"The Guardian's senior economics commentator kicks off a new series looking at the challenges facing the London suburb where he grew up – and the ideas that might offer a radical fix"
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| "Link to the web site, me old cock-sparrow" |
"How do you fix a broken economy? No bigger question faces post-crash Britain. Yet after six years of pledges of virtue – of borrowing less, exporting more, greater investment, factories not banks – the Westminster classes have led us back to their favourite diversion: blowing hard into a balloon marked 'house prices'.
"Meanwhile, the existential problems of how Britain pays its way in the world, and how its people earn a decent living, without depending on credit or welfare, go ignored. Indeed, the most intriguing answer I've seen lies not in the beartraps George Osborne and Ed Balls set for each other – but 10 miles north of parliament, in Enfield.
"... Eastern Enfield is also handicapped by some of the worst public transport links anywhere in north London, with no tube and only two trains from some stations into the city every hour. Graduate Antony Blacker can tell you what that's cost him: he was rejected from a post in the borough next door, Barnet, because it wasn't practical for him to commute by bus." [Light-rail, anyone?]
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