Business leaders in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire have described the Government’s decision on Enterprise Zones announced this morning as a bittersweet moment.
The decision to award Enterprise Zone status for I54 in south Staffordshire has been greeted with joy. The site is internationally important and critical to the drive to put Staffordshire at the heart of job creation nationally.
But the team remain determined to keep up the pace and energy of action in the north of Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent after being knocked back on plans for an Enterprise Zone centred on the Etruria Valley in Stoke.
The Government this morning announced another 11 zones across the UK to kick start a wave of new investment opportunities and jobs, taking the total to 21 locations. Competition was fierce to get on the list.
The I54 decision for the south of the county is a great vote of confidence for the region, but the decision on the Etruria focused EZ is of course a disappointment.Our determination and belief in the area are absolutely undaunted. We are generating an impressive investment package that has put us in poll position for future investment.
Our business friendly approach and unified commitment to making life easy for investors has been really paying off in recent months with international names setting up home here, bringing more jobs and prosperity.
This red carpet approach for business investors is recognised by government as leading the way nationally. Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire has one of the highest, if not the highest, job creation levels in the country.
The Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire LEP has done well in gaining Regional Growth Bid funding, start-up funding, broadband funding and in supporting the I54 EZ bid. And we have the second round of RGF bids on the horizon. We are taking the project forward
The LEP, working hand in hand with Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire councils, will continue to develop a host of other measures designed to put business first including:
- the red carpet treatment ““ local councils working as one to streamline planning and other technical processes to make it easy for businesses to invest
- the creation of a LEP growth fund to provide start up finance for business investment
- the creation of an Educational Trust by the Universities, working with the LEP to develop Enterprise Skills to meet business needs
- support for the drive to ensure superfast broadband is available across the area
- lobbying to promote Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire as a premier investment location at a national and international level.
Surprise, surprise. Virtually all the new enterprise zones are in nice Tory-vote-heavy areas. Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cheshire etc etc…
I don’t know why anyone is surprised about all of this. Tories always, always look after their own and punish people for voting Labour. It is what destroyed the mining communities in the 80s that have never recovered, and is now destroying the post-industrial cities like Stoke.
If you take all of this on top of the Tories riding the reactionary wave against the riots and banging up juveniles for four years for facebook pranks and criminalising everyone who got involved regardless of offence or previous history, to make it even harder for them to get work, you can see they are trying to take us back to a far more rigid class system with little or no social mobility. It will be fine if you have some money behind you. But if you don’t – watch your back. They are coming for you.
I fail to see how anyone in Stoke can seriously defend the Tories for doing a good job for our city.
Oh yes Lawrence…
None so blind as those who refuse to see. Where are the (not) Liberal (not) Democrats? Time to pull the rug or be despised forever boys and girls. Your political principles being cacked on for a few short-lived careers!
[quote=Lawrence Shaw]I don’t know why anyone is surprised about all of this. Tories always, always look after their own and punish people for voting Labour.[/quote]
And Labour don’t?
[quote=Lawrence Shaw]It is what destroyed the mining communities in the 80s that have never recovered, and is now destroying the post-industrial cities like Stoke.[/quote]
Nothing to do with taking strike action without balloting union members then? Or the mines not being economically viable at the time? Areas like Stoke are destroying themselves by constantly clinging to past glories instead moving forward with changes in economic circumstances, by not giving industry the workforce they want etc…
[quote=Lawrence Shaw]If you take all of this on top of the Tories riding the reactionary wave against the riots and banging up juveniles for four years for facebook pranks and criminalising everyone who got involved regardless of offence or previous history, to make it even harder for them to get work, you can see they are trying to take us back to a far more rigid class system with little or no social mobility. It will be fine if you have some money behind you. But if you don’t – watch your back. They are coming for you.[/quote]
Political parties don’t hand sentences out, judges do. So we should turn a blind eye to those who commit crime? You sound like someone I sat on a jury with. Kid charged with death by dangerous driving, first offence, some dick on the same jury says “if he gets jailed it’ll ruin the rest of his life”. Er, he’d taken someone else’s.
In the same way these rioters have ruined people’s livelihoods by looting and burning their shops and businesses. So why should people who’ve built their businesses suffer and now struggle, and the people who’ve destroyed them get off scot free because they’re young or it’s their first offence. Idiot.
