So the Chinese are buying up Sheffield. Tell me economic nationalists where's the outcry?

****

You'll all recall the outcry - much of it pig-ignorant - over the sale of ARM Holdings to a Japanese company. Between people blaming Brexit and a veritiable torrent of slightly leftish economic nationalism we were told that this was a terrible foreign take over. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't (I lean towards the latter - after all I'd be cheering on a British business buying a Japanese company why not the reverse).

What I don't understand it the selective nature of this economic nationalism. I've not picked up anything like the same sort of negative response to this:

In the biggest Chinese investment outside London, Sheffield city council announced that an initial £220m would pay for four or five city centre projects over the next three years and create “hundreds if not thousands” of jobs in south Yorkshire.

The partnership is between Sheffield city council and Sichuan Guodong Construction Group, one of the biggest firms in China’s south-western Sichuan province.

What, dear reader, is the difference between a massive Chinese conglomerate buying up big chunks of Sheffield city centre and the (admittedly larger) inward investment deal that was the ARM takeover? Or for that matter the perennial whining and whimpering about foreign investment in London property? I mean, if you're going to be an economic nationalist - adopt the daft Will Hutton view of industry - then, for heaven's sake, be a consistent economic nationalist.

What we have here is a massive Chinese investment in UK property - celebrated by The Guardian. Just the sort of thing the same paper was railing against a short while ago:

Foreign buyers now own close to 10% of the UK’s housing stock, he claims, and, unchecked, will gobble up much more, increasingly in Manchester, Edinburgh and other regional cities. With the global financial elite numbering at least 15 million, “increasing housing supply can never bring down prices, no matter how much public land and green belt is turned into flats, because the demand for investment returns is almost infinite.”

Thes epeople really do need to make their minds up. Just because this is a snuggly deal between a Labour Council and a big Chinese corporation (with all the lack of accountability that goes with this sort of deal) doesn't make it special or better - it's just as much foreigners buying up British assets as the ARM deal or a thousand other mergers, property investments and stock purchases. All in all a reminder that economic nationalism is stupid.

.....

More nonsense about urban farming...

****
Urban farming, some believe, is the solution to all our problems. Rather than shifting food from distant locations to the urban communities where we live, we farm the corners, roundabouts and gardens and cultivate diused land so as to feed ourselves. It's all terribly jolly and green, typified by the Incredible Edible programme in Todmorden. I love it, the randomness, the cheeky nature of swooping on a little patch of urban green and seeding it with herbs is great.

However, when people start taking this stuff seriously they start talking nonsense. Here's a report from some professors at Sheffield University:

THE COUNTRY may only have 100 harvests left because of intensive over farming unless drastic action is taken, according to university scientists

They say the problem has depleted the soil of the nutrients needed to grow crops and suggest converting parts of the UK’s towns and cities into new farmyards.

Scientists from Sheffield University warn that a lack of bio-diversity is causing a dramatic fall in the country ‘s wildlife populations.

A study by Dr Jill Edmondson has also found that soils under Britain’s allotments are significantly healthier than soils that have been intensively farmed.

Now I'm going to take the scientists' information at face value - it really isn't surprising that the soil in allotments, lovingly and intensively managed by the hobby horticulturalist, is better than the soil on the typical commercial farm. But that really doesn't make it either sensible of viable to replace the production from farmland with production from gardens or allotments. More significantly, yields from commercial farming as vastly higher than yields from hobby farming. Despite stagnant yields in some crops, there's not much evidence to suggest that the dire predictions from the Sheffield University team will come to pass.

However there's another important point to be made here which is about land use and land values. We know that urban and rural land values are massively different. According to Savills the average value for farmland in Great Britain is £9,750 per acre whereas residential development land can be values at £900,000 per acre of higher. Quite obviously there is no way in which the value of the land for other uses (housing, parkland, highway, commercial or industrial) can be substituted for agricultural use and for the farmer to be able to recover his outlay from the profits generated by growing stuff.

As one comment on urban agriculture put it:

What today’s enthusiastic locavores ultimately fail to understand is that their “innovative” ideas are not only up against the Monsantos of this world, but also in a direct collision course with regional advantages for certain types of food production, economies of scale of various kinds in all lines of work and the fact that pretty much anything they can achieve in urban environments can be replicated at lower costs in the countryside. These basic realities defeated sophisticated local food production systems in the past and will do so again in the foreseeable future.

While no one argues against the notion that our modern food production system can be improved, and entrepreneurs are always searching how to do so, the desire to make urban agricultural a viable commercial reality distracts from more serious issues such as international trade barriers and counterproductive domestic agricultural subsidies. The sooner well-intentioned activists understand these realities, the better. 

The right response is to work on either protecting biodiversity and soil quality in intensive agriculture or at opening up more land (not just in the UK, America and Europe but in Africa and Asia) to productive agricultural uses. Suggesting that Sheffield's twee Love Square - or any similar sort of project - is any kind of solution to food supply challenges is arrant nonsense. But it's so much more fun to play at farmer in our spare time and to prattle on about urban food production.

Hardly a day passes without some further argument support intensification and densification within urban communities. It's as if that science fiction image of cities captured in biodomes, self-sufficient and shiny but surrounded by wilderness, has become the real ambition of the green movement. What they miss is that the image was always a convenient plot structure rather than a painting of a real future, a way for the writer to explore the logical conclusions - good and bad - of urban living.

