EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

        

 

In praise of … Little Imber on the Down

Cheesewring and Swarkeston, Grimspound and Frismersk, Dishley, Nosely and Fordebottle-in-Furness: little or nothing remains of such villages now

 
Cheesewring and Swarkeston, Grimspound and Frismersk, Dishley, Nosely and Fordebottle-in-Furness: little or nothing remains of such villages now. Some failed because their populations drifted away; others were swallowed whole by the sea or disappeared under reservoirs. Still others – Tottington, West Tofts (with its fine Pugin church) and Stanford in the Brecklands, Tyneham in Dorset, and Imber at the lonely heart of Salisbury Plain – were requisitioned in the second world war. The Norfolk training area remains closed to the general public, but Tyneham and Imber are occasionally opened for public inspection, and will be today. At Imber the Churches Conservation Trust has taken over the church of St Giles and reroofed it, and beyond you can wander the shattered streets and see the remains of the pub and some of the houses where families lived in tranquillity until on 1 November 1943 they were given 47 days to clear out of the village. It's possible that Imber might have died anyway: its population had fallen over the previous century from over 400 to little more than 100. Or it might have been discovered by city dwellers in search of country retreats, in which case it would no longer have been the old Imber. Its fame has spread over the years of public admission. Some 2,000 people came when the gates were opened last autumn. Best perhaps to be there this evening or at first light tomorrow when the crowds have dispersed and there ought to be a better sense of the village that was.

Coalition politics: Of fissures and fractures

What's happening now hardly reflects the civilised 'agreement to disagree' that had been planned

With an insouciance worthy of Kenneth Clarke, William Hague, yesterday surveying the skirmishes breaking out across coalition territory, declared himself untroubled. Feelings always ran high during campaigns, he said. So they do; and it was always foreseen that David Cameron and Nick Clegg would be taking opposing sides in the referendum on the alternative vote. But what's happening now hardly reflects the civilised "agreement to disagree" that had been planned. Condemning the "no" campaign for "lies, misinformation and deceit", Mr Clegg made it clear to yesterday's Independent on Sunday that he blamed the party led by David Cameron for this dirty work. True, he refrained from accusing Conservative co-chairman, Baroness Warsi, of using the tactics of Goebbels, but his colleague Chris Huhne had done that for him. And the falling out is by no means confined to AV. Hardly had Mr Clegg declared his dedication to the cause of social mobility than David Cameron appeared to wave it away.

The issue here was a limited one – the recruitment of interns from a narrow, convenient pool – but it is clearly wounding for Mr Clegg when his nominal comrade is so off-hand about one of his cherished ambitions. Unfeeling words at such moments tend to be remembered. "I see all this stuff about how we are somehow mates," he pointedly observed. "We are not." The mood may lift once the voting on 5 May is over; but the fond fraternity of the Cameron-Clegg relationship a year ago, when the coalition was formed, is unlikely to be restored.

Some of this reflects the tensions in two other coalitions. All political parties are to some extent coalitions, which in times of stress are likely to buckle. Today's Conservatives are an uneasy alliance of old-fashioned fundamentalists with the kind of more liberal, compassionate Conservatism initially trailed as the Cameron brand. Many Tories, in and out of parliament, feel the Liberal Democrats are far too influential in the coalition. David Cameron's Telegraph interviewer on Saturday was raising the anxieties of those in the party who think their leader is selling true Conservatism short. His blithe dismissal of Mr Clegg's concerns about social mobility fitted this context. Significantly, too, he chose as the highlight of his year the afternoon when he entertained that spirit of unmitigated Conservative government, Margaret Thatcher, to tea. So he won't have welcomed Mr Clegg's claim yesterday that "if you were a political expert from Mars... you would conclude that this is, objectively speaking, a quintessentially Liberal government".

And that leads directly on to the state of another uneasy coalition: the Liberal Democrat party. This weekend's other ructions have tended to overshadow Vince Cable's interview with Saturday's Guardian; yet what he said was incendiary too. Liberal Democrats sometimes talk of electoral reform as if it were something virtuous in a purely philosophical sense, regardless of party advantage. But here was Mr Cable making the case in terms of a coveted outcome: as a way of bringing together Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens in a left-of-centre government, condemning the Tories to opposition. The result would be an era of "progressive government": the very substance that his leader claims to be delivering in partnership with the Tories. You don't have to be a political expert from Mars to suspect that these are hardly the words of a man for whom the present arrangements constitute "a quintessentially Liberal government".

The 20th century history of peacetime coalitions in Britain suggest that the greatest strain, and the greatest cost, falls on the party that makes up the numbers. Should the "rightwing elite, the rightwing clique", whom the Lib Dem leader has located as the heart of the "no" camp prevail in 10 days' time, the fractures of the past two weeks will be even harder to mend.

 

British manufacturing: Reality bites

The boss of Vauxhall pointed out in an interview yesterday that talk of a UK revival in car-making is fanciful

Nick Reilly deserves hearty congratulations for saying the politically unsayable. The boss of Vauxhall pointed out in an interview yesterday that talk of a revival in British car-making is fanciful. His own company, as well as most other big household names in the industry, struggled to find British producers capable of making suitable parts at scale. The result, he noted, was that UK automakers had to buy lots of foreign-made components, with all the attendant currency risk, shipping costs and much longer turnaround times. "It's not enough to have Nissan, Toyota, Vauxhall manufacturing the products," he said. "We'll never be able to compete with another country where the suppliers are surrounding the car plants."

To many, Mr Reilly's comments will seem common sense – having to go abroad for many, or even most, of your parts is slower and more expensive. But in Westminster they are close to heresy. Compare this view of a hollowed-out industry from a senior practitioner (Mr Reilly is the president of General Motors in Europe) with the vision of a manufacturing renaissance propounded by ministers. "A new economy might be able to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old," promised Nick Clegg in a speech made in February. "The new jobs, the new products, the new ideas that will lift us up will be born in the factories," David Cameron told the CBI last autumn.

The truth is that all parties have colluded in the wilful neglect of manufacturing industry over the past three decades. The result in many cases is that British supply chains – where a component manufacturer makes parts for another firm to put into a finished product, whether that be a car or a vacuum cleaner – are broken. The Manufacturers' Organisation point out that 96% of a JCB digger was made in Britain in 1979; by 2010, that proportion had fallen to 36%.

Point this out and, as Mr Reilly will soon find for himself, you get drowned in a wave of fatalism. You cannot beat cheap Chinese competition, runs the argument. Well, yes and no: German manufacturers also buy foreign parts – but their imported proportion of what is known in the jargon as intermediate purchases is much lower: around 25% versus about 50% in the UK. Following the German example here would require British frontbenchers to do more than talk up manufacturing, or scatter a few million around. The government should direct the state-owned banks to lend more at lower rates to key sectors, and give tax relief to firms that produce and employ staff in the UK. Ministers can either choose to heed manufacturers' warnings now – or face the prospect that there not be an equivalent of Mr Reilly in a few years' time.