Table of spending limits and changes—extracted from Scottish Govt. Draft Budget, Sep.20th 2012

Posted on September 20, 2012 by davidsberry | Leave a comment

‘Cos!

Posted on September 20, 2012 by davidsberry

I was reminded of an endearing trait of a former partner who was plenty intelligent/educated and would hold her own in any discussion but who, when pressed to discuss and not in the mood would simultaneously declare the discussion over and that she had won with the simple expletive: ‘Cos!

I soon came to appreciate the fine distinction between “because” and “cos”, which was the former anticipated rational statements of explanation to follow which expressed the argument in more detail and, hopefully, was persuasive in winning it. ‘Cos! implied no such thing and functioned in our discussions much as DefCon 5 and ICBM launch function in international brinkmanship.

I was reminded of this in a small tweetfest with Duncan Hothersall, one of the more compulsive Twitterati who is also a staunch unionist and Labour activist in Edinburgh. Needless to say, we don’t see eye to eye much but he is sincere and non-malicious, even as his passion does lead him astray occasionally. We were discussing Canavan’s aspiration for Scotland to escape Tory policies through independence.

Duncan objected to this: “I’ve long admired Dennis Canavan; it’s really disappointing to see him using the “vote indy to get rid of Tories” line.” When I responded “Why? Scottish Tories are a spent force in most Scottish constituencies. #indy is the answer to avoiding their crass policies” he explained “Because (note we are not yet in ‘Cos! territory) an honest #indyref debate needs to be about the constitution, not a way of fixing elections.”

At that point I realised our problem lay in our differing reading of ‘country’. If I understood him right, he sees both Scotland and UK as “countries”—”And of course Scotland is a country. And a part of a bigger country. And these two things are both fine.” he tweeted. And this may be the root of some confusion in this independence debate. To Duncan, the idea of dissolving the union is a political sleight of hand that fragments what, to him and others like him is an entity, a country called UK or Britain.

That’s a hard one for me to accept. Having been born in England with an English dad and had my education with large pink-painted maps of empire on classroom walls throughout, I still see Scotland as my country and England as part of my heritage  and feel much pride in what they achieved together with no small help from the Welsh but ‘Britain’ has faded to a geographic concept that, for me, ranks with ‘Europe’ as a geographic term that carries little patriotism or emotive identification.

Some people (perhaps Duncan?) argue that the political union and shared history of three centuries has become the dominant factor in identifying ‘country’. But I would cite Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Portugal or Poland as examples of countries that disappeared from maps—but never disappeared from the self-identity of the people who made up that country.

Sometimes countries exist in people’s minds before they exist in reality. The Austrian politician Metternich’s dismissive assessment of Italy as “only a geographic expression” was disproved within a century by Garibaldi. Despite centuries of city-state politics, its unifying culture, language and history made it a country before its citizens realised it. Bismarck and Germany are a similar parallel story.

A similar situation applied to England’s 13 colonies in America. Under the unifying pressure of the Seven Years’ War and the haughty attitude adopted towards them by the British government, the stirring sentiments of their Declaration of Independence codified what the bulk of people there already knew: that they had become a country. Because of the cultural distinctiveness derived from environment and common experience, they had already been thinking that way for some years beforehand.

So, back to Duncan and his elastic understanding of what constitutes a country. There is no doubt that many people in Scotland continue to think of ‘Britain’ as their country, even if they are now in a minority (barely 12%, while ‘all’ or ‘more’ Scottish tally to 64%—according to British Social Attitudes Survey 2011). Given a decade of growth due largely to English immigrants, those are surprising figures.

Where most confusion arises is in England. While the union and the Scots presence in it has registered, most consider it a variant of Edward’s cuffing of Wales into line four centuries previously. For a nominal ‘union of equals’ it has been breathtakingly one-sided with some space being found in the English parliament for fifty or so Scots and their presence in the Lords no greater than that of CofE Bishops.

More importantly, traditions of the English state, such as centralisation, sovereignty of parliament, deference to the monarch, even in business affairs like Crown Estates control of seabed and presumption of seniority of English courts have simply been presumed to extend to Scotland, even where they are in direct conflict with Scottish culture and tradition.

It was difficult enough to redress this in the early days when a post-Darien Scotland came almost bankrupt to the negotiating table. But the population imbalance of roughly six to one has worsened to twelve to one. The booklet In Bed with an Elephant captures the Scottish dilemma of making her voice heard but is unknown among the great majority of English who see no anomaly in using the terms “British” and “English” interchangeably.

Given the relative remoteness and unimportance of Scotland to the bulk of England’s citizens, it would perhaps seem artificial if it were any other way; how often do Scots consider or refer to—let alone understand—Shetlanders? But with so many poorly informed English politicians (Cameron; IDS; Farage; Mayor Boris) wading into the independence debate and so many Scottish politicians (both Alexanders, Davidson, Curran; Rifkind; Brown; Darling; Kennedy, etc) basing their career in England, it is little wonder discussion stalls on terms of reference rooted in English and/or Westminster practice, to the annoyance of those who think the union’s other partner has a say.

What we need at this point is a latter-day Canon Kenyon Wright to articulate that say in a manner that is obviously not tholed to any political master. What the Yes campaign has now is the modern equivalent of Paolo Vestri in 1997—the pivotal desk jockey organising the campaign. But what it needs is the Garibaldi, the Bismarck, the Bolivar, even the Wallace who will articulate—beyond anything regulation-issue politicians in Westminster or Holyrood can achieve—the aspirations of a people to be in charge of their own country once again.

That person must then articulate a new 21st century incarnation of “for as long as one hundred of us remain alive…” that will lift our hearts, inspire our future and give us Scots back the sense of purpose we lost when this British Empire partnership with our good friends to the South ran into a wall.

Simply stamping our feet and grunting “‘Cos!” isn’t going to be enough.

