The art of regeneration

What does the city centre need to blow away the cobwebs of neglect and turn it into the place to be for groovy metropolitan types? A chumbrella of course; no I’d never heard of one before either.

This is less of a surprise than maybe it should be since the chumbrella has just been invented by Stone based artist Sarah Nadin. It’s all part of the Beneath the Pavement project, a clever wheeze costing £11,000 and funded by Appetite to involve the city’s burgeoning arts industry in driving regeneration.

As part of this a team of artists have got together to put forward a slate of proposals including creating a city garden housed in ‘geo-domes’ for visitors and shoppers to enjoy, offering vacant shops in the town centre to artists on short term lets and siting large photographic installations around the city to celebrate its distinctive architecture.

Sarah Nadin told the Sentinel on Friday that she got the idea for the chumbrella from sharing an umbrella with a fellow artist, an experience that made her realise had ‘something about it as a way to make people talk with each other more.’

Also speaking to the Sentinel Anna Francis of the AirSpace gallery said of the project, ‘we need to see artists included in the conversation about what’s being done in the city centre,’ adding that if regeneration is left to ‘developers and money men city centres can end up looking like anywhere else,’ and that ‘artists have a different way of looking at things.’

Public art; don’t you just love it? There is nothing better for stirring up a little light controversy; you can just imagine the massed spluttering of outrage prompted by project chumbrella. Disgusted of Heron Cross won’t know what to get into a tizzy about first, the waste of £11,000 or the mangling of the English language involved.

The thing about public art of course is that yesterday’s hideous carbuncle is often tomorrow’s cultural icon; either that or it just gets forgotten. Consider the fuss made way back in the long ago about ‘A Man Can’t Fly’, not least because his failure to achieve take off might have had something to do with the drag factor coming into play, these days both the man in question and his most prominent feature are routinely ignored by passing motorist.

That will probably the fate of anything that comes from the Beneath the Pavement project, some of their ideas are good, others will never get off the drawing board; which is a shame since I’d love to see a geo-dome in Hanley.

I wouldn’t though dismiss what they’re trying to do out of hand, not least because I agree with Anna Francis that we need voices other than those of business interests involved in the conversation about regeneration. Otherwise we really will end up as just another clone town, actually that may be happening anyway.

Turning the conversation about regeneration into a monologue involving what we might call the money interest alone has given us the expensive money pit that is the Smithfield project and a civic centre the public didn’t want; but will pay through the nose for anyway. Nationally it has led to the building of two huge aircraft carriers to project a power we no longer possess around the globe.

Projects like Beneath the Pavement have the virtue of at least trying to work with the public, because, after all, without an audience art doesn’t exist. Where I would criticise it is that, like so many regeneration projects it seems to have been created by people who believe Hanley to be the centre of the universe.

As the city’s economic centre and soon to be its political one too Hanley will always do well, at least it will if business is left to get on with things and take its own risks as with the successful expansion of the Potteries Centre. What a contrast to the City Sentral fiasco, over which the council have fussed like a mother hen producing, so far, nothing at all in the way of results.

Where the ability of the arts to bring people together from all sections of the community to express their views and creativity is most needed is in relation to the other five towns. The conventional wisdom is that they should be side-lined at best and at worst ignored altogether and everything should be focussed on one centre; that is dangerous bunkum.

It means ignoring our unique selling point, that we are six towns brought together into one city, we are proud of our shared identity and those things that make us unique. That as much as handing things over to the bean counters and money men is the royal road to making our town into a clone town.

It’s hard not to warm to Appetite, not least because much of what they do is engagingly eccentric, but I would suggest to them that the secret to being creative often lies in being willing to rip things up and start again. That’s what we need to do with plans to revive all six towns making up this remarkable city.

Scots referendum shows the way to a society where everyone gets a seat on the train.

Last week getting onto a train back from Birmingham I turned the wrong way and entered the first class coach by mistake; not a smart move.

You can imagine the scene; there I am gawping with surprise at seeing so many unoccupied seats, whilst the air fills with a polite murmur of distaste. I say, poor show what; the fellow looks like he bought his furniture, hardly the sort of person we want in first class.

