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Britain’s fate is in the hands of two people: Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. Which is the problem.

I’m back from Australia, but alas recovering from a bout of flu combined with tooth trouble. What with Christmas coming, normal service will not resume for a while. But I can’t help myself from commenting on  Britain’s Brexit drama.

It is striking that so much of what happens next depends on just two individuals, the Prime Minister, Theresa May, and the Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn. This is not a comforting observation.

First, and most obvious, is Mrs May. She is in charge of the Government – and when it comes to taking the initiative, the Government has the upper hand over Parliament, even though the latter is technically sovereign. Parliament has tried to wrest some control over the process, with need for a “meaningful vote”, but Mrs May has easily outmanoeuvred it. She alone dictates when the vote will take place, and simply postponed it a month when things weren’t going her way. She still needs parliamentary consent though, which leaves a deadlock.

Meanwhile, Mrs May has fended off an ill-advised attempt from within her parliamentary party to unseat her as their leader. There’s nothing much they can do now to remove her. She’s in complete control.

How does Mrs May choose to use this power? She clearly wants the deal she has negotiated with the EU to be ratified, allowing the UK to formally leave on 29 March, and to get on with the next phase of the negotiations about the trading relationship with minimal disruption to commerce and daily life. She interprets this, fairly enough, as fulfilling both the mandate given by the 2016 referendum to parliament, and the election promises she made in 2017. What if she can’t get that consent? She says that there are two alternatives which are No Deal or No Brexit. But she has not expanded on what exactly she means by this, except to rule out a further referendum to decide between two or more of the options.

The closer we get to No Deal the more horrifically it looms, completely giving the lie to Mrs May’s earlier mantra that “No deal is better than a bad deal”. She consider this to be a realistic option – but it is still what happens if parliament does not consent to an alternative. So what does she mean by “No Brexit”? If she rules out a referendum then that means a unilateral decision by parliament to revoke the Article 50 Notice to leave the EU. This has been shown to be legally feasible, but only if it is a complete revocation, and not shenanigans to simply resubmit the notice a bit later. That idea looks horrific too. Even the most ardent Remainers feel that Article 50 should only be revoked if a further referendum endorses it.

This is highly unsatisfactory, but Mrs May is the person in charge and we must play to her rules, even if she doesn’t explain fully what they are. Only one person has the power to break the deadlock: Mr Corbyn. The most obvious way would be for him to throw his weight behind Mrs May’s deal, mobilising enough Labour MPs to neutralise Tory rebels and the DUP. It would be very easy to argue that this is in the national interest, and Labour committed to Brexit in the 2017 election. However, he has spent so much energy rubbishing the deal that the effect on his authority would be catastrophic.

There is another way. As Leader of the Opposition he can table a confidence motion allowing parliament to bring the government down, either leading to a new government or an election. This is what he says he wants to do, to force an election, which he hopes Labour would win. But it is hard to see how he would win an election at this point in the process, without a clear policy on Brexit of his own. Even a deeply split Tory party should be able to see him off. Anyway, if he won he would not have time to renegotiate Mrs May’s deal, so it does little to resolve matters.

But there is a bigger problem with using a confidence motion: neither the Tory rebels nor the DUP would support it. They do not want an election on Mr Corbyn’s terms, or, heaven forbid, risk a Corbyn-led Labour government.

So what else could Mr Corbyn do? He could put forward a confidence motion with plan to replace the current government with a cross-party one with the single aim of resolving the Brexit deadlock through a referendum. This would require cooperation with Tory rebels (though different ones from the hard Brexiteers that are causing Mrs May her main problem). I think this idea has been referred to as a government of “national unity”, though it is hard to see that it would do anything but promote yet more national discord, even if that may be necessary.

That would leave the rather tricky question of who would lead it. It couldn’t be a party leader. It would help to bring as many parties on board as possible: the SNP for sure, but the Lib Dems, Greens and Plaid Cymru too. There would also need to be clarity on where it would end and how. It would need to resign pretty much s soon as Brexit formally happened, or Article 50 was revoked. Would the Conservatives and the DUP be given another chance after that? Or would there be an election, with the Conservatives irretrievably split?

This final option is a very long shot, but these are desperate times as the prospect of No Deal looms. But the real problem is that I don’t think that Mr Corbyn has the vision or ability to pull it off, even if he wanted t, which is doubtful. And without Mr Corbyn it cannot work.

Which leaves us with Mrs. May’s grim brinkmanship. At a time needing great, visionary and persuasive leaders, Britain’s don’t measure up.

Are there Australian lessons for Brexit?

I have now just a week to go in my long trip to Australia. I’m not all that surprised that I haven’t managed to update this blog regularly on my travels. It turns out that it is quite hard to fit into my holiday routine. But witnessing the mounting political tension on Brexit in the UK from afar, I will manage one more post. Does an Australian perspective have anything important to say on Brexit? Well, yes and no.

Australia is beloved of Brexiteers, partly because it is part of an “Anglosphere” which they hope can substitute for Britain’s European identity. But there are two more substantive reasons. One is that Australia shows that a medium-sized nation can be economically successful as a fully sovereign state. The second is that a country that attaches itself to the booming Asian, and especially Chinese, economy will prosper.

Let’s start with the first proposition. Australia is undeniably successful without being part of a wider formal economic block like the EU. Indeed most Australians would probably be horrified at the loss of sovereignty that such an arrangement involves. They are fiercely self-reliant and independentlyminded. Most of the Australian6s I have had proper conversations with have been internationally aware and sympathetic to Britain’s membership of the EU. That makes them unrepresentative. It is very hard to get any kind of international news on television or radio out here. The bulletins are consumed by stories on the latest bushfires, weather events, local political spats and sport. Only the Royal Family can intrude. I suspect that most Australians are pretty sympathetic to Brexit. The country has half or less of the population of the UK, and still makes a very good go of things. Indeed it is prosperous. One shouldn’t make too much of this, though. Australia’s dependence on the US for security has meant that it had to send its boys to be killed in Vietnam. And Australians worry about Chinese intrusion into their state currently.

Australia’s success has a lot to do with the second proposition – that its economy is tied to the fast-growing Asian economy, rather than the lacklustre European one. Australia exports substantial amounts of minerals and agricultural produce to China, in particular, and attracts lots of Asian tourists and students. There is a lot of Chinese investment. That keeps its exchange rate high, so that Australians can afford lots of exotic imports. A popular theme of the Brexit case was that Britain should unshackle itself from the European corpse, and trade more with Asia. Although the example usually given is Singapore, Australia seems to make the case even more convincingly.

But, of course, we have to think of the differences between Britain and Australia. The first is Australia’s relative isolation. The country has little choice but to go it alone, as it is not geographically close to any other large nation – if you exclude Indonesia, which is not close to any of Australia’s major economic hubs, quite apart from a cultural gulf that makes the divide between Britain and its European neighbours look trivial. Indeed the internal distances within the Australian continent are often more daunting than those between Britain and even its more distant European neighbours. Australians are self-reliant because they have to be.

But they are still a success. That is surely down to the next big difference: it is a vast continent with huge exportable assets. These include massive mineral wealth and agricultural land. The Australian economy has a highly extractive character. That even applies to its agriculture, where few farmers give serious consideration to the long-term sustainability of their methods. While on our trip we experienced dust storms in New South Wales. Dust of that sort doesn’t come from deserts (where such fine particles would have been blown out long, long ago) nor form vegetated land; it is agricultural top soil being left exposed by exploitative farming methods. Even without leaving vast areas of topsoil exposed, agriculture depends heavily on artificial fertilisers, which can only do so much. All this means high agricultural productivity and competitiveness of exports for the time being. Britain does not have the option of exploiting its natural resources in a similar way, even if it wanted to – which it very clearly doesn’t. Nobody suggests that despoiling hundreds of square miles of British countryside is what the country must to to escape economic dependence on Europe.

So what could Britain do instead to ride the Asian wave? Asia has strong demand for capital goods. But Britain has hollowed out its manufacturing industry (unlike Germany which is riding the Asian wave successfully from within the EU). There is hi-tech expertise and products. Britain could do better here, but China is investing hugely so that it becomes less dependent on foreigners. Tourism? Professional services? Universities and schools? There are possibilities in all of these, though Britain tends to shoot itself in the foot, especially with over enthusiastic anti-immigration policies. But it would be a hard road. Anyway it is far from clear that Britain is better off being outside Europe and free of its regulations and trade restrictions, or within it and so having a wider semi-domestic market in which to scale up its products and services. Britain’s proximity to the rest of Europe is one of its comparative advantages over Australia – it seems silly to get in the way of that.

Another point is worth making. Some Brexit supporters suggest that Australia could be part of a wider international support network, economic and political, rather as the Commonwealth was before Britain joined the European Community. From here that looks naïve. Australia has long outgrown its old links to Britain. We used to be a significant source of agricultural outputs – but now Britain cannot compete with the closer and larger China. On other matters, education or business services, Australia looks more like a competitor than a partner. Distance prevents the intimate supply chain links that are a feature of Britain’s economic relationship with its neighbours.

While the Empire 2.0 and linking up to Asia’s dynamism look like fatuous arguments for Brexit, Australia still shows that smaller countries can plough there own furrow if they want to. Outside the EU Britain would still keep its strong links to the continent, and the laws of comparative advantage suggest that the economy would in due course rebalance to a new reality. The only question is how much poorer (or, for the Brexit optimists, richer) that new reality would be. Lacking Australia’s natural assets, it seems likely that it would be quite a bit poorer.