 

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Trooble at t’Toon Hoose

Posted on September 19, 2012 by davidsberry

Cheery as this blog tries to be, those seeking their ritual giggle (some at the style, some at the content), should stop reading now and switch to Oor Wullie. Get yer tin hat on—we’re in Sturm und Drang mode today. What triggered it was nothing more offensive than a KPMG beancounter presenting his fiscal audit of ELC to their Audit & Governance scrutiny committee. Although not a member of said committee, anorak that I am I sat in.

The report was competent and thorough but took a rather jaundiced view of ELC finances. We had rehearsed this argument at last week’s cabinet but to hear an outsider figuratively suck his teeth because all reserves were earmarked and capital spend for the last year had exceeded the previous by some 15% made me realise just how uncharted are the fiscal waters into which councils (and indeed the entire Scottish Government) are now sailing.

I’ll spare those readers not already chuckling at Fat Bob and Soapy Soutar the detail but ELC had tightened its fiscal belt as soon as the 2008 crunch hit, piled up some £28m in reserves and planned to spend them down to cover the 3-5 year downturn forecast when the UK budget was put on emergency life support. A chart went the rounds that showed a 5 -year series of year-on-year drops in public funding, followed by a further ten, during which it recovered to its original level.

The idea was that a ‘bridge’ could be built across the bottom of that sharp down/slow up chart by filling in the shortfall with reserves for a limited few years. That assumed there would be an ‘up’ starting soon, if not now. Unfortunately, every indicator from double-dip recession to unending Eurocrisis now points to more down before we see any up. This is bad news for anyone. But for councils, it heralds a disaster.

First of all, a 4% year-on-year drop in the Scottish budget was put off for a year but came into effect last year and will be repeated this year. Initially a third drop next year was going to be the extent of it—a 12% real drop in Scottish Government spending (good chart here), after which things would recover slowly to normal. That in itself was going to be drastic, equalling a loss of £3.840m in monies spent by the Scottish Government. Those monies are spent roughly 1/3rd each on:

  1. NHS, including hospitals, GPs, ambulances, dentists, pharmacy, etc (£10,435m)
  2. Local Government (schools, social work, roads, parks, sports, museums, cleansing, recycling, libraries, environment, planning, trading standards, housing)…to name just a few, totalling £10,300m
  3. Everything else, which includes tertiary education (£2,296m), finance & growth (£3,394m), justice (£1,963) rural affairs (£545m), with quangos like SEPA, Scottish Enterprise, Creative Scotland, VisitScotland, Scottish Water funded through the relevant department.

Given that our population is ageing and the elderly make the biggest demand on the NHS, the current government’s promise to protect the NHS budget is the least it can do. Which means than, instead of 12%, 18% in savings must come out of the budget for the other two areas. Let’s presume local government and the rest share that equally (optimistic, given that there will be hell to pay if either university or arts funding drops by 18%).

There is an additional factor that needs to be considered. When council budgets rose by 3-5% each year, as they did throughout the noughties, the effect of salary ‘creep’ could be ignored. This ‘creep’ is a natural increase as people gain seniority and promotion. Even if a complete pay freeze is in effect, employee salary ‘creep’ will add 1 – 1.5% to any budget and must be taken into account.

So, let’s examine council spending more closely. Easily the most visible of public services to most people, there are few people insensitive to council services, whether it is bin collection, street sweeping or their local football pitch. A typical mid-size council (Perth & Kinross) annual revenue budget allocation is shown in the pie chart below:

By far the largest chunk goes on Education and Children (48%), with the next largest on Housing and Community Care (19%). The former is almost all expended on schools and the bulk of the latter is spent on Adult Social Care. This is because all these budget are net. This means that they are the additional money needed to pay for services that do not pay for themselves. Unusually (because it charges rents), Housing is one of the few council departments that either breaks even or even contributes some money to the general budget.

As far as the general public is concerned, both Education and Adult Social Care fall into the same taboo category for cuts as the NHS does. If the same ‘ring-fencing’ to protect their budgets were applied as we just did with the NHS above, instead of 12% becoming 18% cuts for the whole council, protecting Education and ASC would mean a 54% cut on everything left. Add in salary creep and you’re looking at least at 57% savings

This is clearly impossible without wholesale closure & sale of libraries, museums, community centres, sports centres, parks, etc and slashing planning, cleansing, environmental protection, roads and even transport of pupils and ASC clients to unacceptably low levels. The room for maneuver is worse than we thought.

Back in 2008, East Lothian Council instigated a 2% per annum efficiency saving requirement from each department over the next three years. This was achieved, largely by natural wastage of staff (down by over 200 out of 4,500 FTEs), plus major items like an overhaul of how ASC was provided, through charging for special uplifts, right down to skipping winter planting of flower beds or summer hanging baskets (unless the town fund-raised to supply them).

The point is that, after three years of effort, most of anything that could be described as ‘fat’ has already been cut from the operation. Where councils (including ELC) have made very little progress is in ‘shared services’ where they operate joint departments with other councils. Nobody argues there needs to be 32 directors of education or 32 separate roads departments, each with their own yellow “Tonka-toy” fleets of gravel lorries and tar machines.

But, despite the fact that all 32 councils could get their payroll from one place and despite councils like ELC budgeting £5m of reserves for a ‘change fund’ to finance such transitions, almost nothing has happened. After three years, an ‘ELBEF’ consortium of the six Edinburgh, Lothian, Fife and Borders councils has produced exactly nothing.

The reason is that senior management in virtually all councils have been permitted to run their various departments as they saw fit. And after a decade of annual increments to both their budgets and their salaries, they presided over somewhat bloated organisations that nobody had examined in detail—let alone taken a chain saw to—in living memory.

Complicit in all this is Audit Scotland, who churn out forest-fuls of high-production-value reports that nibble at the edges. It’s an echo of the emperor’s clothes where it’s in no-one’s interest to blow the gaffe and, as no-one steps much out of line, few examples of how to innovate.