Being someone what knows his place and pausing only to give my forelock a good tug I trotted off back to cattle class pronto, there to spend the rest of the journey crammed in nose to armpit with my fellow plebs.

There’s something else what I know too, that the rolling shambles of our train service proves that TUC chief Frances O’Grady was onto something when she said Britain was at risk of becoming a ‘Downton Abbey’ society. The only point where I disagree is that there is no risk about it, we’re already one; and always have been.

Quite a few people reading this will probably be snorting derisively right now, what lefty rubbish, they’ll say. Ours is a ‘classless society’, as proclaimed by John Major of all people, a Tory prime minister who also happened to come from humble origins.

It is, at best a convenient myth, one that my experience aboard that train helps to explode.

Trains, or rather the waves of workers who arrive at a London railway station aboard them every morning form one of the key metaphors in George Orwell’s famous essay about the class system. First come the cheery tabloid reading artisans, then the fussy little clerks clutching copies of the Daily Express and last of all the governing classes with copies of the Times and the Daily Telegraph that were ironed for them by their butler.

The image has always seemed a little too rosy to me, although I’m willing to cut Orwell some slack since he was writing during a war when we really were all in it together, if only in the interests of survival. Personally I favour the far bleaker vision of the class system put forward by Owen Jones, the closest thing our age has to George Orwell. The class war is raging more fiercely than ever and the working and middle classes are losing on every front.

The train has the power to be the ultimate democratic mode of transport and yet we have made out of opportunity a dispiriting shambles where legroom is sold like a class A drug. Last month I joined a protest outside Stoke station against the latest sky high hike in train fares, not one of the people we approached refused to take the postcards we were handing out.

This wasn’t the ‘angry mob’ stereo-typing says would support our protest, these were the sort of people governments of all stripes have courted for the past thirty years. A left wing cause like renationalising the railways resonating with Middle England, surely that’s impossible; don’t you believe it.

At long last the penny has dropped, or it’s starting to anyway, and the people in what used to be the middle class are starting to see they have common cause with those one rung below. The opposition between the striving and the skiving looks ever more like a convenient fiction dreamed up by the political elite.

Both groups have been sold a pup, the aspiration they are goaded into striving for is really just racking up ever more debt in a mad race to keep up with the Jonses, rather than progressing through the force of their efforts they’re splashing like mad to keep their heads above water. As they do so they’re haunted by the fear their kids will likely drown anyway.

The reason we got into this sorry mess is quite simple, the elite long ago learnt that an indebted populace is easy to control because it is too busy worrying how to make ends meet to pay attention to what they’re up to and are endlessly open to falling for the oldest trick in the political play book; divide and rule.

Up to date it has worked because there hasn’t seemed to be an alternative, now there is and it has given our complacent political elite the biggest shock of their comfortable little lives and it had been provided by the campaign around the Scottish independence referendum. The extent to which they have been rattled was demonstrated last week when the three party leaders abandoned the weekly playground squabble of PMQ’s to head north to campaign for a no vote, an exercise that couldn’t have been more absurd had they made the trip in a clown car.

What has scared the political elite so much isn’t the prospect of Scotland becoming independent, all politicians are pragmatists at heart and are adept at rolling with the punches thrown by events, is that the campaign has created a political discourse that is the opposite of the one they usually have with the British public. Their usual tactics of smothering debate with a mix of threats, cheap sentiment and vague promises has fallen flat; they’re in a blue funk and don’t know what to do.

This is because either by accident or design a potentially dull constitutional issue has been turned into a debate over what it means to be Scottish and what sort of shared future the people of the country want. Not surprisingly the market driven, everyone for themself model of the past thirty years is running a distant second to having an open and egalitarian society on Scandinavian lines; who’d have thought it? Not a bunch of professional politicians with firsts in PPE from Oxbridge apparently.

This campaign has engaged the Scottish public in a way that nothing since maybe the 1945 general election has, whatever the result tomorrow things will never be the same again. Even if the Better Together campaign wins the day for the status quo by a narrow margin the people who have held power for centuries will no longer be at ease in the old dispensation.

