that was the end of a very long period in history, already mostly shattered by global stife and the increasing grip of technology. Looking back, it might be seen as idyllic, though that it certainly wasn’t; give me double glazing, wider horizons and lots of running hot water any day.
But there are vestiges of the ‘old’ May Day way of life which still resonate. The festivals (May Day, Harvest and what have you) were unselfconscious and for everyone. Our understanding of the seasons and cycles of the earth – I learned about crop rotation at a very early age, and about its history back to mediaeval times not much later – is something which still informs my perceptions, albeit now in terms of eco-systems. And the things we did were family inclusive; sometimes overly so, but at least everyone was there.
New meaning for old ideas
Only after I came to the city did I learn that there was also another ‘meaning’ to May Day – its use, on the first Monday of May, as a celebration of workers’ rights. Thus, 1 May 1886 in the United States saw the very first International Workers’ Day…. not to be confused with 1 September, which after historical debate is now set in America as Labor Day.
Such reinvention of celebratory events is not however confined to the U.S.A. In Liverpool since 1978, when the date first became a Bank Holiday, we have seen the first Monday in May used to underpin general festivities, to recognise Trade Unions and, occasionally, to celebrate shire horses. The scope is huge in a place with such long historical links to labour, but also with wide-open spaces such as Sefton Park right by the city centre.
Modern May Day
Activities this year for May Day are a million miles away from my hazy childhood recollections. There range from a demonstration in London to promote a Trade Union Freedom Bill, to a grass-roots Labor Arts Festival in Edmonton, Canada and a Maypole event at Liverpool’s Tudor half-timbered Speke Hall and Morris dancers (yes!) outside our wonderful St. George’s Hall, via big marches and strikes across the U.S.A. in favour of regularising the status of illegal workers.
Thus morphs the traditional May Day in a more politically conscious era, whether the objective be workers’ rights or a determiniation to see celebration through the arts of community in a more fragmented world. We can only be glad, whatever the detailed argument about the causes espoused, that people still see fit to make the effort.
We have lost much of the original understanding of May Day, and I’d guess that many people active today are not even aware of its historical roots. But things change only in some ways. For every person involved in worthy trade union activity today, there are probably still hundreds carrying on the original idea behind May Day, taking a day off work and getting out their lawnmower or barbecue set, as they prepare for some family’n’friends time in the garden.
Let’s hope the sun shines for everyone, demonstrators, gardeners and revellers alike.
To Blog Or Not To Blog? That Is The Question
The nature of ‘blogging’ has been quite throughly explored of late; but here is the humble observation of a person who is actually trying to do it, and to find a new way of sharing ideas into the bargain.
Having now completed 150 entries over a period of six month on this Weblog, I hope I’m beginning to get the hang of it.
I read recently that a new Blog is created somewhere every second of every day, but that half of them fold within three months. Frankly, I’m not surprised. I expect that for quite a lot of people it’s bit like writing a Diary, and after a while Life takes over….
More a Journal than a Diary
For me, however, this exercise has become defined in my head as ‘journalistic’, in the sense of examining the events and ideas of the moment – or perhaps sometimes those which are distinctly against the grain of that moment?
And in that too I’m not alone. Both The Economist and The Guardian, for instance, are currently engaged in what might be called meta-analysis of the ‘meaning’ of contemporary journalism; and both have concluded that a lot of it will in future involve direct engagement with the reader.
What is a blog?
Indeed, The Economist‘s Survey of new media, published this week, addresses the issues very clearly: A blog, argues Dave Winer who pioneered weblog software, is ‘the unedited voice of a single person’, preferably amateur and, in The Economist‘s words, having ‘a raw, unpolished authenticity and individuality’. This, it seems to be agreed, is what distinguishes blogs from formal newspapers; just as blogs must in the view of readers be accessible and personal in a way that organisational productions often cannot be.
Well, obviously, I couldn’t possibly comment in this particular context; but I do feel that approaching my Blog Journal over quite a time now has changed my understanding of what it’s all about. To start with I was quite nervous of sharing these ideas, and then I began to feel more confident that readers would understand the spirit in which they are offered – as indeed has always been the case.
More direct and better linked?
And I suspect that I now write more directly than I did to begin with. It’s quite a challenge to move away from ‘academic speak’ whilst still trying to stick to the established rules of evidenced-based commentary. But what I’ve lost in third party style has perhaps been compensated for by my better grasp now of how to link / reference my pieces to other writers’ work, directly through the internet. It’s a challenge always to find the right links to illustrate a given point, but I’m coming to think that even partial connection is better than none.
What next?
So what next? Well, discussions with Nick Prior, who designs this website for me, have taken me to thinking we need photographs! This will not make the weblog a newspaper, but it may help to add interest and show you more about what’s what, especially when I write about events and places I know. My first assignment of this photographic sort was therefore today, in Sefton Park.
And maybe I shall try some more ideas as well… an educational or musical ‘column’, or something special about Liverpool, perhaps? Who knows? Or perhaps by Entry No. 200 we shall all know?