In February of 2013, there will be a variety of bun fights down at the local Town House; the new administrations will blame the old administrations, suck their teeth and balk at anything too radical, using reserves to cover shortfalls and selling property to cover that where necessary.

But during 2013, meetings at CoSLA (the council’s own common organisation) will get much more ill-tempered, as will their relationship with the Scottish Government. John Swinney will continue to be diplomatic, reasonable and generous where he can. But as his hands are also tied, there will be a joint throwing of toys out the council pram as the much-heralded ‘Concordat’ of 2007 gets torn up, along with the related commitment to a council tax freeze.

Even then, because education and ASC will need to take some share of the cuts to come, much ill-tempered trading of blame will pepper the run-up to the February 2014 budget setting—because, despite raising council tax as much as 10% and making what cost savings and natural staff wastages are still there to be made, that’s when the cumulative shrinking will really start to bite and wholesale jotters will be collected across those services deemed not to be ‘essential’.

As well as real cuts in jobs and salaries in Education and ASC and unpopular moves like fortnightly bin collection or doubled fees, look for community facilities that councils supply from pitches to libraries suffering not just limited hours but wholesale closure and sale, with staff losses in what were once ‘safe’ public service jobs of 10% or more.

It’s that serious.

 

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Qually Folly

Posted on September 18, 2012 by davidsberry

Michael Gove has set the cat amongst the educational pigeons in England. By scrapping GCSEs and replacing them with a Baccalureat more common in Europe. Known in France colloquially as le bac, it is an academic qualification which French and international students take at the end of the lycée (secondary education). It was introduced by Napoleon I in 1808. It is the main diploma required to pursue university studies.

Apart from political knee-jerk reactions from the usual suspects, more thoughtful commentators have queried how a single exam in each subject can properly evaluate a pupil’s knowledge and how this will not result in a ‘two-tier’ education dividing academic from vocational pupils.

After 13 years of the Scottish Parliament, the spend on school education has doubled with no measurable improvement in exam results, positive destinations or social problems among young people. The McCrone settlement of 2002 greatly improved teacher salaries and status, while councils have devolved management to schools as well as creating nursery places for all 3- and 4-year-olds.

Nonetheless, negative comments in recent reports and comparisons with Scandinavian models lead to the conclusion that our above-average spend per pupil may not be effective. And, while all reports note the relevance of social backgrounds to academic performance, none draw any conclusion beyond providing ‘more resources for the vulnerable’.

Is it therefore time to re-think Scotland’s school system?

What is striking about education debates both here and furth of Scotland is how dominated they are by the vested interests of governments and teaching unions. The two major groups for whom the system largely exists—employers and the pupils themselves who will become employees—are at best abstracted or, at worst, ignored.

A recent blog on this site (Costly Lessons) took independent schools to task but one thing they excel at is understanding and achieving success in the education system and, to a lesser extent, what pupils need to learn for success in later life. That second point applies mostly to those who would ‘read the Greats’ or wind up in the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Archers but they are more pragmatic than their ivory tower looks suggest.

Education cannot be viewed separate from social context, nor without reference to human behaviour, as regards reward, ambition and peer/family pressure. The strict rote learning of the mid-20th century gave way to pupil-centred and, more recently, inclusive learning. At the same time, social norms of conformity and obligation have given way to ambition and entitlement. Taken together with a fixation on academic progression, the result has given more disruption in classrooms with less responsibility being embraced by parents, especially (but not exclusively) those with social difficulties.

Education authorities and teaching unions agree that key learning stages like literacy are best achieved prior to P3 and social interaction skills prior even to that. Anathema though they seem to be here, Scandinavian outdoor nurseries boast an enviable record of teaching infants self-confidence, as well as both practical social skills. Why can’t we at least investigate that as a tool of early learning?

And where Gove is treading heavily at the other, the fear of social discrimination is blocking the recognition of vocational skills as just as important a part of learning for life as academic pursuits. This month, Corby Technical School opened. with a specialisation in engineering and science. Roquette, a major local employer, says it “welcomes the opportunity for young people to develop real skills for their careers alongside relevant traditional academic qualifications that will provide students with increased value to their future employers.”

Leaving aside fixing poor school infrastructure (important but more a question of money than education philosophy), the top priority parameters to address include:

  1. Reducing classroom disruption
  2. Empowering teachers in status, as well as in disciplinary options
  3. Empowering communities to determine strategic direction of local schools
  4. A much different approach to nursery and infant ‘education’
  5. Definition and enforcement of parental responsibilities
  6. ‘Level-playing field’ options for pupil career (vocational, creative, business)

For such to be feasible, let alone effective, a close involvement of multiple agencies will be required, not least police, social work, youth organisations, wardens but especially parents’ groups. But key to any of that, whatever the structure, it must be pro-active, as opposed to intervention once a child is ‘failing’ academically or socially.

Clearly not all homes are capable of the same nurture and support but neither are a child’s chances of success enhanced where parents abdicate their involvement as role models for which no professional can provide an adequate substitute. However well intentioned or professional state involvement might be, families—like communities—stand or fall on their own actions. Our own history from clan clachans to the Gorbals teaches that poverty makes that harder but does not make it impossible.

The folly of the old P7 Qualifying Examination that once sorted pupils into ‘streams’, each with a differing syllabus was not the principle of teaching pupils what they needed to know for their likely post-school destination but the social presumption that any stream was ‘better’. This is where private schools are a liability, focussing on academia and making it evident they regard money (for their fees) as a measure of worth.

In any other part of human endeavour, training for the job would be self-evident. Deep-sea Divers and Supply-Boat Captains share little in their job training, let alone with solicitors and surgeons. Yet all of them wind up on comparable salaries, often living as neighbours.

For society to be classless, education itself must NOT be classless but differentiated and geared to the child, which involves challenges in wood shop, developing new iPhone apps, access to sports facilities (c.f. wur Andy) andinteractive, real-world languages, as well as Latin and Calculus. And that, Mr Gove does NOT involve pushing them all through the same mincer—any more, Mr EIS, than it does trying to level the playing field and ‘make every child a winner’ because neither is helpful training for life.