The sad part of this green myth-making is the seriousness with which some folk treat it - they seem unconnected to economic reality as they pretend their sweet world of sustainable towns peopled by walking, cycling allotment owners is anything but a greenwashed version of subsistance agriculture - the very form of poverty that we escaped from by moving to cities and creating the modern capitalist society.

....

What to do next? Is Sheffield City Council making the wrong decision?

****

Town and City centre developments are looking pretty fragile as business propositions, us folk in Bradford still sit, fingers crossed, awaiting action from Westfield over the Broadway site. And meanwhile in Sheffield:

Developer Hammerson today announced it was pulling out of long-awaited plans for a new retail quarter in Sheffield.

 The company said it has agreed with Sheffield City Council that it "would end its development agreement" on proposals for the Sevenstone scheme.

The scheme - just cracking open the egg when I was in Sheffield doing my Masters - has been stalled since 2008 "because of the recession" (no mention of the longer-term trends in retail here). It seems to me that this decision from Hammerson reflects the reality of retail investment - other than in exceptional circumstances it's simply not viable right now.

However, Sheffield City Council, wedded to the 'shiny regeneration' model like most big city councils has this to say:

Leigh Bramall, the city council’s cabinet member for business, skills and development, said the authority was still committed to developing Sevenstone.

He said: "The people of Sheffield have waited long enough for a new retail quarter.

"We have the land assembled, utilities in place, have established the level of funding available, and methodology to inject the funding to undertake supporting public works.

"We have confirmed a scheme is viable and so we will now be seeking a new development partner to move the project forward in the shortest time possible."

I wish the city luck with this approach and, knowing the politics and institutional myopia that so restricts regeneration, hope they find a new development partner.

My question is this. If Hammerson - not exactly a small or insignificant developer - can't make the development stack up with an anchor like John Lewis and the promise of £45 million in public subsidy, what makes the Council think another developer will fill the void?

Perhaps a different approach would help us all rethink the regeneration of City centres?

....

Election 2010: Seats to Watch #3: Will the Lib Dems break through in those Northern Cities?

***

I’ve looked at two sets of Conservative target seats – in the coalfields and in what I called “inner-outer” London. This set of seats is of Liberal Democrat targets in the North of England – where Labour is defending.

For a long while the Liberal Democrats have had a strong powerbase in Northern cities – at present they control Liverpool, Sheffield, Hull and Newcastle. However, this strength has never translated into success at General Elections. The old Liberal Party got David Alton elected in Liverpool and the party have won Manchester Withington, Sheffield Hallam and Leeds North West. A key test for the Liberal Democrats at the forthcoming election is whether they can translate their local success into the election of MPs.

Liverpool Wavertree will be a seat with a lot of attention – at least judging by the 500+ comments on the UK Polling Report thread on the seat! Labour’s Jane Kennedy held the seat in 2005 but is retiring. Labour’s candidate is from London and with boundary changes the nominal majority is just 3,038 requiring a swing of under 4.5% for the Lib Dems to make the gain. With 54% of the vote in the 2008 local elections they really ought to! Expect a campaign laden with scouse vitriol from all sides (plus a little borderline racism wrapped up as anti-Zionism directed at Labour’s Luciana Berger).

Oldham East & Saddleworth is held for Labour by Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister – boundary changes favour labour and the nominal majority is 4,087 requiring a swing of 5%. The seat stretches from Oldham’s multiethnic inner suburbs out onto the attractive South Pennine moorlands – factors that meant the old Littleborough & Saddleworth seat was a Tory seat in the 1980s. Will be a close run thing with Lib Dem success depending on how much they can squeeze the substantial Tory vote – local elections suggest win with the Lib Dems on 52% and labour in 3rd with just 20%.

The City of Durham must be right at the top of Liberal Democrat expectations. Although held by labour since the 1930s (like most of the North’s mining seats) the majority is just 3,274 requiring a swing of just 3.7% for a Lib Dem gain). Local elections show the Lib Dems building powerful position with 41% of the vote and 15 of the 22 councillors but there’s no Tory vote to squeeze and Labour has a reliable bedrock of support.

With Nick Clegg looking pretty safe in Hallam, the Liberal Democrats can direct their efforts to Sheffield Central where they have an outside chance of winning especially since former Sports Minister, Richard Caborn is standing down. With boundary changes the notional result is 4,807 requiring an 8% swing. Local election results put the Lib Dems on 42% to Labour’s 30% but an active Green campaign may not do Paul Scriven the council leader any favours.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne North is the most marginal of the City’s seats (just ahead of Chief Whip, Nick Brown’s East) and is very much a long shot for the Liberal Democrats. The notional majority is some 6,744 and even with current MP Doug Henderson retiring it’s a tough call for the Lib Dems. However, their local government performances suggest a strong chance (52% of the vote in 2008 and all but two councillors). However, the Labour machine will be working hard here and it will not be the straightforward gain it seems like on paper.

With a weaker Labour Party and voters out to punish them this may be the year when the Liberal Democrats do break through in the urban North – these aren’t the only places there’s also Bradford East, Burnley and Hull West & Hessle where the party fancies its chances.

...