Thank you as ever for joining with us in this adventure.
Creationism Is An Attack On Rationality: The Scientists Rally At Last
It has taken the scientists quite a while to wake up to the serious dangers for science and its rational underpinnings of creationism and the ‘theory’ of intelligent design. But now at last this danger – to the scientific community and far beyond – is beginning to be understood and confronted.
It’s taken a long time, but the scientists are at last beginning in numbers to fight back vocally against the attack from the Creationists, those mainly right-wing religious followers who believe despite the evidence that the story of the Old Testament is somehow literally true – and, even more worryingly, that it should be taught in schools. And in this rebuttal the scientists have been joined also by most mainstream churches and religious people – the large majority of whom in the case of both science and religion have until recently mainatined it is enough simply to ignore the creationists’ exotic claims.
But now scientists are seeking the active support of the churches to back evolutionary theory, especially in America, where Creationism and the related ‘theory’ of Intelligent Design have made the most headway.
Disputing creationism is not enough
It is not however enough simply to say that scientists should dispute creationism and intelligent design.
Far more is at stake than ‘just’ the challenge to an explanation of the origin of life on earth – vastly significant though this is.
The ideas of the creationists are, as some have recognised for decades, an affront to rationality. It is said that the President of the United States is a prominent supporter of creationism, or at least a proponent of intelligent design, but we must ask how this can be so when he is also a lawyer.
Lawyers may indeed sustain the view that ‘both sides’ of an argument should be aired, but rarely do they believe this even when one of those ‘sides’ has barely any evidence to uphold it. So what else is going on?
Economics and authority
The position of those who support creationism is usually authoritarian, and often anti-intellectual. This is in many respects evident in the current enthusiasm of some to promote such beliefs in Britain. In the USA, perhaps, this stance is even more established.
Many on the right of politics and religion like certainty. They do not feel comfortable with complex debates about evidence; and they are happier when intellectual challenge is replaced by the logic of big business. In other words, there is a deterministic preference here for authority and authoritarianiam to come together so that all is right with the world. God has pre-ordained the universe and our place in it, and this place is evidenced by our wealth (or not) and our religious observance. It’s an old-established way of thinking. Let there be no more debate!
A chasm between world views
For the vast majority of scientists there is a vast chasm between the exploration of the evolutionary paradigm and the determinism of the religious right. Small wonder then that scientists have been ill-prepared for the creationist onslaught.
And sadly small wonder too that many who might challenge the attack on science have not done so, perhaps for fear that in so doing they might also put at risk the funding of their research. There are significant numbers of wealthy benefactors out there who are comfortable with the idea of a creationist world and their hypothecated place in it.
Perhaps the scientists have failed to appreciate how precarious is the wider understanding of their work. Perhaps they have continued in their research mostly oblivious of the threat to their way of interpreting the world.
Fundamental issues
Neither of these positions can be seen as any more than innocent or at worst naive. But what is at stake is fundamental. Few people would wish to dispute the entitlement of individuals to perceive the world and all that is in it in their own way. Many however, the scientists amongst them, must now challenge more overtly and vigorously the view that we can dispense with informed debate and rationality. At last this is beginning visibly to happen.
London’s Theatre Museum Gets A Boost From Its Musical Neighbour
Covent Garden’s Theatre Museum is the National Museum of the Performing Arts, a unique and special place. But it is currently under threat of closure. An urgent rescue bid is being considered by the Museum’s nearby neighbour, the Royal Opera House. Success in this venture is not only essential for the greater good of both parties, but also offers encouragement to those who see that to survive the arts must work together.
The national Theatre Museum in Covent Garden has been under serious threat for a while now. If anything, my conviction – shared, of course, by many others – that this would be a disaster, grows by the day.
But it seems that a way may now be found to put things right. The Museum Theatre’s nearest neighbour, the Royal Opera House, is looking to see if it can take over the running of the Museum, before it is closed and its contents get mothballed in the V & A in South Kensington.
Performing arts working together
We must hope this ‘rescue bid’ between close neighbours, and in a fantastic setting, is successful. Not only does it make huge sense in terms of synergy in a given locality – with perhaps the greater push towards full use of this unique set of resources which could follow – but it is also a story which needs to be shared, with a big message… Together the arts, and especially the performing arts, can flourish. Set apart, this isn’t so easy.
It’s a lesson we almost learnt the hard way in Liverpool’s Hope Street a decade ago, when we had to lauch the CAMPAM slogan – Once lost, we will not get it back! CAMPAM was the Campaign to Promote the Arts on Merseyside. In the early 1990s we fought and won a long and weary battle to make sure that Liverpool didn’t lose its Everyman and Playhouse Theatres, or indeed the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.
History doesn’t need to repeat itself. The Theatre Museum and the Royal Opera House, side by side in Covent Garden, were surely made for each other. I really hope the matchmaking drama we now see before us has a happy ending, soon.
The Theatre Museum, London
Covent Garden: The Untold Story – Dispatches from the English Culture War, 1945-2000
Read more articles on the National Theatre Museum.
Dreaming Realist 