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Looking Through a Glass Union (Again)

Posted on September 17, 2012 by davidsberry

A year ago, this blog welcomed the One Dynamic Nation website to the debate on Scotland’s future, especially its relationship with England. Obviously a reasonably professional effort, in the intervening time, it has been fleshed out with a number of pages and maintained a reasonable, if simplistic, graphics “feel”. Nonetheless, I have been disappointed with the content and apparent lack of new things to say.

Take, for example, one of the five ‘Campaign’ pages entitled “Benefits of the Union” which starts off with:

“The Union serves all four parts of the United Kingdom well and enables us to achieve much more together than would be the case if we were separate nations.”

The presumption underlying this is that bigger is better—and could use a couple of examples if they believe this to be true, especially as Switzerland and Denmark—not to mention Luxembourg or Liechtenstein enjoy GDPs per capita that Britain can only envy.

They then go on to cite three points on history, none of which relate to the 20th century, let alone the 21st, and then cite a number of economic points they obviously consider to be major advantages but they start off badly:

  • The Union allows Scotland to be part of a larger, more powerful economy and within the Union, Scotland enjoys the four freedoms – movement of goods, services, people and capital.

…err, if that were the case we should all integrate with Europe tomorrow because those same four freedoms underpin the EU. Yet the UK is the EU’s most eurosceptic member.

  • By remaining part of the Union, Britain has the fourth largest economy in the world. Edinburgh’s role as a major financial centre is built on the expertise of its workforce and underpinned by its position in the UK.

…err, so explain how tiny Hong Kong or Singapore (never mind the glorified reef that is the Cayman Islands) can possibly hold on to their leading roles in global fianance.

Rather than deconstruct the rest of their rather weak and poorly thought-through points, I challenge whoever is behind the site to up their game. What they have now is a series of platitudes for the faithful to (as they say on their site) “Keep Calm—and tell us why you love the United Kingdom.” Given the latest survey of independence from the British Social Attitudes, they are missing the fact that decisive debate is over those who are not thirled to either view who will wind up being decisive.

In a sample size of 1,197 voters, support for more powers being repatriated to Scotland from Westminster now stands around three-quarters. The detail figures from BSA are:

 

This shows, as clearly as anyone could wish, the extent to which the debate centres not around those who have entirely resisted the trend towards Scotland handing its own affairs (now down from a 20% peak to an irrelevant 5%) but on the half of all people who are pleased with what devolution has brought so far. The real question that web sites like ODN must answer is how are they to persuade that block in the middle that what they now have is adequate, that this positive process is at an end.

They must look across the world at the Norways and Singapores and they must make a strong case why they should have remained part of Sweden or Malaysia, how they would have been more prosperous, more highly respected and able to ‘punch above their weight’ had they stayed where they felt they no longer belonged. The onus of proof is not on fans of independence to prove how it would benefit Scotland, but on those who hold onto a historic but now antiquated union that denies the Scottish people the right to develop their own future, as many others have.

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Scottish Enterprise: The Problem, not the Solution

Posted on September 16, 2012 by davidsberry

Whatever kind of recession we’re in, pretty much everyone now agrees that we’re in one. What everyone does not agree on in how to get out of it. In fact, there is a significant proportion of the population—quite often those struggling with their finances—who question whether unbridled growth is desirable, sensible or even achievable in the long term. But, leaving aside the latter view, how best can we restore a modicum of growth—and thereby remove much of the ill-temper from present economic debate?

Though a global economy is pretty much a given and healthy US/Europe demands for Asian goods has become a lynch-pin of global growth, that does not mean opportunity does not exist for smaller economies to boom while the more sluggish giants who depend on global stimulus to prosper wallow from the inertia of size. For too long, Scotland has thought of itself as a branch of the UK economy: its finest hour to date was as arsenal, foundry and shipbuilder to the British Empire a century ago.

That proud Empire economy that once bestrode the world is now history. Even the last vestige of military manufacturing in the shape of BAE is contemplating merger into Europe. Whether you believe in Osbo’s austerity enema that is actually debt gluttony or not, this UK economy supertanker won’t turn around any time soon. The smart money is on fractional growth, if any, and a 12-15% real cut in public spending over 3-4 years.

Now, a definition of stupidity (or is it madness?) is to repeat the same action time after time, yet to expect a different outcome. What growth there has been in the Scottish economy owes little to Scottish Enterprise—the organ of state whose job it is to generate it. Their thinking was born in the statist 1970’s when the Linwoods, Ravenscraigs and other echoes of our manufacturing past were all the rage. It continued through the 80s and 90s when Mitsubishi and Chungwha and Hitachi all gave a modern veneer to Silicon Glen. It also provided good jobs so nobody was much concerned with quibbling.

But it was an illusion. Since Linwood, Ravenscraig, UCS, and most of Silicon Glen is now dust along with much of the investment provided, it’s time to ask what the hell SE thinks it is doing for our future and why most of its senior management don’t deserve their jotters. As part of the £1/4bn annual cost of SE are a Chief Exec at £204,000 and senior staff at over £1m among them, including pensions as sweet as any FTSE member. SE may hold £5m in 100% ownership of startup shares, plus £75m in others but they sit on £100m+ in cold, hard cash. They also heavily influence the distribution of over £1bn annually of EU and Scottish Government money.

In California, where much of today’s technology is still being developed, even if it’s being manufactured in Seoul or Shanghai, the venture capital denizens of Sand Hill Road must laugh themselves sick that such a colossus could exhibit either the foresight or the flexibility to punt on the future accurately, let alone the cojones to do it with their own money. It’s like releasing your pet dog Rover in Yellowstone and expecting him to compete with the wolves there to bring down caribou.