Western Australia: a place to live rather than visit?

I’m now in Hobart, having moved from Australia’s largest state to its smallest. We only spent a six days in WA, and purely as a tourist. We didn’t visit anybody living here. So my view is inevitably superficial – but I hope it will still be of interest.

WA is vast, taking up one third of the Australian continent. It is mostly empty of people. 80% of its population, we were told, lives in the Perth area. Most of the rest live in the south western corner, which includes Margaret River. We didn’t get beyond these populated areas.

Central Perth is underwhelming. It has an undistinguished skyline of the usual tower blocks. Its setting, on the Swan River has potential, but the urban planners have given almost all the riverside to roads and speeding motor traffic. Only a small harbour area is free of traffic, and that is now mainly a building site. There is a pedestrianised shopping precinct but it is nothing special. There is a lovely park, King’s Park, just off centre (the largest central urban park in the world they claim), but even this is rather spoilt by trying to make it accessible to people in cars. The best views over the city are next to a busy road. There is quite decent public transport but car is king. Outside the centre there is the usual Aussie suburban sprawl, including some lovely waterside properties, once the roads have moved inland. These are surprisingly dense; all houses are detached, and they are mainly single story, but the backyards are tiny. The houses are cheek by jowl. Once you have acquired your building plot, the thing to do apparently is to cover it almost entirely with one storey of house. This holds throughout the residential districts of WA we saw. This may be a countrywide trend, but here even the posh homes on the river side looked a bit squashed up against their neighbours.

The best bit of the Perth area is the old port of Fremantle. A lot of old buildings have survived and they aren’t dominated by newer ones. You can have a fish lunch on the fishing harbour watching dolphins near the fishing boats (real, working ones) without traffic whirring by. The port itself isn’t all that big. There were just three ships there when we visited, two stock carriers and a single container ship. Barcelona it isn’t. WA’s vast mineral exports don’t go close to populated areas.

Outside Perth the main attraction is the continent’s southwest corner, around Margaret River. This is lovely. An attractive coast, with boutique farming inland, featuring its now famous vineyards. It’s a popular holiday district and deservedly so. We perhaps saw it at an ideal time of year, in between the wet winter and hot, dry summer. It was verdant, and the temperature in the very pleasant mid-twenties. There are plenty of wilderness sights in WA, but we didn’t have time to sample them. We will next time. And there could be a next time. We flew here because of the new Qantas non-stop flight from Heathrow by 787 Dreamliner. This was a success, and we prefer it as a way in to breaking the journey to the east cost to Dubai or Bangkok. But if they manage to put on a nonstop flight to Sydney, that might be a tempting alternative.

This is a mainly economics blog, so what could I make of the WA economy? It seems to be healthy and growing, though homeless people were to be seen frequently in central Perth. This appears to be mainly about mining, of which iron ore is the most important, but which covers a multitude of other things. This happens in the wilderness and is quite astonishingly destructive of the local environment. But as almost nobody lives there, that doesn’t seem to be an issue. The presence of aboriginal inhabitants is light. In the south west we only found any serious reference to them in the art gallery. Doubtless in the outback their presence is stronger, but the mining businesses clearly don’t have too much trouble.

The mines do need quite a few people, even if they aren’t sent down holes in the ground when you can simply remove all the rock that is in the way. These are flown in for periods of one to three weeks from Perth and outlying towns. As these workers spend money in their home towns, and go on holidays, this drives much of the rest of the economy, or so we were told. The Economist suggests that automation is far advanced in the mines, and fewer workers are needed. There was no sign of that – perhaps because this affects workers shipped in from outside WA to a greater extent. There are a lot very wealthy people on the back of the mining boom – who in turn invest in the boutique wineries in Margaret River, as well as fabulous properties to live in. But there seem to be plenty of decent mid-level jobs too, which are the key to a broadly prosperous economy. One thing we noticed was that there were quite a few older workers – including just about all the tour guides we used.

So my rather superficial verdict is that Perth and Margaret River are very pleasant places to live, with all the civilised comforts. If there are world-class tourist attractions they are probably in the outback, though apparently the surfing is world class too. But if you are visiting Australia anyway, it’s a nice place to go, though still over three hours flying time from most other places.

Is Australia a neoliberal success story?

I have just started a six week tour of Australia. Right now I am in Perth pictured), our first stop. Australia is a country I know quite well. I have visited it in every decade since the 1980s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s my visits were frequent as I was working for an Australian-owned company. But my last visit was in 2006. I am interested to see some new places (Perth is one; Tasmania will be another), and also to understand how the country has developed.

I have just finished reading a special report by the Economist on the country. It paints it as a neoliberal beacon; it doesn’t use that word of course – neoliberals never use it themselves. That is an interesting thought to challenge while I’m out here. The country is a remarkable economic success story, with continuous growth since 1991: a better record than any other developed country. It has weathered two financial crises (the 1997 Asia crisis, and the 2008-09 crash), and several twists of the commodity cycle, impressive for a country for whom mining is so important. Doubtless raw materials and hitching the country’s fortunes to China’s economic growth, play an important role – but other Southern Hemisphere countries do that without Australia’s success. Its economic policies have a clear neoliberal bent. Fiscal policies have been conservative; pensions and healthcare have been substantially privatised. The currency floats freely. Levels of immigration are high. It stands as a reproach to the conventional wisdom of the left, which hates the involvement of markets in public services as well as governments aiming for low levels of public debt. It also stands as a reproach to the conventional wisdom of the right, which holds that multiculturalism is doomed to failure, and that high levels of immigration undermine social cohesion.

These headlines cover a much more complex picture, of course. In fact the Economist’s report is maddeningly shallow. But Australia is an interesting case study. To me the it looks as if the critical element to its success, which helps explain the way it has beaten the conventional wisdom of left and right, is healthy incomes across a broad stretch of society. This allows people to take more responsibility for health and pension expenses. It also makes them less stressed about the economic impact of immigration. But why? That is one of the questions I want to gain insights into by talking to people who live here.

Maybe Australia shows that it is too early to write off neoliberalism. Interestingly it is making a comeback in South America, as Brazilians follow Argentinians (and others) in turning their backs on leftist economics. Indeed outside some developing economies (including China perhaps), there seems to be no example of a successful economy that has abandoned neoliberal tenets. Even Scandinavian economies have tilted in the neoliberal direction in the last decades. And yet things are clearly not right in most neoliberal economies, including Britain’s. A lot of this has to do with pressure on those with middle and lower incomes, and in the phenomenon of left-behind places: middling and smaller towns, and rural areas. It will be interesting to understand how Australia has met these challenges, if, indeed, it has.

The Master and his Emissary: is modern society too left-brained?

I have at long last finished Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary. It studies how the right and left sides of our brains differ, and develops the idea that there is a conflict between the two hemispheres that has wider implications in our society. It is a fascinating book that has changed the way I look at the world.

The first part of the book describes how the two brain hemispheres work. It is a brain structure that has evolved in vertebrates, with the left side being task-oriented and the right being aware of the environment. This simple idea is explored thoroughly by Mr Gilchrist, and he notices that in the modern world there is a bias towards the left hemisphere’s way. It likes rules and calculation, while the right takes on emotions and context. Revealingly, early brain scientists described the right hemisphere as weak and useless. Our society loves the order that laws bring, and likes to pretend that nature operates under an analogous system to the human legal system – we are simply in the process of discovering its laws. The second part of the book takes this much further by trying to interpret the development of Western thought and art in terms of a conflict between the hemispheres. Classical Greece achieved a happy balance, before the left side took over following Plato. The theocracy of the Middle Ages was also very left hemisphere, before the Renaissance brought in right hemisphere thinking. The left hemisphere fought back with the Enlightenment, leading to a reaction with right hemisphere Romanticism until finally the left hemisphere triumphed with scientific materialism. This is very thought-provoking. But I did find some aspects of his argument lacking.

First is Mr Gilchrist’s focus on the West. Other cultures are generally assumed to be much better balanced, with a small excursion into Japanese culture to substantiate this point. This has an annoying post-colonial aspect to it: the modern narrative that all the world’s ills are down Western greed and exploitation. While this is a corrective to the attitude that saw Western civilisation as the only worthwhile sort on the planet, it still denies non Western peoples and cultures agency. Everything still comes back to the West. One of the things that the BBC series Civilisations did well was to show how we need to see Western civilisation in a wider, more human context. Mr McGilchrist’s analysis would be stronger if he found parallels in his battle of the hemispheres in non-Western cultures, rather simply dropping into lazy West is bad, East is good thinking. In fact I don’t this would have been hard to do. Perhaps the two most spectacular examples of left-brained extremism in modern times were Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero. While both of these might have had some Western heritage there is surely much more to it than that. And what about the complaints from Asian leaders about Western decadence, which seem to boil down to us being too sentimental and right-brained?