Facebook pranks? By that logic inciting racial hatred must just be simply calling people names. Or carrying placards calling for death to those who offend Islam simply expressing oneself!!
As for social mobility, explain how they’re legislating to prevent it? If you want to move up in the world, you can, just ask Branson, Sugar, and Caudwell.
[quote=Lawrence Shaw]I fail to see how anyone in Stoke can seriously defend the Tories for doing a good job for our city.[/quote]
Who’s defending them?
If the Tories are punishing us for voting Labour in the City (this version of Labour) then how did Labour reward us for doing similar?
It’s just not that simple Lawrence.
Utterly predictable auto-Toryism to detract from the fact Cameron lied about helping Stoke with an Enterprise zone that has instead gone to leafy and wealthy zones in Oxfordshire and Cornwall.
1) While Labour clearly did do more to help deprived areas when in office, I don’t believe they ever explicitly punished non-Labour areas. If anything, Blair’s constant pandering to the precious swing voters of the suburban south ensured plenty of investment went into those areas during the New Labour era. I would argue Labour actually did too little to assist in places like Stoke that clearly needed state intervention to save pottery jobs from going abroad more than a decade ago.
2) Only a Tory would blame the miners and the strike of the 80s, and a mistaken tactical decision by the union leadership at the time, for the utter devastation wreaked on those communities that continues to this day. Your comment about pits being “uneconomically unviable at the time” is very telling because I think we all now know how densely stupid and reactionary the government of the day actually were. We now pay through the nose and bow and scrape to the brutal undemocratic Russian government, which still represents a huge military and nuclear threat to the UK, for our energy needs whilst we sit on 300+ years of coal.
3) How you can blame the Stoke workforce for a loss of jobs that started by the deliberate and politically motivated closure of the coal and steel industries and then finished off by subsequent rush abroad to maximise short-term profits by the private sector? Presumably you believe the thousands of already underpaid Stoke pottery workers who have been laid off over the last 25 years should have instead offered to take even less wages than they already did in a bid to compete with China and Indonesia? Presumably you believe the closure of industry was because the pottery workers were all overpaid and had nothing to do with the vicious reality of unfettered globalisation and the fact the UK is the easiest place in the whole of the EU to lay off and sack workers?
4) So you equate a driver who killed someone through dangerous driving to someone who stole a few bottles of water from Aldi? The guy who got locked up for six months for this was in his first year of an engineering degree that I doubt he will now complete. When he gets out he will have no work but clearly has a brain in his head that I am sure any number of criminal organisations will find useful. Who wins by him being put in prison?
In the meantime of course, we are wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money on locking first offenders up. It costs £140,000 a year to keep a young offender inside. Personally that doesn’t represent brilliant value to money to me in light of how many public sector jobs or social enterprises that would have saved from being cut back with that money. I’m not excusing violence in any way, but why is the government allowing and cheerleading the judiciary to pass such heavy sentences just because the public mood is a bit highly charged? And why is the true cost of locking people up never discussed?
Finally your point about Sugar, Branson and Caudwell is facile and irrelevant as they were all educated at a time when there was a far more level playing field in society that your heroes have now bulldozed to make way for a return to a Victorian-era class system. Interestingly Sugar is a Labour supporter as I suspect he recognises that businesses need a well educated and healthy population to employ and a good national infrastructure in place to build a business within.
Finally I ask you simply to answer YES or NO:
Do you defend Cameron’s decision to lie to the people of Stoke?
Do you defend the decision to build enterprise zones in areas least affected by cuts and unemployment?
I don’t disagree – Blair’s New Labour should have done a lot more to put a stop to the endless stream of private sector job losses from the city that has meant the city has been in, effectively, permanent recession for the past 20 years. Simply patching things up with temporary contract minimum wage warehouse jobs and some pretty public spending contracts was not enough.
My point is that the Tories know how to reward their own. I agree that Labour never really did the same.
Partially I think this is a by-product of our archaic and undemocratic electoral system that ensures political parties pander to a narrow social class of swing voter in narrow selection of geographic seats.