All of a sudden the idea that where Scotland leads the English regions could follow no longer seems like a woolly notion for bearded men wearing home knitted jumpers. Handled properly it could be our chance to have a meaningful debate about how we make the sort of society where everyone gets a seat on the train into a reality.

Parking the main issue as UHNS Chief meets local residents.

UHNS Chief Executive Mark Hackett met with members of the Hartshill and Basford PACT group on Monday night to hear the views of local residents.

It was my first encounter with Mr Hackett and after the antics of some of his colleagues the previous Wednesday I wasn’t, to say the least, disposed towards being generous to senior managers with the NHS. A point of view I found myself revising as the evening progressed.

First impressions seemed to confirm my prejudice; Mark Hackett breezed into the Nadim lecture theatre at the North Staffordshire Medical Institute looking every inch the sleek, suited chief executive with an old school tie and an air of self- importance.

The narrative he gave of his life and career to date provided the first clue that I should be a little less eager to jump to the first conclusion that came my way. Born in Kidderminster and educated at the local comp and then the LSE he said he had worked for the NHS since he was twenty one because he wanted to ‘give something back’ in return for the good education he’d received. Not sentiments you’d imagine most health bureaucrats expressing; it’s usually Eton and Oxbridge all the way with a side order of entitlement.

He went on to say he’d held four chief executive positions at different hospitals around the country before coming to Stoke, the last of these being in Southampton. Health services in Staffordshire were, he said, in need of leadership, and how since the UHNS treat a number of patients equivalent to the population of the entire city every year and the workload will only grow as services formerly based at the beleaguered Stafford Hospital move to Stoke.

Mr Hackett gave an outline of his ‘vision’ for the future of UHNS, saying that he wanted the hospital to become a world class provider of healthcare by 2025, making it the ‘best place for people to work, learn and do research.’ The focus on research would, he said, bring between £10million and £15milllion in extra funding over the coming decade.

This would make UHNS a centre for best practice bringing improved patient care delivered by highly motivated staff at the very top of their game. The hospital was, he said, already saving more lives than the national average and had a nurse to patient ration of six to one; good going by another national average.

Investment was also being made in stroke services, cardiology and buying new MRT and CT scanners. The hospital had taken a hit in recent months over waiting times in A&E, but, Mr Hackett said, patients rated the care they received as ‘good’. What was needed, he said, was for the public to be encouraged to use alternatives to A&E whenever possible.

All this was pretty much par for the course, you’d expect the chief executive of any large organisation to be able to run through the list of its achievements and recite the ‘vision’ for its future even if shaken awake in the middle of the night. What made Mr Hackett’s offering different was that it was a presentation rather than a speech and as such comfortingly dull and probably delivered straight.

There was none of the ‘spin’ I’d sat through the previous Wednesday, at no stage was one of his colleagues brought up to the lectern to emote in a cynical attempt to ‘connect’ with we little people. Incidentally Mr Hackett is rumoured not to be the biggest fan of the CCG’s plans for reforming cancer care.

He gave a, mostly, assured performance when the floor was opened to questions, the biggest of which was that of parking around the UNHS site. A shortage of places has driven staff, patients and visitors out into the surrounding streets with the sort of chaos you might expect. To his credit Mr Hackett listened patiently to several people making the same point with varying degrees of frustration and promised that the hospital management had plans in hand to put on more shuttle busses for staff and to open up additional parking spaces on the site of the old central outpatients.

Challenged about long waiting times for admission, nine hours in the experience of one questioner, he initially disappeared behind a smokescreen of acronyms. AMU, SAU, MAU; et al are pretty baffling for a reasonably healthy scribbler to grasp, someone who is sick and scared would be utterly bewildered. That said his promise to look into and try to improve the system seemed genuinely given.

His one big misstep came when asked about the campaign to keep services from being moved from Stafford to the UHNS, he said most of the public supported the move apart from a small but ‘vocal’ campaign group. The issues are rather more complicated than that and have as much to do with the idea of having an NHS that is free for all as what gets done where.