A second issue is more serious. When exploring the evolution of Western thought he focuses mainly on art, and as the story progresses this focus increases, so that by the 20th Century art is pretty much all he analyses in detail. It also seems to be a rather skewed survey of art: I don’t think there is a single reference to Impressionism, the movement that seems to have had more impact than any other in the last two centuries. Actually what I am more interested in is political thought and business practice. He hints at his view that Fascism and Stalinism were left-brained excesses – and yet his survey of art shows that things are never as simple as they appear at first, and I can see many right-brained aspects to Nazism in particular. Indeed if he had tried to take apart and compare Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism instead of Surrealism and Post Modernism the second section would have been much more valuable

And it is through thinking about its application to political thought that I developed my biggest grouse with this book. It is too Right Brain Good, Left Brain Bad. The only real virtue he admits for the left-brain is effectiveness, and the only real vice for the right is corresponding ineffectiveness.  But I think there is more light and dark on both sides. What gave me this insight was watching Donald Trump. He is a right brain genius; he rejects rules, values belonging and always thinks in context (which is why he is so often appears hypocritical). It is more complicated than that of course – his lack of empathy is a left-brained characteristic, as his transactional way of doing business. But it got me to understanding that tribalism is a right-brained characteristic. It wasn’t left-brained white intellectuals who used to spit at coloured children. There was something much deeper and visceral going on. And correspondingly it is the left hemisphere that builds bridges between tribes – it literally and metaphorically builds a common language. It was the Enlightenment that brought Jews into mainstream Western society, and Romanticism that led to their rejection until scientific materialism finally triumphed after the Second World War. Interestingly Mr Gilchrist does hint at this in a caption to one of the colour plates, of a 14th Century picture of the Resurrection of the Dead: “Grasp, the left hemisphere’s means of control, is not intrinsically self-serving: it can also reach out to others. Here the life-giving force comes from the left side of Christ’s body.” There is dark and light on each side of the brain, and it is balance that we should be striving for.

But fundamentally Mr Gilchrist is right. We in the developed world are far too seduced by left-brained thought, and value right-brained insights too little. While there is no proper analysis of political thought in the book, one thing is extremely clear: modern liberalism is rampantly left-brained. This is the most searching critique of liberalism that I have read, and it does much to help me understand why it is failing. It does not put enough weight on emotions, on belonging or on context. Mastery of these things is why Mr Trump is so successful, setting up a strong emotional bond with his supporters. Liberal attempts to counter this are intellectual and dry. They sound clever but miss the point. People will not wake up one day and decide that the liberals were right after all. Liberals must put themselves back in touch with people’s values and emotions. They claim they want to give people more control over their lives, but often they do the opposite: they try to make them conform to a set of  politically correct norms.

There is another important insight that I take from this book. Mr McGilchrist is right that too many people think that humans are machines – or use that metaphor to understand humanity. This is very left-brained. The most egregious example of this is the way artificial intelligence is being hyped. If humanity is a machine, the view goes, we will replicate it very soon. And yet we are nowhere close. There is an irony in this: scientific materialists, the arch left-brainers, do not believe that people were designed by a god, but that we evolved; but they act like believers in Intelligent Design. Humans were not designed by anybody, and that is why they are so hard to understand, and still harder to replicate. And then there is a supreme arrogance about the power of data. The world does not reduce to data. Data give you a small fraction of the past, and that is it.

A further reflection is that the duality of the brain is a very good way to think about effective management. You need focus, and you need awareness of the world. The two are incompatible (attempts to achieve awareness in a focused way usually end in disaster – of which the financial crash of 2007-09 is a particularly clear example) – so you have to do both and make them cooperate. Alas far too management thinking worships task-oriented achievement. Excessive focus is perhaps the biggest reasons why human enterprises fail.

This is a flawed book. But its insights are very powerful indeed.

You don’t run a national economy as if it was a business – understanding the productivity “crisis”

Economists, especially the macro sort, look down on ordinary members of the public when they suggest that a nation’s finances operate in the same way as a household’s. They have a grand name for it: “the fallacy of composition”. And yet most of them suffer from very similar fallacious thinking. They imagine that running the production side of the economy is like running an individual business.

Economists are not good at looking beyond the aggregate statistics that describe an economy as a whole: total income (GDP or GNP), employment/unemployment, inflation, trade and current account deficits and so on. These numbers take on a  reality in their own right, rather than being statistical abstractions. This leads to a ludicrously simple mental model of what is happening behind them. It’s a bit like understanding a car through the operation of the accelerator, brake, steering wheel and gear stick, without thinking about the engine. Economists imagine a national economy to be a bit like a single business, or perhaps an aggregation of similar ones, churning out all the things the people need. The more that gets produced, the more that gets consumed, and the happier we will all be, following the ideas of classical economics. Once you have reached full employment, the only way to increase production is to make the business more efficient by raising productivity. It is one of the central challenges to economic management in this classical view. And it is one Britain seems to be failing at. Commentators from right across the political spectrum (except the Greens, maybe) seize on poor productivity performance with their own favourite explanations.

But the economy is not analogous to a single business. To understand this we need to consider the different sorts of production activity that make up our economy. These divisions are largely my invention to convey the essential dynamics. Many actual activities are in two or three categories at once.

Let’s start with the easy bit: what I will call commodities. These go beyond globally  traded things like oil and coffee to all goods and services that behave more or less as economists expect. Utilities might be an alternative name. These are most of the things sold at a supermarket, or basic cars, like a standard VW Golf, and the raw materials that make them. Services might include bank current accounts, household insurance and so on. Actual utilities a slightly more complicated, because they are distributed through networks that rarely compete with each other. All well and good, but what needs to be understood about these things is that from a consumer point of view there are diminishing returns. Your first fridge or car is really useful; your second one much less so. Not many people have three. That means demand is subject to saturation. Sales of white goods and cars rocketed in the 1950s and 1960s as people bought their first ones, but then slowed as most need came from replacements. This sea change for these and many other goods of the postwar light industrial revolution was surely one of the reasons for the economic wobbles in the 1970s, but one you will not hear mentioned by macroeconomists. A good definition of a developed economy is that it is one where most commodities have reached near saturation.

What are the consequences of this when we think about productivity? First, commodities are generally where advances in productivity have been the steadiest – production is relatively easy to automate and processes easy to redesign because there is little individuality in them. But as demand reaches saturation it means that workforces become smaller rather than more goods being produced. And that means that the weight of commodities in the total economy shrinks. First was agriculture, which used to account for the bulk of the economy, but now for about 1% or so. Next came manufacturing. And so on. How much of the total UK economy is in utilities? There’s no hard and fast definition, but it could be down to 20%.

Now let’s think about something else. Let’s call them “bads”. Direct bads are activities that are directly harmful; indirect bads are other activities we enter into to stop bad things from happening. Crime would be an example of the first, and police forces and security guards of the second. Into this category we might put armed forces and defence industries, a lot of the legal profession, regulators and compliance people, many consultants, and so on. We have little practical control over these activities, and they do not add directly to our wellbeing. An economy composed largely of security guards and armed criminals may have a decent GDP but it isn’t a good place to live. More is not better. The fewer bads overall, the better the economy will function for the population as a whole.

Productivity is clearly relevant for indirect bads. If you can treat the same danger with fewer warplanes or policemen then clearly that’s a good thing. But is this being measured in the economic statistics? And note that more productivity means the sector becomes smaller, like commodities but more so.

Next comes human services. The essence of these is human interaction. Economists’ favourite example is the hairdresser. The economy would be more productive if we all shaved our hair off, but somehow that misses the whole point. There are plenty of other examples: most of education, health care and social work, for example. One fascinating study (by BBC Horizon) showed that longer and more sympathetic consultations with doctors produced more effective treatments (the treatment in question was a placebo, which proved more effective than conventional drug interventions, but that’s an issue for another day). Productivity is a rather ambiguous concept for human services:if there is less waiting around and bureaucracy then that helps. But if you try to improve productivity by reducing the contact time with each client, you are likely to destroy the benefits of the service. This is not understood at all by economists. Trying to improve productivity in this way is how many public services are being undermined at the moment, with detrimental effects on society as a whole. But as a modern economy develops, human services, alongside hobbies and leisure, weigh higher, partly because we choose to consume more of them, and partly because there are few productivity savings to reduce the workforce. So the overall productivity of an economy (or at least the rate of productivity growth) will decline.

And then we have status goods and services. The primary purpose of these is to prove your status in society. The important point is for you own or use them when other people don’t. Think of luxury goods like smart sports cars or designer handbags. The interesting thing about these is that there is an anti-productivity factor. The more labour involved in producing the product, the higher status it confers. Improving productivity is a delicate matter. And, of course, status is a zero-sum game. Rising volumes of status goods simply lead to an arms race of expensive products that does nothing to advance human wellbeing overall.

I could go on. There are rents, public goods and finance and so on, each of which produce a different twist to the productivity puzzle, but none of which follow the classical pattern of commodities. There are two key points to make. First, improvements in productivity in a modern economy do not lead to expanded production, but to a redeployment of the workforce. That redeployment usually goes to sectors with lower productivity (status goods or human services), which means that the benefits of the original productivity gain are limited. But human wellbeing could well advance faster than overall growth, if people have more time for life-enhancing human services, for example. This isn’t a problem, it is a sign of a mature, successful economy. The second issue is that most economic activity is now in areas where productivity is practically unmeasurable because the outputs are intangible (bads, human services and status goods for example).

Look a bit deeper into Britain’s productivity statistics and both of these become important. The poor productivity growth is now attributed to a “tail” of small businesses, just as you would expect if productivity savings are being deployed into status goods and human services. Meanwhile the two sectors where virtually all measured productivity growth has happened in the last two decades are finance and business services. These are both sectors plagued by bads, the undermining of human services and rents. It is hard to argue that this growth has advanced human wellbeing. All of which leads to an alternative explanation of Britain’s low productivity. The British economy is simply further along the development path than others. In particular, unlike the Germany and France, we have run down export-focused commodity production, and that distorts any comparison.

