It's boat week!
...and it's less fun than you'd think!
There’s a common practice in political communication that you segment your messages by week - especially in quieter periods like the summer.
That results in a flurry of activity around a certain topic - it’s Education Week! It’s Health Week! It’s Anti-War-on-Cars Week!
This week is Stop the Boats Week - meaning immigration, and particularly, the Government’s fascination with small boats.
Hence the push to get the first asylum seekers on board the Bibby Stockholm, hence the Home Secretary targeting ‘crooked’ immigration lawyers, hence the ever-articulate and on-message Lee Anderson telling people they can “fuck off back to France”.
I’m not sure whether it’s going to work, mind.
The latest Ipsos polling says 77% of the UK public thinks the Government is doing a bad job on migration, and just 13% a good job.
On small boats specifically, YouGov asked how confident people were that Sunak’s government will reduce the number of small boats crossing the channel and 80% say they are not very or not at all confident.
More generally on the issue - and somewhat counter-intuitively based on the prevailing debate - Brits are more likely to than global averages to say we should let refugees stay and allow more of them (54% compared to 41% globally), and less likely to say we should deport them and not allow any more (14% compared to 19% globally).
That same research (see pg15) also found half (47%) of the British public believing there should be more legal routes into the country provided for refugees.
We tend to jumble and bundle issues together in our policy debates - and especially this debate. We use loosely and interchangeably terminology and evidence, mixing refugees, asylum seekers, economic migration, visa systems, EU free movement, international students and a whole range of other very different things together in a big pot of culture war broth.
Jumbling migration issues a little myself to give a regional flavour to this, the 2021 Census tells us the North East has one in 14 usual residents born outside the UK (6.8%), compared to one in six (16.8%) across England and Wales as a whole.
On this, as on much else, the North East is less diverse. We are all poorer - economically, culturally, spiritually - as a result.
Exposure is understanding, and we have too little of it as a region. We all have to guard against the impact of that.
Buses: you wait ages then 550 don’t come along at once
There are 1,967 bus services in the North East, down from 2,477 last year.
That's according to the latest figures from the Traffic Commissioners Office - that's the body operators have to register their services with in order to run them.
The figures also say a total of 550 existing registrations were cancelled during the past year, on top of 712 cancellations the year before.
The North East is the area with the second highest number of bus services in the country, narrowly behind the North West. It sits second in the number of registration cancellations too.
Now there are lots of reasons for this - and there might be a degree of rationalisation, so fewer routes but areas are still being served.
Many services are also supported by local authorities, who are seeing budgets cut and are therefore also cutting back on the support they provide for services which aren't commercially viable enough to stand on their own two feet.
There's also been a long term fall in bus passenger journeys. In 2021/22 there were 113 million bus journeys in the North East, 47 million fewer than in the mostly pre-pandemic 2019/20.
But that's just part of the story, as prior to 2011/12 there were more than 200 million journeys a year in the North East.
I won't get in the austerity high horse, but let's just say there's more at play here than pandemic effect and a slow recovery.
I think I've written before about the concept of induced demand in transport - or the Field of Dreams “if you build it they will come” model of behavioural psychology.
In essence, good provision of public transport increases its own demand, because it's then a viable alternative to private car travel. Likewise, if you cut provision, demand falls, because it ceases to work for people - they can can't get where they need to go, when they need to go there, so they find another way to travel.
North East trade up by £232m in 2021
According to numbers out a couple of weeks ago, total international trade in the North East in 2021 was worth £15.2bn. That was up from £14.7bn the year before, but still down on the pre-pandemic 2019 figure which sat at £18bn.
2021’s figure is £64m below 2016’s level of international trade value, which is symptomatic of broader slow economic growth in the region. GDP is also around 2016 figures.
What I've been reading this week
This Pattern piece with Mick Ross, CEO of Generator, talking about his life, career and plans for Generator and the North East music scene
This on an emerging genre of fiction, including comments from the North East’s own Eliza Clark on creating something with the appropriate level of darkness. I haven’t read Penance yet, but Boy Parts was just brilliant. Not enough novels feature extensive scenes in the Jesmond Tesco Metro.
What’s coming up in the next week or so?
GDP, construction output and trade stats on Friday
Labour market stats on Tues 15th
Inflation stats on the 16th
After Energy Week last week and Small Boats Week, I’d imagine we’ll get another Week next week…could be health (one of Sunak’s five pledges for the year?), or will it be a dividing line they think Labour will get itself in a tizz over (e.g. God help us, gender and trans issues)?
Working with me
I’m available for freelance policy-related commissions - I’m booking work in for September now, so reach out if you have something I can help with.
I do things like:
translate your big research or academic paper into a useful policy briefing
help you take your big pile of data and tell stories with it
interview people and turn it into really nice written content
You can find out more about me on my website.
You can email me on worroom@substack.com or arlen@arlenpettitt.co.uk
I’m @arlenpettitt on Twitter, and you’ll find me on LinkedIn.