FACT: businesses exist to make money for their owners, NOT to provide employment. When Western workers understand that simple concept then Western economies might stand a chance of competing with the Far East and their culture and Confucian mindset. Until then, continue to watch Asia rise and Europe/ N.America fall.
FACT: For businesses to be a success, customers need money to spend with them. The most universally accepted best way for people to get money to spend is for them to have jobs. Businesses also need a stable and healthy society to thrive in – which obviously means public services must exist and be paid for. The only reason the far east has been thriving in terms of jobs is, simply, it has been cheaper to pay people over there than over here and we have been using up what surplus wealth we did have importing all their wares. Now those days are over and in your promised land of low wages and high productivity guess whats happening? Thats right, wage demands are rising and workers are getting uppity, and lo and behold, all those cossetted managers moving pottery production to China to chase the tightest margins are starting to look pretty stupid. This idea that the Chinese have some culturally different attitude to work and the profit motive is vacuous and not backed up by fact or statistic.
End of the day business is not the be all and end all – it is actually a dumb animal rather than this omniscient being it is held up to be. Like a pet it has to be disciplined and punished to ensure it doesnt cross boundaries or behave badly and encouraged and rewarded to do what we want it to. Its not rocket science really.
Mike Rawlins:
I think the blog is not performing how it should be and I understand that time is needed to fulfil the blog’s potential.
I am prepared to take over the blog and take it to another chapter and move it forward.
I don’t know what you require or want but you have my email and let me know what it will take to move forward.
Gary
I’m sure you’re busy Mike but the blog has come too far to fall by the wayside.
I’m prepared to move it forward.
Gary,
I couldn’t agree more. Please email Mike directly to see if you can sort something out. It’s a real shame for it to die but I can understand the difficulties we all have with time. At least Mike has the knowhow. I would like to continue to write blogs but can only find time to do a few sometimes. For some reason Mike has not as yet published my recent ones despite I was in touch with him about this.
I don’t have his email and I am quite prepared to take over the blog with the same rules that everyone can be on board to write articles or just to contribute comments.
It is irrelevant to me of any disputes or of which politics it all comes from.
Come on Mike, you did ask for an offer.
There are many good log blogs that could all contribute articels to PitsnPots such as Tom Reynolds, Abi Brown, Sam Alexander and Mike Barnes.
But the circle of those adding comments, has never really expanded, did we create a clique that put others off?
Local Councillors and Cabinet members and Council leader dont help by not replying to questions, is that were Tony succeed they trusted him to be interviewd
I’ve currently got Question with Cabinet members in respect to
Sustanable City and the on going work for the Council to be able to get out of the 15 year contract for Green n Kitchen Waste
Intelligent Transport Systems and there possible uses across the City.
With out answer how can one write a blog showing both sides (not that im any good at writing blogs) I just want the info.
So question how encage the councillor to engage with the public, which in turn should get public to engae with the site? (bit too simple but there must be away unless the prefer the closed doors)
FACT (the most overworked word on this site) if “businesses exist to make money for their owners…” then you really can’t complain if thieves, pirates and looters look after themselves with no social conscience. Who wrote the rule book?
Seems pretty obvious to me that those who do best out of the way society is structured really should pay most to maintain it (and I don’t just mean the police and army).
Further – what kind of government have we got?
I don’t mean Labour, Tory or even this unelected gang of thieves and liars… I mean us. We encourage total anarchy on the streets of Tripoli, where anyone big enough to hold an AK can have one and black Africans are shot on sight as mercenaries (children live in Tripoli, y’know) then demand rough justice for our own kids who rob Apple and Sony.
Question: would armed fighters against the House of Windsor be rebels, insurgents or terrorists?
Cue the Turbanhater accusing me of backing Gaddafi.
We’re NOT backing them for ‘democracy’ – we just want a slice of the (BP) pie when the dust settles.
Emperor’s new clothes.
ARE YOU SH!TT!NG ME???
Really Mr Elsby – you’re like the guy who sweeps the factory floor, whose heard the Company Chairman’s resigning.
Before you discharge your cheapshot… it’s insomnia, something I’ve suffered from for years… NOT alcoholism.
Tonyjohnt, I must be having one of my turns, and god help me but here goes, I agree with you on this point.