There’s a further insight from this way of looking at things. Advancing human wellbeing in a developed economy does not come from producing ever more commodities. It derives from producing fewer bads, containing status goods, and expanding human services. Depending on how pricing works, that is unlikely to lead to measured growth in GDP. But that is not a bad thing: if it simply arises from the freely made choices of empowered citizens.

Of course productivity is an important issue for individual businesses and public agencies – at the level where managers should know whether value is being created or destroyed. But macro-economists should take their own advice on the fallacy of composition: don’t try running a national economy as if it was a business.

Economics for the Many – voices from the echo chamber

I promised you I would read and review Economics for the Many, a collection of essays edited by John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor. The purpose of the book is to show that Labour is not trying to reheat failed ideas from the past – but it is brimming with new ideas fit for the 21st Century. It doesn’t really succeed in that aim, but it does contain some interesting pointers.

My first idea was to review each article in about 200-300 words and produce a series of posts. That was how I started. But I quickly realised that this wasn’t going to work. Most of the 16 essays are pretty poor, and readers would have been subject to long tracts of rather sarky criticism. And not much of a thread would have emerged. As I waded through essay after essay, I was gaining more idea about Labour’s mythology, but little clarity on what they might do. Even when I could wholeheartedly agree with an essay, such as one supporting political devolution, something seemed missing. It was all too abstract; there should be a passion in ideas. And then, in Chapter 9, the book burst into life, with Democratic Ownership in the New Economy. I could even forgive the cringe-making comments about Jeremy Corbyn and Mr McDonnell, and claims of a  public uprising in the 2017 general election. It had passion, and pointed to practical examples of its ideas working. The central idea was local, grassroots-led action to develop local businesses based on local networks, using cooperatives, anchor institutions (like hospitals) and so on. The following essay, A New Urban Economic System: The UK and the US followed the same ideas and was less gushing but more convincing, again pointing to examples, including Preston in Lancashire. Both had a common thread: based on a think tank called the Democracy Collaborative that gets involved in real world projects, and which co-authored both articles. The book got a bit better after this, but the only essay to match this highlight was the last one: Rentier Capitalism and the Precariat: The Case for A commons Fund by Guy Standing.

This article had much the best overall narrative – developing the idea that capitalism had gone wrong, hoarding monopoly profits and creating a whole class (“the precariat”) of insecure jobs. This made a nice change from banging on about austerity (a Tory word, somebody has pointed out to me, suggesting frugality and discipline). It reads like a Marxist tract, but a good one, and much of it could in fact have been written by The Economist. Even if it was fact free and exaggerated it created a strong narrative based on things that are clearly actually happening. Mr  Standing recognises that Labour is not doing a good job of appealing to the precariat, which is either politically apathetic, or taken in by socially conservative populists. Then he develops the case for building a “Commons Fund”, which would pay a dividend, which would then develop into a universal basic income (UBI). This is the best constructed case I have read for this idea. It is interesting that it is the only place in the book where UBI, such a darling idea on the left, gets traction, and it is a very mild version of it. No hint here of it replacing welfare benefits.

Two other themes are worth mentioning. First is “financialisation”, which was the topic of two essays (by Costas Lapavitsas and Johnna Montgomerie). This awkward abstract noun is taking its place in the left’s lexicon. It covers a disparate variety of things, of which the most important is the expansion private debt. This is all part of the neoliberal villainy. The argument is that a lot of growth in the UK is built on private debt, and an influx of financial investment from abroad (typically in London property). This latter has created a high exchange rate which has helped hollow out productive business. There is clearly something in this. Where the essays break down is trying to work out what to do about it. If the process is to be reversed, and levels of private debt cut, then this will conversely be a drag on the economy. Unless it is simply replaced by public debt – but neither essay makes the case for that. The first essay gets the closest by advocating the creation of public sector institutions to take over lending. There may be something in this, but public sector banks have led to some of the biggest wastes of public resources around the world: the operating models are critical, and the essay says nothing about this. It just falls in with a general prejudice through the book that nationalised institutions are good.

Another theme is the development of online platforms, from Google and Amazon to Uber. This is clearly a worrying development,and it is very well described by Nick Srnicek, including the political difficulties of doing anything about it. A badly-written and excessively abstract article by Francesca Bria, who works for the city of Barcelona, takes this forward with the advocacy of more active management of data networks by city governments. This is something policymakers should talk more about. Some networks, such as Uber or Airbnb, could be replaced by locally managed cooperatives that retain profits locally without being less efficient – this dovetails with the Democracy Collaborative’s ideas. Others are global issues, but here initiatives like the EU’s GDPR can have an important impact.

What of the rest? Prem Sikka puts forwards ideas for improving the tax system. These aren’t particularly new, and I don’t actually think there is much low hanging fruit for extra tax revenues – but some of the perverse incentives of the system could be fixed. He advocates a version of unitary tax for multinationals, which I have favoured for a long time, but which the British political class has always shied a way from.  Ann Pettifor produced a disjointed essay with quite a lot of lazy rhetoric in it. Her main idea of a “Green Deal” might have a worthy objective but looks like an invitation to mismanagement. Barry Gardiner (Labour’s trade spokesman) advocates a middle way on trade policy between protectionism and a free for all, which promotes human rights and helps “vulnerable” economies. Good luck with that. Rob Calvert Jump delivers a flat essay on models of business ownership that people who remember the nationalised industry disasters of the 1970s and the successes of privatisations in the 1980s will be more than a little surprised at. He offers no thoughts on why privately owned companies might be a good ownership model in many contexts. Christopher Proctor has an essay on rethinking economics, with a clear explanation and critique of classical economics (puzzlingly referred to as “neoclassical”), but then fails to develop any ideas about how it is to be replaced, beyond a collection of unexplained initiatives which he says need more work. Ozlem Onaran expands on one these: feminist economics. Actually I don’t disagree with her idea that there should be more public spending on what she calls “social infrastructure”, but a lot her logic was unpersuasive – one suspects a lack of challenge in the development of her ideas.

So what to make of it? Labour’s critics will find their prejudices reinforced. There is no admission that Keynesian stimulus might not be appropriate in many contexts. Low productivity is always down to poor motivation, pay and social conditions, while process design and effective management don’t get mentioned. The concept of creative destruction is alien. Most of the ideas are about the state doing things from the centre, rather than empowering individuals and communities. There is little thought on how effective management can be encouraged and the abuse of power curtailed. Facts are few and far between, and silly factoids make their appearance (the £93bn of “corporate welfare” for example in Guy Standing’s). And all that rage against austerity and neoliberalism, when the politically uncommitted can see that there are some good aspects to both policies. The overwhelming impression is of ideas being developed in a leftist echo chamber without proper external challenge, for circualtion within that echo chamber. Still there is plenty of scope for liberals to share parts of the analysis and many of the solutions. Lib Dems passed something that looked very like Mr Standing’s Commons Fund at its last conference.

For me though, the most important and exciting essays were the Democracy Collaborative’s on building local networks to revive local and regional economies that have been hollowed out by modern economic policies. This involves a radical decentralisation of power and properly faces up to the challenge that modern economies face. If Labour’s leadership really do pick these ideas up and run with them, I’ll be impressed. There is clear scope for a coalition between socialists, greens and liberals here.

But I remain sceptical. Mr McDonnell’s big idea at the last conference was the expropriation of shares in public companies to put in employee trusts to pay dividends to workers up to a point. This has little to do with any of the ideas in this book and looks like a gimmick. But we should welcome much of the new thinking nevertheless. These ideas need to be brought out of the left’s echo chamber for the discipline of wider public debate.

Was austerity a horrible mistake? Three challenges to the left’s narrative

The Prime Minister Theresa May recently suggested that “austerity” was coming to an end. That word is one of the political left’s most successful abstract nouns; that Mrs May is now using it shows just how successful it is. Alongside the word comes an austerity narrative that is nowadays largely unchallenged. This is that the programme of public expenditure cuts started by the coalition government in 2010 was economically unwarranted, and therefore “ideological”, and that this foolish policy is responsible for the UK’s weak economic performance in the years since.

Conservatives are unbothered by this austerity narrative. They peddle their own rival one: that the preceding Labour regime was profligate with other people’s money and that the cuts were needed to stop public waste. They further, and tendentiously,  suggest that this profligacy is what led to the financial crash in 2007-2009. They feel no need to challenge the left’s austerity narrative; they just ignore it. For Liberal Democrats, as part of the coalition, the austerity narrative is much more painful. They neither challenge the left’s version, nor come up with one of their own. That war is over and the Lib Dems lost, but for the small number of people who care about what happened and why, should we meekly accept the left’s version of events, and acknowledge that it was a horrible mistake?

The economic logic of the left’s case is based on the idea of Keynesianism. In 2010 Britain was suffering a recession, with a collapse in output in 2008 to 2009 following the financial crash. A recession is a temporary dip in aggregate demand which can become a doom loop: lower demand cause job losses, which in turn reduces demand further. The quickest way to counter this is to stoke up government spending: this keeps demand going, stopping the job losses until confidence returns, the economy starts growing and the excess government spending is then cut back to restore balance (funnily enough left-wing economic commentators rarely talk about that second phase). This is what Labour did to a modest extent in 2009. But the coalition embarked on a massive programme of cuts in 2010, sucking demand out of the economy when demand was already weak. Instead of bouncing back from recession, as you would expect, the economy stayed at its low level with little or no growth for years, until weak growth eventually returned – the worst performance of any major economy.  America, the argument goes, was not as severe in its cuts, and bounced back much more quickly. Some commentators go as far as to project how much the economy would have grown at the average rate before the crash, to show a massive gap between now and where the economy could have been.

