Wednesday 15 February 2012

15th February 2012

The Anglican Church in Fuengirola is half way between the Railway Station and the Audi showroom.

Not quite Brian Patten's famous line 'O somewhere between Heaven and Woolworths', but close enough.

Being halfway between one thing and another can be a good place to be.

The shining cars on display in the Audi showroom suggests that all is well with the Spanish economy.

The prices in Euro's of the cars is eye watering, but the cars sell, which means that someone somewhere has got the money or the credit rating to afford to buy them.

The Railway Station is how everyone else gets around.

Apparently it is the best way to get to Malaga, it is accessible for the wheelchair and removes the headache that is parking in any City.

Being halfway between one thing and another is great because it means that you are both stuck in the middle and able to speak from where you are to those around you.

Currently the Government is stuck in the middle, somewhere between a rock and a hard place.

The rating agencies have put the Chancellor on notice that the triple AAA rating could be removed, the economy is flat-lining and wherever you look economic indicators suggest that we are are somewhere between a recession and a disaster.

Interesting that before the election we were offered a 'vision', I use the word advisedly, of a big society where we are encouraged to take more responsibility as citizens.

More responsibility meaning less government.

But the 'vision' is now contradicted by a Prime Minister who appears increasingly to have a tendency towards micro management.

Which means that increasingly the government is announcing policies and strategies for all sorts of issues.

Last week it was car insurance and driving down the cost of so many claims for compensation.

This week it seems that alcohol and the high cost of treatment versus the low cost of alcohol.

Micro management is very dangerous for any number of reasons but mainly because it is a way of avoiding the real issues.

After all it is so much easier to get worked up about public drunkenness and the impact that has on A&E units in hospitals on a Friday and Saturday nights than it is to get worked up about child poverty which is increasing and of course the cynical view is that it is much better to focus on TV images of young people staggering through the town centre than it is to show children starving because family incomes are being reduced by a variety of cuts in both wages and benefits.

During the last Conservative Government's time in office there was much talk of Victorian values everyone seemed to think that there was something valuable in reaching into the past.

I wrote an article in which I suggested that whenever the idea of Victorian values was raised the word Victorian should be replaced with the word Dickensian.

Dicken's bi-centenary has just been celebrated and will doubtless continue to be celebrated throughout the year.

Those novels which so graphically illustrated the grinding effects of poverty on family life and children's aspiration's can still be harrowing and especially so when the effects of public spending cuts is bringing the echoes of Dickens narrative back into our hearing.

I'm not sure which is worse, Mr Cameron's micro managing or Mr Osborne's refusal to manage at all, so we remain stuck as Gerry Rafferty's song has it, in the middle, although I increasingly wonder, should that be spelled muddle?


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