Author Archives: James

About James

James specialises in digital literary heritage projects. He spends most of his time in front of a computer screen writing about life instead of living it. Therefore, do not trust a word he says.

The Importance of Economic Literacy

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illustration: Natalie Owen

illustration: Natalie Owen in LeftLion.

I’ve been harping on about the importance of literacy for ages but never in terms of economic literacy. As we’re all expected to work zero hour contracts perhaps it’s about time we had a zero hour mortgage…

First off, let’s have a few statistics about the miserable mess we’re in. I’m not talking about Brexit, Trident or the prospect of Big Sam becoming the next England manager. I’m talking about two four letter words that define our lives: work and home.

According to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) there were 10,732 repossessions of rented and mortgaged homes by bailiffs between January and March. Although this was down by 123 during the same period in 2015, it was up by 479 for the final quarter of 2015. But we should be grateful as The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) believe if repossessions continue to drop at the current rate we’ll be at our lowest annual numbers since 1982. Back when houses were affordable.

There are some reasons to be cheerful in terms of buying a property. The standard variable rate for a mortgage has plummeted and a rise in stamp duty has slightly halted property developers from  swallowing up entire streets. But this has been offset by the ridiculous increase in house prices that simply make it impossible for anyone to save up a deposit, let alone get a mortgage. I bought my first home when I was twenty-one and it was roughly 3 times my annual wage. My current home is 7 times my annual wage. The house is the same size.

This may explain why rents in both the social and private sectors have risen this year by around 7-9%. The landlords who’ve had their wings clipped by the Chancellor are passing this cost onto those who can’t afford to get onto the property ladder. According to the MoJ there were 10,636 evictions during the first quarter of the year. Expect this to increase, as the cap on housing allowance kicked in at the beginning of April. Then there’s the 7.2million, according to Churchill Insurance, who have moved back in with the parents because a relationship ended and are too poor to rent alone.

For those without the luxury of parents, there’s the streets. You always know when the privileged are in power because the number of people ‘begging’ zooms up. On an average walk across town I probably get stopped between 5-10 times for ‘a spare bit of change’. Expect more of this as hostels, Citizen’s Advice, and public sector support service staff increasingly begin to evaporate.

What we really need is change.

Speaking of which, banks have a lot of loose change at the moment. They’ve saved a bundle in wages by adopting the trend set by supermarkets and kitting out their stores with self-service machines. The unidentified item in the bagging area is staff. People are losing their jobs in every area of work as technology slowly takes hold. Ring up for a taxi and you’ll no longer be put through to a call centre of eternally bored operators. Instead there’s an efficient automated service that tells you where you want picking up from before you’ve even said a word. And you know things are seriously wrong when Waitrose gets in on the trend and dismisses checkout staff in favour of self-service machines.

Banks need to cut back on wages because they’ve finally been caught with their pants down. According to the CCP Research Foundation the top twenty banks paid out £252bn in conduct charges over the past five years, such as the six banks fined a record £4.3bn for rigging foreign exchange rates and Lloyds £4bn penalty for mis-selling of payment protection insurance. So why exactly did we bail out the banks again?

According to the Sutton Trust, the poorest British students will graduate with debts in excess of £50,000. (In the US, by contrast, where students study for an extra year, the average debt at a private for-profit university is £29,000.) Although state-sponsored loans are linked to future earnings, these debts are subject to inflation so the money keeps going up. Students who studied a decade or so ago will tell you that although their debts were a lot cheaper, the loans have been sold off to debt agencies, despite the promise that they wouldn’t be, and now fear earning a penny above a certain threshold because it will trigger larger repayments.

For those of us fortunate enough to have a job there is the constant restructuring of departments and the shoehorning of two jobs into one, and for an added bonus, with reduced hours. Some of us have had our wages frozen for so long we have to put gloves on when we draw money out the bank. We’re told we should be grateful that we’ve got a job, and expected to smile when we receive the ‘Happy Friday’ email wishing us the very best for the weekend and remembering not to be late back in on Monday.

For adolescents who’ve skipped F.E. there’s the temp agencies where you’re guaranteed the minimum of work for the minimum amount of money. One lad I spoke to told me he had to drive to Grimsby to do a two hour shift and he wasn’t paid for his petrol or the four hours the round trip took. He had to do it because if he refused they wouldn’t consider him for other work. Work left him out of pocket. Of course this is completely illegal but it goes on all the time. ‘Calm down and carry on’ is the expression. This translates as ‘Shut up and do as you’re told’.

