{"id":1476,"date":"2016-02-12T06:47:39","date_gmt":"2016-02-12T06:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=1476"},"modified":"2016-02-12T06:47:39","modified_gmt":"2016-02-12T06:47:39","slug":"the-guardian-plays-fantasy-politics-with-stoke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2016\/02\/12\/the-guardian-plays-fantasy-politics-with-stoke\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guardian plays ‘fantasy politics’ with Stoke"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spotted a recent letter in the left-wing Guardian<\/em><\/a> newspaper, from someone who comes across as a far-leftist of some sort…<\/p>\n

“As a working-class male who taught in an area of Stoke\u2013on-Trent with an unemployment rate of 80% and a life expectancy among males of 45…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There may have been such an “area” of Stoke for a brief time, although I must say that I’ve never heard of it. Even Middleport, where I lived for many years, wasn’t that bad. When the steelworks and the mines shut, a great many working men moved away rather than stay put and claim the dole and add to local statistics. Frankly I have to doubt that the letter’s statistics are correctly remembered, unless perhaps they refer a tiny ‘special case’ electoral ward in some especially neglected bit of Normacot for a few months in 1982.<\/p>\n

But the effect of the use of such statistics in The Guardian<\/em><\/em>, in this age of speed-reading and drive-by politics, is to unfairly malign and misrepresent the whole city by elision. Some of the real facts, from the 1980s to the 2000s, are easily found and are quite different for the city…<\/p>\n

   “… in spite of the general decline in the manufacturing sector in the UK economy, the unemployment rate locally [in Stoke-on-Trent] is roughly at the national average, and has been falling both in absolute terms and relative to the average within the UK economy over the relevant period.” — from a detailed paper on Stoke-on-Trent and unemployment in the 1980s, later included the major academic book On the Mysteries of Unemployment: Causes, Consequences and Policies<\/em>, Springer, 2013.<\/p>\n

   “… the unemployment rate [for Stoke-on-Trent] in 2006, at 5.1%, lay marginally below the regional (5.5%) and national (5.3%) levels” — report of the House of Lords, Select Committee on Economic Affairs, 2007-8.<\/p>\n

   “Male life expectancy at birth in Stoke-on-Trent increased from 76.5 years in 2009-2011 to 76.7 years in 2010-2012.” — Joint Strategic Needs Assessment<\/em>, Stoke-on-Trent City Council. Earlier male life expectancy figures are given in this graph from another Stoke-on-Trent City Council research document…<\/p>\n

\"lifeexp\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Stoke’s dip between 2000 and 2004 was, I would guess, somewhat due to the heroin epidemic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spotted a recent letter in the left-wing Guardian newspaper, from someone who comes across as a far-leftist of some sort… “As a working-class male who taught in an area of Stoke\u2013on-Trent with an unemployment rate of 80% and a life expectancy among males of 45…” There may have been such an “area” of Stoke […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}