(EN) London's economic boom leaves rest of Britain behind

London's economic boom leaves rest of Britain behind

Exclusive: Guardian analysis highlighting regional imbalance raises troubling questions about who is enjoying UK's recovery

London and the south-east’s share of growth in output has soared since 2007 while every other region except Scotland has declined. Photograph: Nicholas Bailey/Rex

London's economy is doing even better after the banking crash than during the bubble – while nearly every other part of the UK has seen its economy shrink by comparison. Exclusive findings published by the Guardian show that London and the south-east are racing away from the rest of the UK at a pace that would have seemed almost incredible at the height of the financial panic.
During the boom from 1997 to 2006, London and the south-east was responsible for 37% of the UK's growth in output. Since the crash of 2007, however, their share has rocketed to 48%. Every other nation and region – with the exception of Scotland – has suffered relative decline over the same period. The upshot is about a quarter of the population is responsible for half of the UK's growth, leaving the remaining three-quarters of Britons to share the rest.
The research also shows that the UK's highest-earners have become relatively more prosperous after the crash, while many on middle incomes are being squeezed hard. In austerity Britain, the top 20% of earning households are enjoying 37.5% of all Britain's income growth, even after accounting for taxes and benefits.
These findings will embarrass the government, especially as they come shortly before the release of the latest GDP figures on Friday. Ministers are poised to celebrate news that the economy is at last enjoying strong growth, and may even have racked up its best quarter in 13 years. But the Guardian's analysis raises questions about who is enjoying Britain's growth and how sustainable it is, and will fuel the debate over who should bear the burden for an economic crisis that began in the Square Mile.
The Guardian's analysis is based on official measures of gross value added, often used to assess regional and industrial performance, and was conducted by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at Manchester University.
The findings suggests that David Cameron has failed to meet some of his most important promises: on making Britain's economy less lopsided; on ensuring that the pain from its cuts would be fairly shared out; and that banks would lend more to small businesses.
In his first major speech as prime minister, Cameron described Britain as "more and more unbalanced, with our fortunes hitched to a few industries in one corner of the country". Analysis of the statistics shows that regional imbalance has grown sharply since the crash.
The chancellor, George Osborne, has repeatedly claimed that "we're all in this together". But while the highest-earning 20% of households have done well, and the fortunes of the bottom 20% have been boosted by the minimum wage, most of the rest – the so-called squeezed middle – have seen their incomes stretched.
UK lending by financial institutions Photograph: Guardian Osborne and the business secretary, Vince Cable, have exhorted banks to lend more to small businesses and to manufacturing. The Guardian's analysis of the Bank of England's own lending figures shows that the share of loans to manufacturers and other real businesses have fallen since the crash. In the decade to 2007, manufacturing and other "productive businesses" took 9.7% of all bank loans. From 2008 to 2012, however, that plummeted to just 5.9%. That compares with the 40% of bank loans to other financial institutions and the 52% of credit extended to individuals, much of which would have been used for mortgages.
In 2010, Cameron described Britain's economy as "unsustainable, unstable, unfair and, frankly, uninspiring", and said that transforming it would be his first priority. Three years on, these figures suggest no such transformation has taken place. Indeed, some of the coalition's policies have been criticised for only Britain's regional and social inqualities.
Infrastructure projects such as the Olympics and the Channel tunnel rail link have seen a huge amount of public spending flowing into London. Last year, the construction skills industry training board forecast that Greater London would receive more economic-development spending than than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together.

This has sat alongside policies aimed at making credit cheaper and easier, which have had the effect of making owners of homes and other assets better off. This month, Nigel Wilson, the chief executive of Legal and General, described the £375bn quantitative easing programme as "a policy designed by the rich for the rich".

Share of regional GVA growth Photograph: Guardian "Since the crash, London and the south-east have continued to pull away from the rest of the national economy. The wedge between them and the rest of Britain has been driven in deeper," said Adam Leaver at the Manchester Business School, and a member of Cresc. The academic team's work is drawn on the latest GVA (gross value added) figures, which end in 2011, but there are indications that the divide has only grown since.
This week, a Rightmove survey showed house prices jumping 10% in London in just on

(ES) BILINGÜISMO, ¿VENTAJA O INCONVENIENTE?

18-10-2013

BILINGÜISMO, ¿VENTAJA O INCONVENIENTE?

Tener la capacidad de comunicarse en dos idiomas también genera inconvenientes. Así lo ha demostrado el proyecto científico Consolider Brainglot que, desde hace seis años, ha estado centrado en el análisis de la base neurocientífica del bilingüismo.

La profesora Núria Sebastián, que forma parte de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra, ha sido la encargada de dirigir este revelador proyecto. Sin embargo, también ha podido contar con la ayuda de cien investigadores pertenecientes a varias universidades españolas.

