Category: Europe

On cities and data for TheInformationDaily.com

I kicked off a new series, Supplier side, for TheInformationDaily.com last week with two pieces: one on what Ukip’s rise means for businesses (not good), the other on the insights you can gain from cities and data:

Cities are found at the extremes of all kinds of official datasets. National Statistics produces workplace-based gross value added figures, roughly equivalent to gross domestic product for an area’s workplaces, for 193 areas of the UK. The UK-wide figure for 2012 was £21,674. London’s was £37,232, and if you break it down further, inner London west (including the City and Westminster) totted up £127,127, nearly six times the national average.

Everyone knows London is rich, but the same pattern is visible on smaller scales. The second highest gross value added in the UK is the City of Edinburgh’s £35,614, 74 per cent higher than the Scottish average of £20,423. Leeds generates £24,770 a head, compared with £19,149 across all of West Yorkshire. Cities are the places where regions and counties go to work, as well as countries.

Continue reading “On cities and data for TheInformationDaily.com”

What to read on Beacon, as well as the Ends of Britain

Beacon, which hosts my series the Ends of Britain – which last Friday looked at the controversy over whether an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK could share the pound – now has more than 70 writers. If you subscribe to one you get access to all.

To read the articles mentioned in this post in full, you will need to be a subscriber – but you can sign up for a 14 day free trial here. So why not do that, then come back and read the rest of the post? Continue reading “What to read on Beacon, as well as the Ends of Britain”

Spain’s nationalised heritage paradores: unlikely in Britain, sadly

If you were looking for parts of the economy to nationalise, luxury hotels would probably be low on most people’s lists – and for the last three decades, British governments have mainly privatised, not nationalised, with most of Royal Mail being privatised this week.

Having just spent a week in a different parador – Spain’s nationalised chain of hotels – every night, that’s a bit of a shame. Not because hotel accommodation urgently needs to become part of the public sector, but because it’s difficult to imagine any organisation but a government doing what Spain has done with several paradores: take a fantastic but decrepit old building and make it usable again. Continue reading “Spain’s nationalised heritage paradores: unlikely in Britain, sadly”

e-Borders: still over here, still a mess – article for The Register

Last week, The Register published my review of e-Borders, a government IT scheme that deserves more attention than it gets. Presumably politicians’ wish to sound tough on immigration stands in the way, but the UK’s system for tracking international journeys has big problems that it is hard to see anyone solving. Continue reading “e-Borders: still over here, still a mess – article for The Register”