The Economic Consequence

Two timely posts in one.

First, Save Newcastle Wildlife (off site link here) have made no further progress on getting Newcastle and North Tyneside Councils to face up to their plans to destroy or undermine prime local habitats with aspirational house building and playing fields. Explanations as to how these schemes fit in with previously expensively compiled master plans larded with bold declarations are awaited.

Secondly, a superb article by the ever readable and sane Rowan Moore on the 'studied decline' of a precious national asset (and exemplar to the wider world) being thrown under the bus by the Austerity process. (Full article here). Two governments and, perhaps, a third one currently have pursued an economic policy that has run down the public aspect of national life almost to nothing.

In 1919 John Maynard Keynes wrote the hugely influential The Economic Consequences of the Peace that described the outcomes of financial ignorance overruled by political ideology as leading to disaster and the probability that this in turn would return the world of catastrophic war in twenty years. I do not for a moment suggest an apocalypse will result from spec building and trashing our city parks; but the short sightedness of the policy has a crushing familiarity. Obsession with one factor and ignoring all others – or even that there might be an alternative to the current policy of avoiding accidents by cutting off one's own feet.