Durante el desarrollo de esta investigación, cuyos resultados fueron expuestos en el IV Workshop on Bilingualism and Cognitive Neurosciencie, han sido examinados los mecanismos de conocimiento neurológico que posibilitan el aprendizaje de lenguajes diferentes.

Las aptitudes que el bilingüismo confiere a las personas, según el proyecto Consolider Brainglot, son las siguientes: disposición para utilizar un mayor número de áreas cerebrales y mayor adaptación frente a los cambios que una persona monolingüe.

Sin embargo, no todo son ventajas para el bilingüismo. Este análisis ha servido también para descubrir que aquellas personas bilingües, que lo sean desde pequeñas, presentan una menor eficacia en el procesamiento de información. Esto significa que la persona bilingüe está continuamente eligiendo en qué idioma habla y este acto, a la hora de expresarse, contribuye a entorpecer la emisión de las palabras.

Asimismo, esta investigación ha incluido otro aspecto que plantea una duda determinada: ¿por qué la dificultad para aprender un segundo idioma aumenta en edades avanzadas? La respuesta a esta pregunta se resuelve de modo sencillo: porque la primera lengua aprendida ha llenado un espacio prioritario en el cerebro y, como consecuencia, deja menos espacio para el nuevo idioma.

Quizá resulte evidente, tras conocer estos resultados, que también las cosas buenas pueden contener una parte negativa. No obstante, a pesar de cualquier inconveniente que pueda acarrear, el aprendizaje de idiomas representa un beneficio en sí al que no debería renunciarse.

(ES) LA VERDAD SOBRE LA POLÍTICA ESPAÑOLA

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(EN) Spain's cowardly purge of the journalists who ask difficult questions

Spain's cowardly purge of the journalists who ask difficult questions

The dismissal of journalists at Spain's state-funded broadcaster RTVE shows how Mariano Rajoy's government has lost the plot

Spain's prime minister Mariano Rajoy is convinced that government's unpopularity 'is the state media's fault, staffed as it is with unsympathetic journos who keep talking about cutbacks and unemployment.' Photograph: Javier Soriano/AFP/Getty Images

"No news is good news", the old dictum goes. But someone should explain to Mariano Rajoy, Spain's prime minister, that it only qualifies as good news if there really is no news. This doesn't mean firing as many journalists as you can. Even if you sack almost everybody from TV and radio, as will soon be the case if the purge of Spanish public-sector broadcasting is to continue, there will still be news, and that news will presumably be just as bad as it has been up until now. Getting a new cohort of faithful journalists to suppress or distort the facts won't turn it into good news; it will turn it into what is technically known as "lies".
Ana Pastor, Xabier Fortes, Juan Ramón Lucas, Fran Llorente … the casualty list from the Spanish national broadcaster (RTVE) reads like a competition for the most popular journalist in the country. But as the spin doctors would put it, state broadcasting in Spain has never been about the popularity of the channel, it's about the popularity of the government. And with polls already indicating a 16% fall in support since March, this government seems to be running low on that.
And yet to Rajoy it's simply unbelievable that his austerity policies – harsh, unpopular and, what is probably worse, ineffective – may have anything to do with the quick erosion of his political capital. He and his advisers are convinced that it is the national broadcaster's fault, staffed as it is with unsympathetic journalists who keep talking about cutbacks and unemployment. That the government's reaction has been to make them unemployed and to cut back on RTVE budgets is an irony that seems to have escaped ministers.
Purges are not news at RTVE. But in 2006, at least, a decision was made to put an end to this Tony Soprano-like approach to human resources. A new law was passed that required a two-thirds parliamentary majority for key appointments in RTVE. The government has seen it as a matter of the utmost urgency to scrap that law and return to the good old vendetta system. That, rather than the personal fate of a particular number of news anchors, is what is worrying, because this Putin-esque "changing the rules of the game as you go" game is quickly becoming the government's only firm policy. It has also tried to change the way in which judges are selected, and is toying with the idea of touching up the electoral law, without seeking any consensus with the rest of political forces, in order to tip the scales in its favour in an upcoming regional election.
But then there's also the way in which journalism is understood, or misunderstood, in Spain. Maybe the sacked journalists are left-leaning or progressive. So what? While everybody expects reporters working for private media organisations to be biased to the point of militancy (as they are), those working for the state media are not supposed to have any views at all. Actually, the opposite is true: all views should be represented. That's the point of having a public media – those who lose elections pay taxes too.
Spain has always struggled with impartiality and objectivity. Impartiality – never taking sides – is neither possible nor desirable in journalism. Objectivity is what is needed, and that means simply handling the raw data with care and with honesty.
That is why it's interesting that most of those who have been dismissed are interviewers, a job that only makes sense when the journalist takes the opposing side. Politicians in Spain are not used to being contradicted, or even pressed to answer a question. They expect the interviewer to nod sheepishly while they deliver their speech, and most do. The newly jobless represented a new trend in Spanish political journalism: they asked real questions to our political leaders. That's why they were popular. And that's why the government, increasingly, is not.