One of Scotland’s advantages is that it’s small. That means the politicians, bankers, businessmen—and the quangocrats—generally know one another and network well. But that also means that such a club is generally defensive about any major changes because there for the grace of fate goes any one of them. As a result, major moneys such as the European ESF and ERDF funds pass largely through SE, with the rest parcelled out to known recipients through a picked committee put there to rubberstamp what the Victoria Quay mandarins present tell them.

The point is that virtually none of public investment in Scotland is done with an eye on the far future. Go ask the Wood Group or Clyde Blowers or Barrs or Cairn Energy or even Brian Souter what they think of Scottish Enterprise and, once they’ve stopped laughing and picked themselves up off the floor they’ll put a flea in your ear how they grew their respective companies themselves and no thanks to the timeservers in the ivory towers of Apex House or Waterloo Street.

It took SE well into the nineties to twig that chip manufacture was a third-world operation that belonged offshore. It took them until the noughties to see that CRT picture tubes were old hat and that LED screens were the future. They are still fishing about for the next Motorola that will build a nice £1bn plant with 5,000 employees in Armadale because it seems that’s all they know. They have washed their hands of really small companies, palming them off on ‘one-stop shops’ with local councils who generally are not geared to real business advice or funding.

So what is the solution? The dog-eat-dog rapaciousness of the American business climate does not sit well with Scottish culture but nor do the environmentally indifferent sweat shops of East and South Asia. Appropriately enough, we may have something to learn from our UK partner in England. A couple of years ago they took out their equivalent of SE (the regional development agencies) out and shot them. The replacement was a network of much smaller local enterprise partnerships (LEPs), announced as part of the June 2010 UK budget and of which there are currently 39 in operation.

LEPs are voluntary partnerships between local authorities and businesses and, since they form organically, they seem to focus far better on the requirements of a particular area. While some thought needs to be given how they would be formed in the rest of Scotland, it seems that the area SE of Edinburgh, covering Mid- and East Lothian, plus Scottish Borders shares much in common, being a combination of commuter and rural but with none of the industrial concentration of West Lothian or the city focus of Edinburgh.

Such a SESLEP (South-east Scotland LEP) would, by its population, be entitled to around 10% of SE’s budget or approximately £25m. They should also get the equivalent of the EU and Scottish Government capital investments, allowing issues like Borders Rail or A1 dualling to be dealt and not dithered with. This would go a long way towards developing business to suit the area and thereby reduce the huge amount of travel into Edinburgh by professionals and salaried workers.

So what should such a SESLEC focus on to achieve such noble, not to mention useful, aims? For a start, the amount of skilled people and desirable quality of life would give them a flying start to develop:

  • “Joined-up” tourism offering transport and entry to multiple attractions
  • Linear recreation, such as long distance footpaths, an East Lothian Coast offering a smorgasbord of accessible recreation options and a bike hire network
  • Town centre offices attracting architects, web/graphic design and other small professionals to work where they live—and spend their money there
  • Quality food distribution network making local produce and seafood available to restaurants, specialty (e.g. farm) shops and other local outlets
  • Quality restaurants specialising in the local produce and seafood
  • Support infrastructure for building and maintaining Scottish & Southern offshore wind farm
  • Town centre specialty retail that becomes a tourist destination in themselves
  • Crafts and artwork network that would see equivalents of Wigton as book town spring up for art gallery tours

Although not all of the above may be viable, the point is that many opportunities here are lying unexploited—despite the growth in foreign and local tourism—because the enterprise ‘network’ we have is not geared to local small businesses. Such business offers the appropriate method of regenerating and making prosperous the 400,000 people who live in the quadrant SE of Edinburgh—and about which Scottish Enterprise is demonstrably clueless.

Posted in Commerce, Community | Tagged | 3 Comments

Leader of the Free World? Baggie Not

Posted on September 15, 2012 by davidsberry

American politics is something that rarely interests Europeans, not least because of its simplistic tenets and absolute belief in itself. But as long as its 300m people constitute the biggest consumer market and source of innovation on the planet, who runs it matters.

On November 6th, they will (among a myriad of other posts) elect a new President—the incumbent Democrat Barack Obama or the Republican contender Mitt Romney. Given the rather right-wing slant of most American politics, it is hard to find objective commentary but Rolling Stone magazine, by being left-wing in a right-wing world, quite often hits the bulls-eye in balancing things. While not being objective, they are astute and insightful in a way that Time, Newsweek and their ‘quality’ papers seldom manage.

On September 12th they published a piece by Matt Taibbi Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. If you are a subscriber, read it. If not, I attempt to distill the gist of his 8,000 insightful words into those below.

How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn’t stand for anything. He’s a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who’ll say anything to get elected. The critics couldn’t be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He’s closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky. His legendary flip-flops aren’t the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they’re the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has vision, and is trying for something big.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney’s run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he’s somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move.

Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid.

Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America’s federal borrowing. “A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” he declared. “Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love.”

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune by loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place.

That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street’s greed revolution.

Instead of building new companies from the ground up, massive bank loans are used to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars, nurtured communities and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world.

Like John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, Mitt Romney’s career has been both a tribute to and a repudiation of a famous father. George Romney in the 1950s became CEO of American Motors Corp., made a modest fortune betting on energy efficiency in an age of gas guzzlers and ended up governor of Michigan. Mitt made an odd career choice after his top-notch education: Already married and a father of two, he left Harvard and eschewed both politics and the law to enter the at-the-time unsexy world of financial consulting.

Romney started off at the Boston Consulting Group, where he showed an aptitude for crunching numbers and glad-handing clients. Then, in 1977, he joined a young entrepreneur named Bill Bain at a firm called Bain & Company, where he worked for six years before being handed the reins of a new firm-within-a-firm called Bain Capital. Romney made a fateful strategic decision: he moved away from creating companies through venture capital schemes, and toward a business model that involved borrowing huge sums of money to take over existing firms, then extracting value from them by force. This form of financial piracy became known as a ‘leveraged buyout’, and it achieved iconic status, thanks to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off company management with lucrative bonuses. With management is on board, the rest was just numbers. Say the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake. The catch? When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it’s the target company that ends up owning all the debt.