One of the reasons why this narrative is largely unchallenged is that the picture is actually very complicated, so that it is not particularly easy to pursue a considered argument. The winner is goes to the person that shouts the loudest in a dialogue of the deaf. I will sketch out three challenges, however, but I will inevitably oversimplify things to keep this post a manageable size.

Challenge 1: the size of the government debt was becoming unsustainable. The budget deficit in 2010 was in the region of 10% of GDP (with estimates at the time being even higher). This is truly scary, and promised a massive rise in the size of government debt: could the financial markets absorb it? And if they couldn’t, there might be a financial crisis that would create an even deeper recession. The Greek crisis, which was emerging at the same time, was used an example. But Greece doesn’t have its own currency any more. In Britain we can simply create the extra currency when push comes to shove: the government doesn’t run out. This is what Japan has been doing for decades with little ill-effect. But Japan has a current account surplus, meaning that the Japanese spend less than they produce, and do not need foreign money to keep the system going. Britain had (and still has) a large current account deficit, which means the opposite: we are dependent on foreign money. So, the argument runs, if these foreigners lost confidence in the British economy because of an ongoing 10% budget deficit, with the free creation of money (and hence a higher risk of currency depreciation and inflation), then there would be a crunch. At best, the government, or private sector, would be forced to borrow in foreign currency, destabilising the economy. At worst imports would rapidly become unaffordable, leading to severe inflation. This is a very hard argument to get to the bottom of on either side. There was no stress in the market for government borrowing as things turned out. But was that because of austerity? Or  sign that austerity was unnecessary? There is a very good case that the government could easily have borrowed more for investment (in council housing, say), a more difficult case for simply open-ended funding of bureaucrats and benefits.

Challenge 2: the government actually moderated austerity to reflect economic conditions. The government’s plans to cut spending announced in 2010 were never adhered to; what actually happened followed the trajectory proposed by the Labour Chancellor in 2010 to tackle the deficit and included in the party’s election manifesto. Unemployment never got out of control, and overall employment recovered much more quickly than the overall income figures. A lot of the comments from left-wing writers on the scale of the recession and austerity does not follow the facts. Some even suggest that because austerity was slower than planned “it was a failure in its own terms”. This really is disappearing up your own backside. The scale of the cuts to public services simply shows how far public spending had got out of step with tax revenues. The more serious left-wing counter to this is that though employment held up, its quality did not. Pay was squeezed, and a lot of the new employment was insecure. There was scope for more demand in the economy, they say.

Challenge 3: the economy before the crash was unsustainable. To me this is the lynch pin argument, and I’m disappointed that it is so rarely made. This runs in a narrow form and a broader form. The narrow form is that government spending was at unsustainable levels, both because it was running a deficit at the top of the economic cycle, and, more seriously, because so much spending was funded by bubble taxes like capital gains taxes and stamp duty, while more reliable taxes, like income tax, were actually cut. That left a massive gap when the bubble burst, which meant that spending cuts or tax rises were inevitable even taking the Keynesian argument into account. There was never going to be a good moment to make the adjustment.

But the broader argument is more important. There was something fundamentally unsound about the pre-crash economy. It depended too much on the financial sector, drawing in foreign money to invest in British property and other assets. This drove the pound up, strangling export industries and giving us that large current account deficit. Growth in the economy depended on two very dubious sectors: finance and “business services” – the supply to services to other businesses, often in the finance sector. A lot of the reported income turned out to be fictitious, generating huge losses in the banks which the government then had to bail out. This was the culmination of two or three decades of poor economic management, when instead of modernising the economy, Britain went on an orgy of financialisation – not only pumping up a socially useless finance sector and its hangers on, but persuading people to increase consumption by borrowing more. In this light, projecting growth rates from before the crash to after it, to show how far it should have grown, is nonsense. The sustainable growth rate has been near zero for some years. And this puts a severe limit on Keynesian policies: the economy simply couldn’t bounce back to where it was before without creating another bubble. In fact with the finance sector flat on its back, such policies would most likely have done little to raise domestic incomes, but simply sucked in more imports and foreign money invested in British property. The rebalancing of the economy, advocated by politicians of the right, left and centre, is a much slower and more painful process. We simply do not have the skills that a rebalanced economy will need.

This is not to say that the coalition government did not make serious mistakes. The more subtle critique made by prominent economists is that the government should have borrowed to invest. In other words the austerity was necessary, but that it should have been balanced by building more infrastructure and (perhaps) developing schools and colleges (the universities did fine). The left-wing commentators who cite these economists (the likes of Joe Stiglitz for example) overlook this.

The problem is that the British economy is in a deep mess, and it will not be easy to break out of it. We cannot do so by trying to go back to the economies of the 2000s, still less the 1970s. We cannot even go back to how the 2000s might have been if we had been wiser (looking more like Germany for example). Trying to work out what this new economy looks like and how to get there is the big challenge facing all politicians. Meanwhile we should regard any arguments about the easy restoration of growth with suspicion.

Three things the EU needs to fix, and one that it doesn’t

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At a recent event organised by the Spectator, Matthew Goodwin, an academic who has made his name with studies of the far right, suggested that the European Union was falling apart, and that in time Brexit, for its trauma, will be seen as the right move for Britain. Supporters of the EU are so mired in the crises of the moment, from Brexit to the Italian budget to refugees to governmental corruption in east Europe, that they are not asking deeper questions abut the Union. In the spirit of moving the debate along, I want to talk about three fundamental problems that need to be fixed, and one that doesn’t.

The one that doesn’t is a lack of democracy. This is a nearly universal complaint, but it is a proxy. It is an old rule about complaints: often what people say isn’t the real issue. In the EU’s case the real issue is that people feel that they don’t have enough say in key things that affect their lives, such as who can move into their neighbourhoods. The answer to that isn’t making EU institutions more transparent and accountable, and still less directly electing officials. In practice these will tend to centralise power and create yet more aggravation from those who get outvoted. There is as yet no European polity, and little solidarity between Europe’s extremes. These are necessary prerequisites for democratic structures. The European parliament is a democratic failure for this reason: the only useful purpose its elections serve is as a vehicle for protest votes – but that is because the voters don’t care about the consequences. Decisions in the Union are made through a consensus or near consensus of democratically elected heads of state – which is as good as it is ever going to get. Instead we need to look at the issues that are causing the deepest friction, in particular the free movement of people, or the greatest institutional stress, such as corrupt and populist governments, or both, like the Euro.

Let’s start with the free movement of people. This is so difficult is because free movement is in fact very popular. People like the idea that they can up sticks and move anywhere in the continent where the opportunities are better or the climate is nicer. This is, above all, what inflames passions amongst Britain’s Remainers. And it is why Europe’s politicians created the Schengen passport free zone. But for those people who find themselves surrounded by newcomers, it feels that they have lost control over an important aspect of their lives. And the biggest stress of all comes from people who originally come from outside the continent to live here, though we shouldn’t forget the stresses created by Poles and Lithuanians in Lincolnshire, or British “expats” in Spain. There is an undoubted racist undertone to this, but liberals need to understand that behind this is the feeling that rural and small town residents have of lost control. Democratisation, in this case, means more local control on who is entitled to residency, work and benefits. Of course this would mean that those choosing to keep foreigners out should lose the benefits of having foreigners come in – but people need to make that calculation for themselves, rather than have it imposed on them from on high.

The next problem for the Union is the way that corrupt elites can take control of governments with weaker national institutions, and bend them towards favouring insiders. Often this is done under the guise of populism, as in Hungary and Poland; sometimes it is a bit more obvious, as in Bulgaria and Romania. The elites running these countries are able to take the benefits of EU membership while ignoring its institutional norms, such as free speech and the rule of law. The more skilled practitioners, like Hungary’s Victor Orban, are then able to portray the EU’s complaints as an outrageous attack on their own democracy. Here what is needed is a bit of rebalancing of EU institutions to give the majority more leverage. Time is on the EU centre’s side: few things are more unpopular than corruption and sooner or later voters will endorse the rules-based EU institutions. But the majority need to be able to exert more subtle pressure on the backsliders than currently. The EU budget is an obvious place to start.

And so we come to the Euro. As with freedom of movement the problem is that the Euro both very popular, and has a capacity to create extraordinary friction. The Euro is popular because it is, for most people (Germany and the Netherlands excluded), a better store of value that any local currency would be, as well as a more flexible unit of exchange – two of the key functions of a currency. Meanwhile governments like the reduced cost of borrowing that the Euro brings. Germany and the Netherlands, meanwhile, derive much of their wealth from trade and doubtless appreciate that a floating currency would tip the terms of trade against them. And yet a single currency brings many problems with it, especially when combined with the fiscal rules that prevent countries from properly managing their business cycles. This can create unnecessary hardship, as well as dangerous frictions between the currencies haves and have-nots. The new Italian government is about to challenge the system to breaking point. It wants to loosen the fiscal rules to stimulate its economy, for which there may be a perfectly decent case, while at the same time rolling back reforms that would make the Italian economy more efficient. Interestingly, it is not finding this as easy as it thought, since its manoeuvres have raised its cost of borrowing without the EU institutions lifting a finger. But doubtless they will succeed in engineering a damaging confrontation. Most people think that they way forward is to create stronger institutions at the centre of the zone so that resources can be moved around within it more freely. The Germans object, though, and so there is impasse.

