Solidarinosc

People thought that Thatcherism was the end of workers' militancy in the UK, but yesterday clearly showed that, despite the fact that unions could not officially support the moves, the working-class and the white-collar workers are standing shoulder-to-shoulder about the employment of non-British workers in the construction and energy industries.

London workers yesterday nearly all went on strike. The bus strike was 100% successful, nearly all of the underground was out of action, and much of the overground could run only a reduced service. More than 50% of office staff expressed their solidarity with the British workers, staying at home yesterday. Huzzah for British solidarity!


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On a more serious note, the bollocks being spouted out this morning (and last night) about England's inability to cope with a bit of bad weather keeps alive the concept that bad journalism is not dead.

1) The numbers of £1.2bn and £3.5bn in "cost" to the economy. Oh how I was waiting for one, just one, journalist to pose the question "And how fo you get this number?" and then to point out that there are implicit assumptions that there is no "catch-up" in following days, that anyone who doesn't go to work simply sits on his or her arse rtather than doing something else "useful" in economic terms (e.g., painting the spare bedroom).

2) That this happens "time and time again" and that they cope with it well in Moscow and Helsinki. Just look to see how well Helsinki copes with unseasonably warm weather. This implication that it is a flaw in the English character (or, more usually, the "London" character) doesn't take account of simple economics. Having metal-studded tyres, and sophisticated snow-clearance machines, makes sense in Moscow and Helsinki, because you know that you will need them every year. London hasn't been frozen (metaphorically and physically) for 18 years. If people had bought the tyres and the councils had bought the machines in 1992, they would probably have had to be replaced at least once without ever being used. And, last time I looked, there were lots of Russians in London, but none of them seemed to have metal-studded tyres at the ready when yesterday's snow came down.

3) That "the Swiss can run the trains, why can't we? The simple answer to that is that the London train system transports a huge number of people every day. Just getting it to work when the wearther is good is a logistical nightmare akin to moving a couple of armies forwards and backwards every day. Switzerland carries less than 10% of the number of people carried in England. It's not just that the Swiss expect it and it therefore makes economic sense to have the staff ready. It's also a matter of fewer people waiting to be commuted into urban centres. That said, it's one of the few valid criticisms, albeit for a red herring reason. London needs huge investment in transpoert infrastructure, not because of the weather, but because an ancient system is trying to transport too many people. Unfortunately, most of the money that London makes goes to subsidize the public sector elsewhere in the UK, keeping local economies and local societies alive that would otherwise become ghost towns.


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Latest intersting argument about the unofficial strikes in the UK. Said one man "it's about the right to go to work within a reasonable distance of your own home..."

Er, isn't this a strike objecting to the employment of Italian workers rather than British workers, in Britain? Clearly the Italians are less fussy about such "fundamental rights".

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Why weren't we told, they whinge.

Andrew Marr, whom I feel should no better, continued to reinforce the myth that "no economists warned us" about the current shit-hole in which we find ourselves. "YES WE DID!" you feel like screaming, "BUT YOU DIDN'T LISTEN!" The point is, Radio Four people don't like to bother themselves with tiresome economics, and all its concomitant association with "trade". Then, when it goes tits up, they moan that they weren't warned about the possibility of it happening. What do we have to do? Bash their heads hard on the stuff that we were writing as long ago as 2001?

Point is, no-one will put that on Radio Four, or the BBC News, because (a) it's hypothetical, (b) it's complicated and (c) there are no easy pictures or voxpop interviews with which you can associate it.

And, sadness of sadness, it's still happening. Let's highlight next year's possible "WHY WEREN'T WE TOLD" whinge from Andrew Marr and others on Radio Four. And this isn't ecopnomics, so even Radio Four presenters might understand it.

Nope, this is an earthquake. The "Great San Franciso earthquake of 2010" as it will be known. Except it doesn't have to be that great. It only has to be a repeat of the 1989 6.9 Loma Prieta "rumble". That alone could destory a quarter of SF's 120,000 homes, most of them "soft-storey" wood-frame buildings put up before 1970 (90% of SF buldings were put up before modern building codes came into force).

The San Francisco Planning And Urban Research Association (Spur, www.spur.org) is going to publish a report today that comes out with warnings about as dire as dire can be, effectively saying that the consequences of an earthquake will be like Hurricane Katrina's impact on New orleans, because the city will have about 100,000 homeless people to deal with.

Much of this problem could be avoided if the soft-storey wood frame buildings were retrofitted to modern building code standards. Lives would be saved, uncountable economic cost would be saved and, most importantly, the levels of homelessness would be massively reduced, thus eliminating the social problems that arose in New Orleans after Katrina.

Will it happen? Nope. because the spending now is a certainty if the retrofitting is to take place (and it would have to be made mandatory for it to take place) whereas the savings are a "might have been". We will have to wait for the disaster of 2010, and the inevtiable plaintive cries of "why weren't we told" about these wood-frame buildings, and the relatively small cost involved in making them safe. $1.5bn to save $30bn of economic cost post-earthquake. For SF, those are good odds.


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