Broke

Broke is a play by the very talented Paper Birds. It was very well received at the Edinburgh Fringe, I was lucky enough to see it at Lincoln Drill Hall.

It explores debt, how it builds and then its legacy. The writers saw a point of origin in the 1980's with Mrs Thatcher's attack on working communities and her encouragement to everyone to become middle class. It is middle class aspiration where the driver for ever increasing borrowing can be found.

They explore individual and government debt side by side.

It is frightening just how easy it is for someone, making their way through life, to gather around them the millstone of debt, and even more chilling to see just how hard it is to get out.

Perhaps more scary is their analysis of government and how a consumer economy can only function with ever increasing debt. It is the emperor's new clothes, it only works until some is brave enough to blow the whistle.

For me, the play brought back ideas contained in my blogs from 2009 when I was writing Broken Bonds, a novel about the banking crisis and its impact. My more recent blogs are about Magna Carta and the abuse of power. I wonder, was Mrs Thatcher's push for deregulation, which I still see as the heart of the problem, an almighty abuse of power?

Bad old ways?

The Observer (14 June) offered in its leader a stark warning to the city and those concrned with its governance that it must not be allowed to slip back into its bad old ways. I am probably not the only person who would wish to take issue with the word old; the bad ways were new, the bad ways were post big bang, the bad ways emerged because light touch regulation allowed them to. A most telling comment was that the old (I would say new) way of doing things made some people very rich.'

Vested interests are thus very strong and very powerful. In exactly the same way as it was not in the interests of the city to say the emperor had no clothes, neither is it in their interests to question the substance of what might look like the green shoots of recovery. Anything which shows that the city is working is good news.

The tragedy is that just when strong government is need, we are having to live with a lame duck. It is sadder still that when a change in government does come, the forces which demand a strong performance from the city will both be vocal and may well be basking in a recovery of their own making.