The solutions to each of these three issues are not clear. But what I think is clear is that they will require a new EU treaty of some sort. At the extreme it may mean closing down the existing union and creating a new one – or at least for the core countries to threaten this. That will require the crisis to deepen. They also mean that some of the fundamental rights and freedoms on which the Union has been built will have to be rethought. The sooner that people start that rethinking, the better.

But before we despair we must remember the things the Union does well. First is that it makes continental commerce easier, especially since the Single Market was instituted in 1992. Second, it is more effective than any national institution in taking on global multinational businesses, whose anti competitive practices are an increasing global problem. Third, they help its smaller members to stand up to bullying by countries inside and outside the union. Ask yourself why Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump dislike it so much? And fourth, it does regulation pretty well. A recent example of this is the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). This is a welcome push-back by the European public against the abuse of data by commercial and other interests. It is very unlikely that individual governments would have done as good a job. Their local political agendas are too full to make room; crucial elements would have been watered down by local vested interests. Even in Brexit Britain you hear very little protest against what is a very irksome set of requirements; people feel that something needed to be done. There are many other examples. And, of course, it makes sense if each country’s regulations are compatible with each others. It is not that EU institutions are immune to special interests, but that it is better placed to handle them than national governments.

And there is such a thing as a shared European identity, based on a shared history. This may get stronger. Europeans used to see the rest of the world reflected in its own image – a result of its period of empire in the 18th and 19th Centuries. As other continents emerge from that shadow, Europe looks a smaller place – but it becomes more obvious what unites it. It stands against the free-wheeling capitalism of America, the totalitarianism of China, the theocracy of Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the cynical kleptocracy of Russia. It does so based on centuries of learning things the hard way. As the EU struggles with its raison d’etre something more cohesive should emerge. That is my hope.

There are alternatives. Theresa May is in deep trouble

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Beware the superficial when assessing Theresa May, Britain’s Prime Minister. Most of the time she seems very weak, but somehow she survives as her position is much stronger than it looks. Conversely this is punctuated by moments of triumph, when she seems to sweep all before her. This always precedes a major reverse. Yesterday as she closed the Conservative conference with a confident speech she looked strong, though perhaps short of triumphant. In reality she has never looked more vulnerable.

Of course the central issue is Brexit. I have generally given this an optimistic gloss, being one of the few people to say that it is going reasonably well for Mrs May. But there is now serious reason to question her judgement. Her claim that there is no alternative is now in question.

Mrs May has taken up a very risky negotiating strategy. She is sticking to her proposal, usually referred to as “Chequers”, though it looks as it the government has stopped using that word to refer to it. This is a very complex fudge by which Britain accepts EU Single Market product regulation for goods, but not for labour and environmental standards, nor for the movement of workers, and a customs arrangement whereby Britain can collect both its own and EU tariffs at its borders, allowing the easy movement of goods to the EU. The idea is to have an open border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and allow the intricate supply chains that have built up between the UK and EU countries to continue. But the problem is that EU leaders are really not happy with this. It looks too much like “have your cake and eat it”, where Britain can undercut EU labour and environmental regulations and compete unfairly. Not to mention getting all the benefits of a customs union while freely negotiating alternative tariffs with non-European partners. Smarting from what they see as the growing nightmare of the pick ‘n mix relationship they have with Switzerland, and worried about signals they might give both to other countries in the union and those just outside, they are anxious to guide the UK down one of the clear institutional models that they have already developed.

That leaves a very dangerous stand-off. If neither side gives way there could be a potentially disastrous “no deal” on 29 March 2019. Some Brexit supporters are quite relaxed about that idea. They assume that a number of side-deals can be done to mitigate the worst impacts, like grounded aircraft, halted medical supplies, non recognition of driving licences and so on. That is much too complacent. Though many of the scare stories spread by Remainers can be dealt with like this, the relationship is much too complex for such deals to go far enough, and it looks a bit like the hated Swiss model anyway. And there is no side deal possible that will prevent huge difficulties for goods crossing borders. The prospect of no-deal is so daunting that it might persuade parliament to go for a further referendum allowing Brexit to be reversed, something that has started to worry Conservatives, to judge how keen they are to rubbish the idea.

The EU is in fact offering two alternative ways forward for Britain after the transition period ends on 31 December 2020 (or perhaps later…). The first is full membership of the Single Market as a member of the European Economic Area (EEA). This has supporters in Britain. It might be bent to accommodate Labour’s “tests” and so allow a parliamentary coalition that excludes most Conservative MPs. But it means that Britain will be a rule-taker from the EU, and continue to allow EU workers in freely. Most of those who voted for Brexit, and even some who didn’t, would surely not support it. The second way forward is to do a free trade deal along the lines of the one done with Canada (referred to as “Canada” or “Canada plus”). This is the real threat to Mrs May, because Tory hardline Brexiteers support it. Much worse, so do many others, as it looks much better than no-deal, as at least there is nearly two years of transition and quite likely more. It is possible that there will be  cabinet rebellion – or even a revolt amongst Conservative MPs that turns Mrs May out of the leadership.

Mrs May’s objection to Canada is that it creates a problem with Northern Ireland, as the EU currently insists that there would need to be a boundary of some sort between it and the rest of the UK. The rebels’ calculation is the the EU will give ground on this, not least because a no-deal would have a very hard impact on the Irish Republic. They have even come up with various fudges and fig leaves that might make it viable.

So there is a clear and coherent alternative strategy for Brexit to Mrs May’s. But her position is  made weaker by something else. Her remarkable longevity as leader since the fiasco of the 2017 General Election was not just because there was no alternative Brexit strategy,  but because there was no alternative leader. Or rather, that the main alternative looked to be Boris Johnson, the former Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary. He was on manoeuvres this week, giving a speech outside the main conference that apparently went down a storm. I have accused Labour’s John McDonnell of advocating candyfloss policies, but Mr Johnson makes him look like a serious civil servant. Now two serious alternatives as leader have now emerged: the Home Secretary Sajid Javid, and the new Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who is conspicuously more competent in that role than Mr Johnson ever was. Mr Johnson’s position, meanwhile, is weakening. In a leadership election Tory members make the final choice between the last two candidates selected by MPs. Mr Johnson can’t guarantee being in that top two (a bit like the similarly charismatic, but more competent, Michael Portillo when the system was used the first time). And even if he does make it, the members may well lose their nerve and vote for the alternative. Tory MPs may be prepared to risk starting the selection process.

Such a rebellion is still unlikely before March next year, though, since it is too close to Brexit day. Afterwards it could happen very quickly. They will need to get a move on. The next general election is very winnable for the Conservatives. Brexit will stay in the news for years after next March, but the political sting will be much less, especially if Mrs May can be scapegoated for the worst aspects. Remainers may be energised now, but they will run out of steam once the country has formally left. They are not at all clear on what they want after that – they have barely started to think about it. Labour are vulnerable. They have a leader who is regarded as nice, sincere but ineffective by most people, and as an evil villain by many others. They have some interesting policies but a lot of these haven’t been thought through, and they will wilt under sustained attack. The group of advisers that surround their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, remind me of the tight coterie that surrounded Mrs May before her disastrous election of June 2017: clever but inward looking.

But the Conservatives have weaknesses of their own. Their membership is low and ageing. The Brexit brand, which they have taken ownership of, is toxic to many. A new, younger leader will help with this. But they also need time to prepare for their campaign. The party owed its unexpected victory in 2015 to years of careful preparation; they did so badly in 2017 because they went into it with no preparation at all. So Tory MPs need to get Mrs May out of the way as soon as they can. And then there is all to play for.

As alternatives start to look more viable, Mrs May’s days are surely numbered.


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News for Winter 2018

Geoffrey Bond Research Award 2018

Once again, this year we received a number of very good and worthwhile applications for research awards from the generous amount provided by Geoffrey Bond and by an equal amount from Thoroton funds. The selection panel, chaired by John Beckett, decided that this year awards would be made to three applicants.

Bassetlaw Christian Heritage has been awarded £1000 to continue its project to research and document material of all kinds relating to local dissidents which may be held in archives, local churches or orally. This is being undertaken in the lead up to the 2020 commemorative year which will mark the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ voyage to America in 1620. As you will be aware, many of the leaders of the Mayflower Pilgrims came from villages in the Bassetlaw area.

A project to be undertaken by archaeologist Tom Keyworth has been awarded the sum of £635. This will comprise an investigation at Lodge Farm, Burton Joyce, involving an auguring survey of the ditchfill at the site and further environmental examination and recording of the organic samples.

Research by Jenny Sissons on the county’s mediaeval monastic sites has been awarded the sum of £350.

There is a requirement for those receiving grants to provide articles on the outcomes of their research for the newsletter and, subject to editorial processes, there may be future articles in the Transactions.

We are grateful for Geoffrey Bond’s support in enabling such worthwhile research to be undertaken relating to our county and we look forward to next year’s applications which will be due on 1st September 2019.

Again, we urge all researchers to consider whether they could be helped in their projects by a grant. The conditions of application are on the website at www.thorotonsociety.org.uk/bond-awards.htm

Barbara Cast, Honorary Secretary

New war memorial at Trent Bridge Pavilion

On 4th September a new First World War memorial was unveiled on the Pavilion at Trent Bridge Cricket Ground. It is fixed to the right of the steps and consists of three sturdy English oak carved planks surmounted by one very large poppy and its leaves. Above it is a carved wooden rifle. To the left it states, ‘If the cricketer has a straight eye let him look down the barrel of a rifle’ (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Adjacent, to the left, is a small slate plaque bearing the names of the six men who played cricket for Nottinghamshire but made the ultimate sacrifice in the War. The design is by Martin Somerville.