(EN) Libertad de prensa en España 0

(EN) Old English

English has changed a lot in the last several hundred years, and there are many words once used that we would no longer recognize today. For whatever reason, we started pronouncing them differently, or stopped using them entirely, and they became obsolete. There are some old words, however, that are nearly obsolete, but we still recognize because they were lucky enough to get stuck in set phrases that have lasted across the centuries. Here are 12 lucky words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms.

1. wend

You rarely see a "wend" without a "way." You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. "Wend" was just another word for "go" in Old English. The past tense of "wend" was "went" and the past tense of "go" was "gaed." People used both until the 15th century, when "go" became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where "went" hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.

2. deserts

The "desert" from the phrase "just deserts" is not the dry and sandy kind, nor the sweet post-dinner kind. It comes from an Old French word for "deserve," and it was used in English from the 13th century to mean "that which is deserved." When you get your just deserts, you get your due. In some cases, that may mean you also get dessert, a word that comes from a later French borrowing.

3. eke

If we see "eke" at all these days, it's when we "eke out" a living, but it comes from an old verb meaning to add, supplement, or grow. It's the same word that gave us "eke-name" for "additional name," which later, through misanalysis of "an eke-name" became "nickname."

4. sleight

"Sleight of hand" is one tricky phrase. "Sleight" is often miswritten as "slight" and for good reason. Not only does the expression convey an image of light, nimble fingers, which fits well with the smallness implied by "slight," but an alternate expression for the concept is "legerdemain," from the French léger de main," literally, "light of hand." "Sleight" comes from a different source, a Middle English word meaning "cunning" or "trickery." It's a wily little word that lives up to its name.

5. dint

"Dint" comes from the oldest of Old English where it originally referred to a blow struck with a sword or other weapon. It came to stand for the whole idea of subduing by force, and is now fossilized in our expression "by dint of X" where X can stand for your charisma, hard work, smarts, or anything you can use to accomplish something else.

6. roughshod

Nowadays we see this word in the expression "to run/ride roughshod" over somebody or something, meaning to tyrannize or treat harshly. It came about as a way to describe the 17th century version of snow tires. A "rough-shod" horse had its shoes attached with protruding nail heads in order to get a better grip on slippery roads. It was great for keeping the horse on its feet, but not so great for anyone the horse might step on.

7. fro

The "fro" in "to and fro" is a fossilized remnant of a Northern English or Scottish way of pronouncing "from." It was also part of other expressions that didn't stick around, like "fro and till," "to do fro" (to remove), and "of or fro" (for or against).

8. hue

The "hue" of "hue and cry," the expression for the noisy clamor of a crowd, is not the same "hue" as the term we use for color. The color one comes from the Old English word híew, for "appearance." This hue comes from the Old French hu or heu, which was basically an onomatopoeia, like "hoot."

9. kith

The "kith" part of "kith and kin" came from an Old English word referring to knowledge or acquaintance. It also stood for native land or country, the place you were most familiar with. The expression "kith and kin" originally meant your country and your family, but later came to have the wider sense of friends and family.

10. lurch

When you leave someone "in the lurch," you leave them in a jam, in a difficult position. But while getting left in the lurch may leave you staggering around and feeling off-balance, the "lurch" in this expression has a different origin than the staggery one. The balance-related lurch comes from nautical vocabulary, while the lurch you get left in comes from an old French backgammon-style game called lourche. Lurch became a general term for the situation of beating your opponent by a huge score. By extension it came to stand for the state of getting the better of someone or cheating them.

11. umbrage

"Umbrage" comes from the Old French ombrage (shade, shadow), and it was once used to talk about actual shade from the sun. It took on various figurative meanings having to do with doubt and suspicion or the giving and taking of offense. To give umbrage was to offend someone, to "throw shade." However, these days when we see the term "umbrage" at all, it is more likely to be because someone is taking, rather than giving it.

12. shrift

We might not know what a shrift is anymore, but we know we don't want to get a short one. "Shrift" was a word for a confession, something it seems we might want to keep short, or a penance imposed by a priest, something we would definitely want to keep short. But the phrase "short shrift" came from the practice of allowing a little time for the condemned to make a confession before being executed. So in that context, shorter was not better.