Solutions need to look at the bigger picture

AS a former student of De Montfort University and a citizen of Leicester for 60 years, I read with interest “30 ideas to help Leicester build back better” (Leicester Mercury, June 4).

I think an opportunity was missed. The solutions are very much ones which deal with fundamental and underlying problems which face not only our city but also many others across the Midlands and Northern England. Namely, dealing with market failure, with lack of opportunity, with urban decline and with poverty.

No doubt there is much ongoing work at our universities considering these problems.

However, to badge up solutions to these problems on the back of the corona crisis and suggest the essentially “bottom up” initiatives proposed, misses the point that these types of strategies have been tried time and again and have failed, Cameron’s Big Society being the most obvious example.

There should be no onus on the people of Leicester to sort out the problems facing the country.

They voted neither Tory nor for Brexit. Expecting them to get on their bikes with pop-up initiatives is at best naive, at worst, insulting.

The citizens of Leicester have wrecked neither their local nor the national economy.

Neither have they put us into this dire economic situation by a catastrophically inept handling of a deadly virus.

This sits squarely at the doors of Johnson, Gove and Hancock.

The problems of the city are largely summarised in terms of loss of major manufacturers and the dying High Street.

Inequality, alienation and crime are symptoms of the former, decay the main symptom of the latter.

Defending major industries is the task of national government and again, since 1979 in particular, they have failed to do this.

The government’s own pet economist, Patrick Minford, finds that Brexit will clear out what is left of British industry and farming.

In the face of a government committing the equivalent of national economic suicide, why would anyone bother to engage with the job market other than through sheer fear of starvation?

Our high streets die not only because of the all-pervasive internet but because of a historically bonkers free market in the provision of retail space.

New provision simply displaces existing and, against a backdrop of falling wages in the city, the net result is decline.

Walk around Leicester city centre, it’s evident.

Local authorities are not to blame for this. In many cases they are so underfunded they are simply forced to accept the baloney developers give them about the need for new floor space.

Above all, the planning system is so weak nationally there is little local people can do about anything.

If corona is to be a reset for our city, our great universities should be presenting the big picture, rather than exhorting or cajoling its local people into initiatives which simply support a dysfunctional political and electoral system and the current bunch of economic vandals that are promoting it.

If Leicester is to become great again, they should look no further than advocating a properly resourced city council as the economic driver, one with fully interventionist planning powers of regeneration, and the ability to raise capital in an equitable manner from its communities.

This should lie within a regional government structure so ringfenced infrastructure funding can be properly and fully directed across the Nottingham-Derby-LeicesterNorthampton area.

There is also a pressing need for local political structures and evidence bases that can be used to communicate to people the impact on our city of the wider economic forces at work, our environmental responsibilities and our city’s place at the heart of Europe.

I think then our people would then have a sound and meaningful economic and political framework in which to play a significant role in helping to develop our great city.

Dr Andrew Golland, Leicester