A brief biography of each man follows:

Alexander Crawford

Born 24th May 1891 in Warwickshire but moved to Nottinghamshire and was educated at Nottingham High School and Oundle. Qualified lawyer. A right-handed batsman and right-arm fast-medium bowler, he played briefly for Warwickshire then eleven times for Nottinghamshire in 1912.

At the outbreak of war, he joined the Lincolnshire Regiment but in early 1915 he was commissioned into the Notts and Derby Regiment (Sherwood Foresters) before transferring to the West Yorkshire Regiment. Promoted to captain and sent France in February 1916 but killed in action on 10th May 1916 at the age of 24. He is buried at St Vaast Military cemetery, Pas de Calais.

Ralph Hemingway

Born 15th December 1877 near Macclesfield, the youngest of ten brothers. Attended Rugby School before becoming an architect in Nottingham. A right-handed batsman, he played thirty matches for Notts between 1903 and 1905. In August 1905 he opened the batting with George Gunn against the South Africans and scored 85. In his last match for the Gentlemen of the South he took the catch of WG Grace.

Ill-health forced him to give up cricket at the age of 27; nevertheless, he became a second lieutenant in the Notts and Derby Regiment in 1914. Sent to France in June 1915 and wounded in September, he was killed on 15th October 1915 aged 37. His body was never recovered but he is commemorated on the Loos Memorial, Lille.

Harold Hodges

Born on 22nd January 1886 in Mansfield Woodhouse, the fifth of seven sons. Won Blues for rugby and lacrosse at Oxford and played twice for England at Rugby. After studying at the Sorbonne, he became a school teacher. He played three matches for Notts in 1911 and 1912.

In 1914 he joined the Monmouthshire Regiment and was sent to France in February 1915.In May he was seriously wounded but recovered in England, then returned to his battalion. Now a captain, he was transferred to the South Lancashire Regiment and Mentioned in Dispatches twice. Killed on 22nd March 1918, aged 32, whilst helping a junior officer to escape. His body was later recovered, and he is commemorated in Roye New Cemetery, Somme.

Charles Pepper

Born 6th June 1875 in County Cork but came to England as a boy. Initially a professional cricketer of Rye CC the came to Nottingham in 1900. A right-handed batsman and right-arm medium bowler. He played for Notts against the West Indies in July 1900 and in seven County Championship matches in 1900 and 1901. Between 1902 and 1904 he was a professional for Darlington CC.

Charles enlisted as a private in the Notts and Derby Regiment (Sherwood Foresters) but was soon promoted to sergeant. He arrived in France in April 1916 and survived until 13th September 1917 when he was killed by a shell whilst standing next to his CO in Flanders. They are buried side by side at La Clytte Cemetery, Belgium. He was 42 years old.

William Riley

Born 11th August 1888 at Newstead Colliery Village. Began working in the local coal mine at the age of 12. Played for Newstead Colliery CC. A slow-medium left-arm bowler, he played seventy-eight first-class matches between May 1909 and July 1913, plus two more for Notts. in August 1914. He took 235 wickets at an average of 23.39, but is perhaps remembered as the non-striking batsman when Ted Alletson scored a record 34 runs against Sussex in 1911.

William joined the Royal Garrison Artillery in February 1916 and served with the 13rd Siege Battery as a gunner. Went to France in May 1916 and was killed by a shell splinter on 9th August, two days before his 29th birthday. He is buried at Coxyde Military Cemetery, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium.

Harvey Staunton

Born 21st November 1870 at Staunton Hall, Nottinghamshire and educated at Bromsgrove School and Cambridge University, where he was awarded a Blue at Rugby. Became a curate, serving Pleasley Hill and Plumtree; also chaplain to Notts. County Asylum and rector of Broughton Sulney from 1907 to 1911. A right-handed batsman, he played sixteen first-class matches for Notts between May 1903 and July 1905, including the defeat by the Gentlemen of Philadelphia.

In 1910 he went to India as a missionary, becoming the chaplain at Nagpur. During the War he served in Mesopotamia as a Chaplain 4th Class in the Army Chaplains’ Department. He died of a fever in Arzizieh on 14th January 1918 and is commemorated in a grave at North Gate War Cemetery, Baghdad.

Several Notts cricketers served and survived, including Arthur Carr, George Gunn, Vincent Cartwright and William Barber.

At the start of the war the two Pavilions, i.e. the present building and the Ladies’ Pavilion where the Hound Road stand is today, were handed to the military authorities. The Pavilion VAD Hospital was established, staffed mainly by female volunteers and funded by donations. It expanded from 36 beds into a 200-bed convalescent facility, which was one of the UK’s best-equipped physiotherapy and orthopaedic units. Between October 1914 and March 1919, when it officially closed, the hospital treated 3,533 patients, but some wards were still open when the County Championship resumed in 1919.

Throughout the war years the pitch itself was used for various events. In 1915 a cricket match took place between the City Police and the Special Constables; in 1916 to Radford, Basford and District Athletic and Cycling Club held races; in July 1917 there was a sports carnival including a lady munitions workers’ Donkey Derby; in May 1918 a crowd of 4,000 watched a cricket match followed by a concert and three months later more concerts were included in a Fete in aid of the Patriotic Fair. Between April and September 1918 five baseball matches were played by American soldiers from military camps in the area.

Terry Fry

Roman Villa discovered at Broughton Castle

Thorotonians who went on the excursion to Broughton Castle this year will be interested in the recently published find of a large Roman villa on the Broughton estate. The land is owned by Martin Fiennes, the heir of Baron Saye and Sele. Apparently, in 1963, the local tenant farmer had discovered a burial containing the skeleton of a high-status woman, when he hit and damaged her sarcophagus with his plough and subsequently retrieved a human bone. A local historian and metal detectorist, Keith Westcott, heard this story and did a field-walk over the site, discovering a piece of Roman hypocaust tile. In April of this year, Oxford Archaeology carried out a trial dig at the site. They recovered various artefacts, including a Roman coin with a depiction of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf. Samian pottery was found and also the tusk of a boar.

The villa is described as ‘huge’. A geophysical survey indicate that it was not far short of the dimensions of Buckingham Palace! The site lies at the head of a triangle between the Fosse Way, Akeman Street and Watling Street, so is a very important Roman area.

John Wilson

Celebrating 200 years of the Mansfield and Pinxton Railway

"A more exhilarating scene was probably never exhibited in the town of Mansfield, than was occasioned by opening the new Railway from the Cromford Canal... The morning was ushered in with the ringing of bells and a bonfire was made in the market place. About one o’clock the proprietors and friends of the undertaking began to assemble at the Swan Inn, and about two o’clock they proceeded on horseback attended by hundreds of foot people, along the Alfreton Road, about a mile and a half, to where it comes into contact with the Railway, at the beautiful five-arch bridge, constructed under the direction of Mr Jessop, the Engineer, where they met ten waggons laden with coal, from the Pinxton Colliery, surmounted by workmen and colliers, carrying branches of laurel. There the assemblage amounted to some thousands, covering not only the road, but in great measure the fields by the roadside.

The procession then moved towards town, Mr Mason having presented the proprietors with a flag for the procession, bearing the motto ‘by perseverance we have obtained’, this was carried in front, the Friendly Societies having also attended with their flags and a good band of music ...... Having arrived in the Market Place, about three o’clock, which, notwithstanding the heavy rain falling at the time, was thronged with people, the band struck up ‘God save the King’, which was followed by loud huzzahs from the population assembled, who thus testified to their satisfaction at the accomplishment of this arduous undertaking.”

(Nottingham Journal, April 17, 1819 describing events of April 13 in Mansfield)

Kings Mill Viaduct carried the Mansfield and Pinxton Railway across a small stream.
Kings Mill Viaduct carried the Mansfield and Pinxton Railway across a small stream.

A brief history of the railway

After many years of debate, from the 1790s, of how to connect Mansfield to the growing network of canals it was finally decided to make that connection via rail to the Cromford Canal at Pinxton, rather than constructing an additional canal. Work commenced on the rail in 1817 and concluded in 1819, when it opened for business on Easter Tuesday. Initially it was used to transport heavy goods, such as coal into Mansfield and stone, sand and malt out of the town. As the years went by, passenger travel was introduced and in 1849 the Mansfield & Pinxton line, which had recently been purchased by the Midland Railway Company, upgraded and extended into Nottingham, where it joined the main network. At this point steam locomotives were introduced on to this upgraded line and continued to transport goods and passengers until they were superseded by diesel power. However, during the mid-1960s the passenger services were withdrawn but coal and other goods continued to be transported.

Fortunately, as the commercial side of transportation started to decline after the closure of many local collieries in the 1980s & 90s, the passenger service was re-introduced as the Robin Hood Line. This continued use of the train line makes it one of the oldest continuously running lines in the United Kingdom and possibly the oldest in England; some railway historians believe it to be the sixth oldest in the world. The original line was enabled by the construction of a viaduct (the “beautiful five-arched bridge” mentioned above), which is still standing and accessed by the public daily and is recognised as the oldest railway viaduct in the country.

Features of the original railway

The funding application

In 2017 the Kirkby & District Archaeological Group (KDAG) shifted its focus from a vanished medieval house (the lost manor of Kirkby Hardwick) to a dramatically different theme: a still visible, local achievement of the Industrial Revolution. The Mansfield & Pinxton Railway is not widely known about, even locally, but the imminent 200th anniversary of its opening was seen to provide an ideal opportunity to celebrate its special claims to historical importance.