Zero hours contracts are the reality for most of us now. University lecturers are paid by the term and join an expendable workforce who can be got rid of with the flicker of an eyebrow. And this is where the Big Society steps in. The volunteers who run our libraries. The volunteers who cut down the forests. The volunteers who write for free for magazines because they have the deluded idea they can make a difference. So in some respects we’ve been complicit.

All of which finally gets me to my point. If we are expected to live flexibly in a big society on zero hours contracts, isn’t it time we had a more flexible mortgage, a ‘zero-hours’ mortgage, to reflect the reality of our lives?

A zero-hours mortgage would work exactly like a zero-hours contract. If there’s no work, there’s no mortgage payment. Simple. It’s not your fault that you’re losing your job in the call centre to the latest Siri. If you do work a few hours then you pay a proportionate payment. Yes, calculating this could be tedious but isn’t that better than repossessing a home and putting a family out on the street, which is ultimately more costly for society?

A university lecturer told me recently that universities need to throw out all of their liberal newspapers and stock the Financial Times. He said that’s where the power is, in the things people don’t understand. The things that are deliberately made complicated. For this reason he believes economics should be at the heart of everything that it is taught, no matter what the discipline. It’s for this reason that I’ve joined a reading group where we are slowly working our way through Karl Marx’s Capital Volume One, reading one hundred pages per week. It’s complicated, but far more humorous and literary than I would have imagined. I don’t believe in communism, and I certainly don’t believe in capitalism in its current manifestation. All I know is that something isn’t right at the moment and the system needs a bit of tinkering. Hopefully this book group – comprised of PhD students, unemployed, artists etc – and from Manchester, Mansfield and other places not necessarily beginning with M will help me figure it out.

The above article was originally published in the August issue of LeftLion magazine and The Axiological Perspective.

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Ray Gosling: His Life, Legacy and Archive

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You need to be at the National Videogame Archive on 21 July and this is why…

Although Ray Gosling was born in Northampton and spent a large chunk of his life setting up youth clubs in Leicester, his heart was in Nottingham. ‘It’s a rough old city’ he once told me during a three year interview ‘and I absolutely love it’.

Gosling produced over 1000 radio documentaries and 100 television broadcasts in a career that spanned half a century or so. All of which was done in a provincial accent, helping to break down the boundaries created by the received pronunciation of the BBC. He epitomised Raymond Williams’ philosophy that ‘culture is ordinary’ by celebrating the everyday lives of the streets he walked through. His real skill was never mocking his subjects, no matter how bizarre or eccentric, and instead brought out the human in the man who collected garden gnomes and the people who loved their sheds. In his latter years he became the subject of his documentaries, describing the difficulties of growing old and facing bankruptcy. But for many of us in Nottingham he’s the community activist who helped St. Ann’s avoid getting entirely pummelled by City planners.

Ray was a hoarder and saved absolutely everything. But during his bankruptcy he dumped everything in a skip. Fortunately John Goodridge was on hand to salvage this and his archives now live in the Mary Ann Evans building at Nottingham Trent University’s Clifton campus. The archives were first sorted out by Colin Haynes and Ray’s sister Juliet. For the past year or so Clare Tebbutts, a research assistant at NTU, has lovingly continued the archiving.

Knowing the nature of Ray’s character – he was a self-proclaimed anarchist among other things – I doubt he would be very happy to know his life’s work was housed in an academic institution. But if NTU hadn’t have intervened his work would be on a rubbish dump somewhere. It’s with this in mind that NTU are hosting an evening at the National Video Game Arcade to celebrate the archives. It is vital that absolutely everybody that knew Ray turns up. Not just to pay homage and celebrate his incredible life, but to ensure that you have a say in how his archives are made more accessible.

Ray Gosling featured in Issue 12 of Dawn of the Unread where he applied his community activism to the afterlife...

Ray Gosling featured in Issue 12 of Dawn of the Unread where he applied his community activism to the afterlife…

I would personally like to see some of them go on tour, perhaps between his last three homes of Nottingham, Manchester and London. Or at the very least in public spaces. St. Ann’s Library would be an obvious choice, as would Nottingham Writers’ Studio. Then there’s those vacant spaces in the recently refurbished Sneinton Market…

Nottingham City of Literature appoint an executive director on 1 September so it will be interesting to see how s/he approaches one of our most valued cultural assets. For what it is worth I have a suggestion: How about a Ray Gosling Bursary? Filmmakers, artists, writers and activists could take a theme from the archives and create a new response. This is how you create legacy, and this is how you create opportunities. Not even a contrarian like Ray could argue with that.

Ray Gosling: His Life, Legacy and Archive is at The National Videogame Arcade – 24-32 Carlton Street – NG1 1NN Nottingham. Get EventBrite tickets here.

This article was originally published on LeftLion on 8 July 2016