Once in such debt, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay its new obligations (debt + Bain fees + management bonuses), leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt, leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal. Romney’s face when asked to apologise said it all: Hey, I’m trying to win an election. We’re all grown-ups here.

In the old days, making money required sharing the wealth: with assembly-line workers, with middle management, with schools and communities, with investors. Even the Gilded Age robber barons, despite their unapologetic efforts to keep workers from getting any rights at all, built America in spite of themselves, erecting railroads and oil wells and telegraph wires. Under Romney’s business model, leveraging other people’s debt means you carve out big profits for yourself but leave everyone else holding the bag.

Romney is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just in America but all over the world. That divide will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, living in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated communities and minimal connection to the rest.

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while communities fall apart.

—Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, September 12th 2012

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If It’s About Money, You’re in the Wrong Job

Posted on September 13, 2012 by davidsberry

For six years as community councillor and thirteen as a local authority councillor, most of which I served on a SEPA board, I have earned a grand total of around £149,000. Put another way, that works out at £3.50 per hour—or about half the minimum wage. Now I expect neither plaudits nor OBEs for that; I chose to do this and no-one is forcing me to continue. I do this because I have a sweet spot for my home town and I believe no-one else can as good a job of representing the people who live there and their needs.

This weekend, a sleeping dog was snoring happily away when it was awakened by a Hootsmon reporter drawing my attention to a recent advert in the London Gazette that said:

“The Queen has directed that the appointment of John Lindsay to be an officer of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, dated 31 December 2005, shall be cancelled and annulled and that his name shall be erased from the register of the said Order.”

It was a conclusion to a matter and—in my opinion—the only fitting one, given that he had already been criticised by the Standards Commission, stripped of his membership of CiPFA (the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy and fined £7,000 to boot. It is the final dishonourable step in what should have been an honourable career.

Everyone who comes to public service does so for their own reasons and I am not about to lecture anyone on what they should be. But one thing I am certain: those reasons should not be about money. If it’s about money in public service, then you’re in the wrong job. After a career in local authority finance, by 2007, John Lindsay had been Chief Executive of East Lothian Council for a decade and was heading for retirement and an annual pension of around £50,000. Despite being a tidy sum, this was nonetheless fairly earned by rules that no-one has questioned either before or since.

For reasons that still escape me (other than greed), he could not settle for that. First of all, he dreamed up a financial wheeze whereby what had been a separate car allowance for senior officials was to be considered as salary and, since final salary pensions were standard, would have a positive effect on any senior staff’s retirement pension package. No-one pointed out it was specifically forbidden to treat car allowances in this way.

My history with John was one of cagey hostility. When first elected in 1999, the office he assigned me was a room next to the Sheriff Court cells and five minutes walk from any administrative support. When I took complaints of ritual bullying by the Administration in the Chamber to him, he listened in stony silence, claimed he could do nothing about it and we went our separate ways.

Though I made a point of meeting with him annually, it was with diminishing hope that I would be treated as other than a nuisance, an aberration of the council’s 25-year history of a Labour Administration, heavily dependent on its Chief Executive for policy and budget initiatives whose execution was barely disturbed by a pliant Conservative opposition.

Then came the ELC Special Meeting to set the 2007-8 budget on February 8th. As was usual, papers were made available only 1 hour prior to the meeting. First among them was a tabled paper of which I had been given no notice that re-organised senior management such that the Chief Executive post would be made redundant and the putative savings therefrom wrapped into a lump sum of £149,000 to be gifted to John upon his retirement.

The paper was nodded through with Conservative support; the Labour budget passed. Once it was all over, I walked out of the room knowing something was wrong. I shared my misgivings with several officials who basically shrugged. I then went to Council Solicitor Keith MacConnachie as Monitoring Officer (the Council’s internal conscience) who maintained the legitimacy of the paper and that making the Chief Executive’s job redundant did not, as I claimed, break the law—quite apart from flying in the face of logic.

Failing to find any support for my position within the Council and convinced that this was much more than an Administration again riding roughshod over a weak opposition, I felt I had no choice but write to the Ethical Standards in Public Life, which I did. No sooner had I done so than The Provost Pat O’Brien, Leader Norman Murray and Leader of the Opposition Gilbert Meikle all reported me to the same authority, claiming I had harassed the manager of the committee clerks service.

Before much else could happen, the May 2007 elections produced an earthquake in Scottish local government. Instead of 17 Labour to one each SNP and Lib-Dem councillors, 7 Labour faced 7 SNP and 6 Lib-Dems, the latter quickly agreeing a coalition that was to administer East Lothian for the next five years.

Upon hearing of the coalition, John reversed his decision to retire in September of that year but was promptly put on “gardening leave” and escorted out of the building. The next 18 months saw a great deal of legal wrangling as to whether he was or was not entitled to keep either his job or his £149,000 ‘bonus’, during which time the Accounts Commission reported that not just ELC’s behaviour around this retirement but indeed much of its management practice at senior level before then did not match its standards.

In all that time, I served as Leader but, because much of this was sub judice I was unable to brief my own Cabinet colleagues, let alone the bulk of staff who were understandably unnerved by this wrangle going on at senior level. Before John’s case itself collapsed after two years, CiPFA’s own investigation found John’s behaviour seriously wanting and so below the standards expected he was expelled as a member and fined £7,000. All three Ethical Standards in Public Life cases against me were dismissed with no case to answer.

It is unfortunate that it took the Crown a further three years to strip John of his OBE but the logic seems inevitable to me. How fellow councillors can consider this “a step too far” puzzles me. John was already stretching rules before he made this foolish bid for money to which he was not entitled. I found him to be a poor Chief Executive, relying on fiscal threats to keep departments in line, over-cosy with the Administration and poor at people motivation.