A Steering Group was established with the aim of applying for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to:

The Steering Group brought together heritage groups from all parts of the railway (Old Mansfield Society; Sutton Heritage Society; Pinxton & S. Normanton History Society, as well as KDAG) along with several knowledgeable railway enthusiasts, under the chairmanship of Denis Hill, who was for many years Heritage Officer at Ashfield District Council. The Heritage Lottery Fund application was submitted in May 2018, and we learnt in late July that we had been successful. The HLF had made a grant of £89,600 to fulfil a detailed Project Plan.

The Celebration

A major focus of the project is the actual anniversary date: Saturday, April 13, 2019. We are hoping to incorporate several aspects of the original opening, as described above: the procession, the flags, the church bells, the feasting, the entertainment - though the bonfire in the Market Square may be rather less achievable. More modern features of the celebration will include memorabilia (mugs, pens, etc), talks, and walks along the railway route, interaction with schools, a travelling exhibition in Mansfield Museum (February 2019) and other venues, and the creation of models and a video. The project has a two-year timescale and some aspects, such as researching the history and installing interpretation boards, will extend well beyond the anniversary date.

We have appointed a Project Officer (Denis Hill) who will oversee the project from start to finish, but the detailed work on the various aspects of the celebration will be in the hands of working groups. Recruitment is underway! Many different skills are needed in terms of organising, writing, mapping, researching, designing, oral history recording, publicity and creative ideas. We would welcome anyone who is interested in contributing. Training can be provided in a number of these areas.

It is evident from the opening paragraphs that the arrival of the railway created massive crowds and enthusiasm. Even if you can’t be part of the planning we hope you will note Saturday, April 13, 2019 in your diary and join in the celebrations which will be well publicised nearer the time.

Anyone who wishes to be involved or kept informed should contact Denis Hill on 0744 353 6811 or email denishill1066@gmail.com

Trevor Lewis & Denis Hill

It is with sadness that we note the death of the following members:

Dr Margaret Skelly

Beth Tate (1928 - 2018)

Beth lived to be 90 years old, yet her energy, curiosity and empathy were limitless.

Born 1928, Beth grew up in Protestant Belfast but her two GP parents always employed Catholics and made sure Beth and her sister Joan were taken to school through the Catholic areas to appreciate how hard life was for some. This led Beth ultimately to become a Social Worker in the Probation Service and then a Magistrate. Her life in war-torn Belfast has been documented and is now held by The Imperial War Museum.

She travelled widely with her husband Professor Brian Tate and was interested in historic buildings, music, poetry and politics. A fierce royalist and member of the Anglican church she also supported Jeremy Corbyn’s maxim, “For the many, not the few”.

In her last year she found time to host an Irish Halloween party to raise money for the street children of Sierra Leone and her house was used by the BBC to film “Jamie Johnson Plays Football.” The weekend she died Beth had been due to fly to Belfast to feature in a film about her beloved uncle, C.S. Lewis. Sadly, she didn’t make it.

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Episode 107: The Unanswered Circus Question

The Jerks recap the NBA Finals, analyze the upcoming Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight and discuss UCF’s kicker’s NCAA woes because of his YouTube success. Plus, DC’s reaction to Wonder Woman’s box office numbers, Chris Evans signing up for more Captain America adventures, and what the guys are reading this week. Bonus: Find out how Nightwing’s circus background comes into play, and try to decipher why (We couldn’t).

Those Two Jerks: Episode 107


text:
Deano's Summer Vacation!

Dean J. Splittgerber, Jr. .........

Dad Sponsored the Doobie Bros. Alethea and I got to meet them. I got to loose some weight for the Doobie Brothers....Deano Cool tractor trailer at http://www.spitzies.com/

Old Switcher for Railex in Rotterdam.
New switcher for Railex in Rotterdam.
Produce Train. Only time this unit has been on this train. Westbound at Tribes Hill. Lehigh Valley tugboat...restored...Port of Albany during the Tugboat Round-Up. There are only two LV Tugs left. It has and EMD Prime MoverFinally, the new basement for the model railroad. Someday Lincoln Logs will bring the house, LOL!

Update Summer Vacation Series

From John Camerota..... NS 9034 in the lead of a westbound empty coal train, Alleghany Yard in Olean, NY

From Brad Peterson...
The crossing with my whole train in tow. Once I had some ties in place, I loaded the flat car with supplies and was able to use it as a seat for spiking/gauging. I'm using exterior drywall screws with a washer added to secure the rail to PT 2X4's. This will work great until the extension cords run short. Just kidding, I have a cordless that works fine. Looking east with the deck in the background.

From Tony Bucca.....
Work is progressing on the caboose at King's Station. At our work party last night , we unloaded the 1/4 inch steel gutters we had made up to weld to the edges of the roof. I took a trip all the way down to exit 11 of the northway to measure some things on the 35702-the ex-D&H caboose that's an ice-cream stand. It has v-groove bead-board siding, and we'll be able to match the dimensions very closely. We have been scrapping the roof of the aluminum
coating, and we should be able to get the gutters welded in place this week. Then we'll peel the first layer of plywood to determine if the primary layer is going to be OK as a substrate for the bead-board. Landscaping is ongoing, and I hope to bring in some ballast for around the ties. As always,photo documentation is ongoing. We are very lucky to have a number of non-rail citizens involved in the project, just for the historical side of it. But that's part of the Bridge Line Historical Society! Thanks to C.R.O.C.K.S. (Citizens Restoring Our Caboose at King Station,) progress has been made on our work on the caboose. We went before the town of Greenfield board with our work and schedule plans, and they not only approved our estimated budget, but increased it by about 25%. Our town supervisor, Al Janik wants to make sure things are done the right way. We've had a couple of work sesions, initially to clear overgrown shrubbery, and pull up buried brick pavers, in anticipation of engraved pavers we hope to sell for between the depot and the caboose. Work on the caboose began in earnest with a good cleaning of the inside. On a subsequent work-day we drilled out the screws securing the roof-walks so we could have a clear shot at re-doing the gutters and roofing. The caboose has TWO layers of plywood sheathing, the second extending past the edge of the roof-line, allowing for water infiltration. We, as a comittee have decided to strip both layers down to the frame-work, and re-do the siding in a more aesthetic bead-board as early cabooses had. While I was in Cass,WV, I was able to get some detail shots of some of their wood-side cabeese. The general good shape of the metal roof will allow us to divert monies ear-marked for roofing to the slightly more expensive bead-board. We plan on doing a side at a time,but not till after we have welded on new gutters. Thanks to BLHS historian Brad Peterson for keeping an eye on the caboose as he passes by each day, and to Bill Bibby who also wants to get involved from North Creek. I will be presenting a Power-point presentation at the BLHS convention in October, so I have been keeping a photographic record of progress to date.

My Summer Vacation Series

From Bill Kozel...
Not exactly what I would choose to post but....Go to:http://conradstenton.multiply.com/photos/album/207/Quebec_Northshore_Labrador_Run
here are some pic's someone on the trip did post.
As you can see, we had some rain, typical for Labrador and it was definitely cold all of the time, 30's to 50. It snowed just north of Mai before we got their.
I will be writing an article for the D&H Bridge Line for next issue. I wasn't able to send in a column for the current issue, just plain ran out of time. Hopefully the guy will send more pic's of the trains and facilities. I definitely will make a video of this run.
The loaded ore trains are 240 cars with two units leading and one mid train now. Wabush Mines (Mines Wabush in French/Canadian) are behind the helper and hauled for the Wabush mine. Many things had changed on the railroad since my last trip just prior to 9/11.
The labor problems I was told the railroad had were actually problems the mine workers had with the mine management itself which would affect the railroad by ore haulage but did not relate to the railroad in any other way; the railroad did not have labor problems as we had been informed so our trip was never in jeopardy.
Got 11 hours sleep last night, finally feel awake after two weeks, haha! These "mainline" trips are definitely not relaxing. Really happy I could get one of my partners & fellow BLHS member Bill O'Connell (alias General Patton, alias Sheepskin) on the trip.
Regards, Bill K

From John Camerota....Thermite Weld at the end of its pour. WNYP RR near MP43.75. Rail is132RE. This is part of a larger track rehab project including tiereplacemt and surfacing as well. 8/22/2007, 1618HRS....... Westbound CSXT vans pass CP 5 in Lackawanna. In the near future thistrain may make pick ups and setouts here. Seneca Yard on the left isbeing regraded and reconfigured to serve the growing intermodal marketin the Buffalo Niagara area. 8/24/2007 1231HRS............. John C

From Randy Epstein....
I took this picture the other day on my layout. Both of the NYC Atlas GP40's were from Alex's collection, purchased from Paul's. I hope Alex would have approved.
Randy E
From Brad Peterson...
The new deck, or should I call it the log unloading platform. Through the sliding glass doors is the woodburning stove and this 1 1/2" gauge railroad will be used to get from the wood pile to the stove this winter.Looking west from the deck is the first 30' off the20' deck. This includes a small crossing for the kids to get from the pool to the deck without jumping over the tracks. Its the first 50 feet done in July.Turned around from the last shot is the 'S' curve to get across the gully next to the driveway. The wood pile will be in the driveway turnaround just beyond the sub roadbed. The tracks will enter the woods and head for the mailbox. Brad P........