It seems to have become a pastime of PMs to stick their noses into problems in other countries.
It smacks of Hypocrasy when Mugabe is left alone to kill people yet Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan are important to them.
Mike, it’s beginning to look silly now and you will be accused of petulance.
Written by someone who:
a) has never lived in the Far East and seen the wholly different mindset that exists there.
b) doesn’t understand that wages are cheap over there because the cost of living is cheap. In money terms they might be being paid a lot less, but in real terms it may be somewhat more
c) is an agitator for the sake of it which is why they have problems of their own in the workplace
d) has never had a business of their own
e) doesn’t understand that without business the revenue for public services won’t be generated
f) hasn’t grasped that not all customers are Joe Public, but other businesses and the public sector
g) that hasn’t figured that taxation also comes from businesses and not simply personal income
etc…
[quote=terry turbo]Tonyjohnt, I must be having one of my turns, and god help me but here goes, I agree with you on this point.
It seems to have become a pastime of PMs to stick their noses into problems in other countries.
It smacks of Hypocrasy when Mugabe is left alone to kill people yet Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan are important to them.[/quote]
Learn to spell and punctuate you fing retard!!!!
You can agree with me if you must Terry… I’m sure we meet half way on many things.
I for one, would be livid if Muslim airforces were bombing the sh!t out of Bimingham because nobody actually gave the Tories a democratic mandate!
It’s our problem and we’ll deal with it. I’ll laugh my kitten off if Libya votes to be an Islamic state… all that time and money wasted!
Here’s one who thinks you couldn’t run a bath Gary… let’s put it to a vote. Then you’d be sure to lose.
I’d rather PnP go down than end up in your self-serving hands!
Actually it’s ‘hypocrisy’ – but you wouldn’t know that…
Mike has always been very good and quick in the past in publishing my articles.
Then I wrote some articles on 8th July and 16th August which didn’t appear, so I emailed him on 21st August to check whether there were some different criteria in order to get published, now Tony’s gone. I realised it could just simply be time constraints but wanted to check if there were other factors.
He replied on 22nd August to say he’d been a bit busy, which is absolutely fair enough. It would also be fair enough if he’d said now the site was for his own publications, after all I have no right to publish on someone else’s site. (Although personally I think the success and quality of this site was down to a wide range of people writing for it and expressing their views in comments.) But he didn’t say that. What he actually said was that he had my August article and would publish it that day – 22nd August. (He said he didn’t have the July one which I then sent again.) Of course it’s always possible some unforseen crisis happens, but seeing as he then published more of his own, this does not seem to be the case.
The articles in themselves are not of any huge importance. What I’m more concerned about is protocol. I don’t mind being told exactly how it is. I don’t actually mind being told to go take a running jump if that’s what someone thinks (and I’d not be surprised if that’s what some on here actually do think). But I can’t be doing with being told one thing when it’s actually another.
I give up.
Yes Nicky, I did say I would publish them and then didn’t because I forgot.
The site isn’t just for me to publish on, it was, is and I hope continues to be a team effort.
I’ve been working in the background to update the site to the next version and hopefully fix some of the bugs which meant that you have not been able to ‘self publish’ for the past few months.
But as you have given up I don’t need to rush now do I?
Gary, I haven’t been at my desk for the best part of the week so I’m not being petulant as you so eloquently put it.
The site will be getting updated in the next few weeks and then I’ll make decisions as to who takes over or contributes.
If you want to contact me you could take a guess at the E-mail address or of course you could use the contact form”¦”¦.
Firstly, this is a website… not a “blog”.
You don’t even talk basic cyber-language but you want to run PnP?
Then what happens to me (no doubt your nemesis) and the 99% of other posters who think you were dropped on your head as a baby?
Please Mike, if you must go – pass the baton on to someone who’ll run with it.
Ideally I’ll get some contributors on board and the site will continue to run once we have sorted out some of the bugs.
I’ll be making contact with some of the people who have contributed in the past over the next week or so to discuss ways forward.
If anyone wants to offer help then use the contact form to get in touch, ways of helping could be contributing, doing some moderation of comments or researching stuff..
If people genuinely want to see the site continue and can support it in some small way then do get in touch.
Hear if you need me Mike. Tell me what you want on site and I’ll try my best.