That as senior and experienced a councillor as present Leader Willie Innes can say “Everyone makes mistakes…but on balance I would have thought it a bit unfair for the honour to have been stripped” makes me question moral compasses of some  colleagues.

This was no mistake from John; it was coldly, deliberately, selfishly planned.

This was a strong-willed individual browbeating his staff on more than one occasion into self-serving policy interpretations that were demonstrably wrong and then swearing black was white in his own defence, rejecting respected organisation after respected organisation as they condemned his schemes in the strongest possible terms.

With the OBE matter now out of the way, this whole issue can be put to bed and John can sit in his big house down in Archerfield and enjoy an already well funded retirement. I’m glad the whole distasteful mess is now over and console myself that, if I had never done a single other thing for residents of East Lothian (and I like to think I’ve done many) then by torpedoing John’s dash for the door with £149,000 of public cash, just by itself has covered my entire public income over my two decades of public service to date.

But I hope any future contribution I make in the public interest will be less distasteful and more uplifting for all. Can’t guarantee it will face its face, though.

 

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The Sillars Season

Posted on September 12, 2012 by davidsberry

Jim Sillars has been a weel kent face in Scottish politics since before he won the Govan by-election for the SNP in 1988 and repeated the wet-fish-in-the-puss-for-Labour act his irrepressible wife Margo MacDonald had achieved 15 years prior. As a former deputy leader, you would credit Jim with some insight into the party but you might as well compare computers from 1993 with those of today if you wanted a similar example of being out of touch.

In his latest outburst, he excoriates a “totalitarian SNP” in yesterday’s Hootsmon and does not mince his words:

“If I did not know better, I would easily believe the leaders had been schooled in the old communist party, where the top, the elite, made the decisions and the rest fell into step automatically, with not a word of dissent. Totalitarian would be a fair description of Scotland’s majority party.”

Perhaps he sees himself as Trotsky to Josef Dughailovitch Salmond and is eternally on the qui vive for the looming ice pick. Now today, Brian Wilson has piled in joyously, also in the Hootsmon, with his usual opportunism when a chance to put the boot into the SNP is on offer. Brian writes well and deserves credit for his consistency. But, as with many who made a career ‘down south’ where the ‘real’ government is, has an agenda that would choke a horse when it comes to his beloved Union and the threat he (rightly) believes the SNP poses. But, as with Jim, I have great difficulty believing he writes from knowledge and not from personal bias, such as:

“All political parties aspire to internal discipline but few achieve anything like the parrot-like uniformity which characterises the Nationalists at Holyrood and beyond. As Sillars suggests, there are no internal pressure groups to influence policy; no individuals left who will stand up for an unapproved cause; no right to ask an unvetted question; no evidence of independent thought. They exist to follow orders.”

This should be funny. But, as we’re talking about the party who runs Scotland, the lie to this little self-serving falsehood needs to be exposed. The fact that Jim once moved from Labour to form the ILP and then join with the SNP is, in my eyes, no disqualification for a decent opinion. Alex Neil was his colleague through those transitions but has remained a leading figure in the SNP, shedding much of the hectoring pseudo-radicalism that still characterises Jim’s later pronouncements.

As an SNP party member since the seventies, activist & local official for the last two decades, ex-Convener of their 400+ councillor association and member of their National Executive, I feel I have some basis on which to accuse both Jim and Brian—political veterans though they may be—of talking through their collective hat.

Let’s leave aside that, over the last two years, this blog has been as questioning of SNP orthodoxy as any, how is it, with my frequent appearances on-stage at conference, often in support of our own ego-iconoclast Gerry Fisher, no large gentlemen called Shuggie have been round to knee-cap me? Why would I still attend and be taken seriously at monthly NEC meetings? I’ve been made welcome at party gatherings from Strichen to Tarbet and from Kirkwall to Jedburgh.

If Jim and Brian are right, I fail to understand why a loose cannon like me could keep getting selected to represent the party in elected office for 13 years, still less lead my council for three of those, during which I opposed Keith Brown’s priorities on Transport, took issue with Richard Lochhead’s approach to shellfish development and openly lambasted Scottish Enterprise and VisitScotland’s shortcomings in dealing with rural business and local tourism. Though I check my bed nightly, no horse’s head has appeared.

Even “Stalin” himself stills smiles at me (although, thankfully, he has yet to kiss me on both cheeks), despite the fact that his “politburo” would prefer Cockenzie power station to be converted from coal to gas firing and I had my entire group out campaigning to have the eyesore demolished because East Lothian needs another power station like a hole in the head. Yes, I have ‘enemies’ within the party but we treat each other with respect because we believe in something in common more than we believe in personal ambition. Is it bad that such internal differences don’t surface to be reported in the media?

The sad thing for me is that both Jim and Brian appear to have had trouble moving away from a mentality that seemed to pervade Scottish Labour through their black days of the eighties. They hated Thatcher and all her works but were helpless to stop her policies being stuffed down their throats. They circled the wagons and came to believe only they held the truth; only they could be the people’s champions; only their rule was right.

If you start to believe in such a bunker mentality, the rest of the world appears foreign. You wind up condemning anything that did not originate with your tribe. You assume no-one else can have morals or aspire to ideas. And, since such neanderthal thinking seldom is rewarded by an enlightened public, frustration creeps in with each electoral defeat, along with backstabbing and infighting (c.f. Glasgow City early this year).

And, if you live in that poisonous atmosphere long enough, you start to ascribe its less salubrious elements to your opponents out of sheer bitterness. You see others who debate with little rancour as spineless; you see a whole mass of people spurred on by success in a common cause they believe in as automatons; you see leaders who have the confidence of their membership as autocrats because they are not being constantly torn down in public.

I believe that Jim does not recognise the party he left declaiming as “ninety-minute patriots” two decades ago. That’s because the long dark tunnel of the eighties & nineties ended in 1997 and the SNP moved into its present upbeat, outward-looking and calmly resilient mood.

