Tag Archives: local

Story telling might lead to economic revolution

By David Boyle | Wed 23rd March 2016 - 12:22 pm

It is extraordinary how compartmentalised everything is – especially when we are campaigning in local elections.

We, few of us, who know a little about the way public responsibilities are demarcated between different layers of government, have a kind of sense of corrosive superiority as we expect campaigners to demand the right reform from the right level.

But partly this is just a function of sclerotic centralisation. The Treasury has a crushing monopoly on economic policy because, well – it always has.

Partly because of that, and because there is almost no local economic data collected about where money flows (the exception is bank lending to postal district level, forced on the banks by Lib Dem peers in 2012) – Whitehall doesn’t see the economic innovations at local level.

And in particular, they don’t see the emergence of a new generation of local entrepreneurs who are no longer prepared to wait patiently for the Chinese to invest or the government to give them a grant – and are trying to transform their local economies a bite at a time.

Posted in News | Also tagged economics and entrepreneur | 1 Comment

Opinion: You’re not from round here are you?

By Ruth Bright | Mon 4th March 2013 - 12:53 pm

Was “local”, I wonder, the most overused word in the Eastleigh by-election? Of all the terms in the Lib Dem lexicon “local” is surely our favourite.

A few years ago when the party had one of its periodic embarrassments, it looked like there would have to be a by-election in Winchester. I had a week-old baby at the time and was barely out of hospital when the phone calls started – “Why don’t you stand?”, “Hampshire bred”, “You got a great result in the next