Brian, for all his abilities and experience, has always displayed a pathological hostility to the SNP. What he feels is no doubt genuine (were I in his place, I would be consumed by frustration at events) but he needs to get out of the eighties and watch our upcoming NATO debate.

Both should look not just at what the SNP is doing but how it is doing it—with the passion, belief and common purpose that once made the Labour party greater and nobler than the tittle-tattle of their present writings.

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Costly Lessons

Posted on September 10, 2012 by davidsberry

Just back from a week wandering Appin, Morvern and Mull, I make no apology for having silenced this blog for a whole week. We all need a break but watching sea eagles bringing sudden death to the fish of Loch Sunart or Askival and Ainshval play hide-and-seek in curtains of rain cloaking Rum from Ardnamurchan lighthouse or the Kilchoan ferry slide at dusk in between the dozing boats beneath the Western Isles Hotel was therapeutic beyond my wildest expectations.

Meanwhile, back at reality, I open my first paper in yonks and splutter my coffee over a piece in the Hootsmon by the usually astute Douglas Alexander, claiming that SNP policies are causing a waiting list of over 10,000 Scottish students by restricting funding to tertiary colleges while sustaining it to universities. That seems a serious issue and one worth some investigation—so I did.

Reading the article , it is apparent that virtually all of the ‘lost’ students are from Numptygrad Central—8,000 from Glasgow colleges and a further 2,000 from colleges in Lanarkshire. Now, while the reduction in funding is real and can’t have helped, why would it be that virtually all the students with this problem have spent their entire education to date under the dominance of the Labour party and their three Lanarkshire redoubts?

It’s not that those Education Authorities get any less money per pupil than anyone else. Apart from the tendency to run half-empty schools—which should make for smaller class sizes, even if it doesn’t help efficiency—they also don’t have the transport headaches of most other councils and they should benefit from sharing specialists over more pupils, quite apart from the generally good performance achieved by their many Catholic (not to mention Gaelic) schools.

But I have no explanation why Glasgow and Lanarkshire vocational students should be any harder to place in tertiary education than anywhere else. And, as it’s clearly not the kids themselves, I can only conclude that it’s the education they’ve been receiving and that the fault lies with a combination of teachers, educationalists and parents in that area.

If it were a matter of being shortchanged on funding, I would not be so rash as to make the above statement. But, although Glasgow’s £1/2bn education budget was slashed by some £33.5m. But for its 65,000 (and declining) pupil numbers, that means £7,146 per pupil, which compares favourably with my own East Lothian’s £7,669, especially when you realise ELC is constantly building schools for new pupils, whereas Glasgow needn’t as its rolls have shrunk by over 10,000 in barely a decade.

So, what’s going on?

Controversial though it is to say—especially when there are many selfless teachers out there who sincerely believe in the importance of education and go that extra mile—we are not getting value for educational money. Douglas Alexander can try to blame his SNP nemesis but that is no more helpful than my blaming local politicians, as I did above. We need to revisit McCrone because, apart from boosting teachers’ salaries and restoring some much overdue respect and dignity, it has done diddly-squat to improve education.

Before an official EIS-sponsored lynch mob shows up at my door, consider this: Scotland pays its teachers better (in purchasing power parity terms) than most countries whose pupils are well ahead on tests and who are generally agreed to now have superior education systems to ours. Scottish teachers on an average $48,611 salary beat their English colleagues by 8.9%, Finnish by 18.7%, Norwegian by 31.3% and Swedish by a whopping 43.5%. This is illustrated on Chart 1 below.

Chart 1

It would be fruitless to get into a rammy over whether Scottish teachers were worth 31% than Norwegian teachers. But consider this, if class sizes are such a big deal, our average class size of 26 could be 18 at a stroke if teachers here were paid the same as Norwegians and the money was used to hire 31% more teachers instead. That would take us from 10th most crowded classrooms to the bottom of the table, as shown in Chart 2.

Chart 2

Trouble is, I’ve never heard the EIS or any other union arguing this, despite the obvious benefit to both children and education. More often, we hear the opposite from teaching unions—as today at the TUC in Brighton, the two main teaching unions (NUT and NASUWT) were both shaping for a fight with English ministers. They voted to start an indefinite work to-rule protest in two weeks’ time, even though 73% of their members did not actually vote.

Some teachers—especially those newly qualified and uncertain of their tenure do have valid beefs with their employers. But those whose salary and conditions boomed under McCrone and want a general strike because their chunky annual salary boost has been frozen need to get out more, read the financial pages during their 12 weeks of holiday and consider that, as professionals, how the welfare of young people under their charge and their vital education would be damaged by indefinite strike action.

And, if a class size of 26 is deleterious to good learning, how much worse must a class size of none be?

But—bottom line—are we getting value for our money? In Scotland’s 32 councils almost half their £11bn budget is spent on educating the 675,000 pupils (down from 758,000 a decade ago) in the schools they run.

Last year, the highly respected PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) indicated Scotland had slumped to 28th place in maths, 25th in reading and 15th in science. Compared to a decade before, the year the tests in the three subjects on 15-year-olds, we were eighth in maths, seventh in reading and fourth in science. England and Northern Ireland have done much the same but Wales has performed even worse.

You decide for yourself whether Scottish teachers would be justified in taking industrial action. A decade ago, I fully accepted they were. But in the intervening decade for a ‘profession’ to receive double the investment, including hundreds of new schools, to perform by sliding out of the top ten into third world territory and then threaten industrial action that would damage kids’ futures in the midst of a major recession just beggars belief that they don’t see now as time for a little humility and self-evaluation.

Time someone examined the teachers to weed out failures who don’t deserve over-the-odds payment they already receive—never mind more costly rises, especially when based on time served and not on pupils inspired, sparks ignited or new careers launched. Teaching is a calling that deserves decent remuneration. But if teaching unions can talk of little but member pay rises, they are worse than greedy bankers: at least the people that bankers screw over are adult and capable of retaliation.

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