This aside Mark Hackett did seem to be genuinely interested in engaging with the public, as opposed to handing down his pronouncements and expecting us all to be suitably grateful. That is sufficiently rare in senior NHS managers for him to be given the benefit of the doubt by even the most cynical observers.

Cognitive dissonance from NHS bosses planning changes to cancer care.

Under plans put forward by the government NHS Cancer and End of Life services in Staffordshire are being opened up to tenders from private companies, a contract worth £1.2 billion.

There is, say campaign group Cancer-Not for Profit, no business case for privatising the service citing figures from the Office of National Statistics showing that 90% of patients in Staffordshire are satisfied with the care they receive from the NHS run service. The NHS Support Federation says that 70% of the contracts put out to tender have been won by private companies, a testament, perhaps, to their greater experience of the tendering process.

The Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) led by Andrew Donald claim the service needs to be ‘joined up’ to prevent patients from falling through the crack, under legal advice they have been instructed to consult with the public before putting their plans into action.

Cancer-Not for Profit have collected 10,000 signatures on a petition opposing the sell off and on Wednesday they held a public meeting at the Civic Centre; it proved to be a stormy evening for Mr Donald.

The meeting took place in the Jubilee Hall, a grand wood panelled space redolent of a civic self -confidence noticeably absent from the cuts haunted landscape of local government today. Down at the front of the room the four speakers milled around, Stoke South MP Rob Flello wearing a distinctive white suit, whilst half a dozen earnest young people fussed around with cameras and light-meters.

There was a fairly large crowd, not surprisingly really since the NHS is one of the few political issues that still has the power to galvanise the public. The age range was well above forty, a danger sign for any politician considering an assault on the NHS because this is the demographic that votes; mostly because they can remember when doing so meant something.

Andrew Donald, the Staffs and Surrounds CCG Chief Officer and Transforming Cancer Care EOL programme sponsor, a title that if he has it painted on his office door must have doubled the NHS signage budget at a stroke, the opposing captain so to speak put Dr Jonathan Shapiro a consultant with experience of a family member using the NHS cancer services in London in to bat.

A smart move in the sense that he had an emotive story to tell about his elderly father’s struggle to cope with a service that seemed to be focussed more on its own systems than the needs of patients, a fair criticism that can be levelled at some aspects of the NHS. He lost the audience though with a patronising analogy that placed the private provider as the ‘conductor’ bringing the disparate elements of the health care orchestra together tunefully that he hammered mercilessly, suggesting a bedside manner that was a little on the grandiose side.

Andrew Donald also ran with the line that although the service delivered was in general good it needed to be redesigned to make it more integrated and focussed on patient needs by getting the various providers to work together. He summed this up as the creation of a service delivering ‘patient seamless care; a piece of bureaucratic double-speak that could mean anything or nothing depending on who he is speaking to.

He was slippery to say the least when questioned from the floor as to why this new service could only be created by bringing in a private company, saying at one point that opponents were ‘assuming’ that one would be brought in, although the ONS figures suggest any other outcome is unlikely. Mr Donald also didn’t take kindly to being questioned about the CCG’s patient consultation, saying huffily that they had put together a team of ‘patient champions’ although he was unable to say what these people actually did apart from being force fed CCG biased information.

Rob Flello MP, taking the crease for the Labour Party gave a rather off the peg speech about an NHS that was ‘cracking at the seams’ due to government underfunding and called the privatisation of cancer care the ‘biggest auction in NHS history. He was more animated in the panel discussion asking several questions that made Mr Donald squirm inside his expensive suit. It was hard not to feel though that his hands were tied by the fact that the plan could be forced through before the election leaving an incoming Labour government unable to reverse it for fear of being sued and that his party though it is often at the anti-cuts dance has been rather timid when it comes to taking to the floor.

Rachel Maskell, head of Health for UNITE savaged the plans as an attempt to ‘drive profit from the sick’ and contrasted the way the NHS owned by the public operates and the secretive practices of many of the private companies set to bid for the contract. Dr John Lister of Coventry University also attacked the lack of democratic accountability in the tendering process and the limitations of the public consultation conducted by the CCG.

The real meat of the meeting came when it was opened up to questions from the floor, poor Andrew Donald must have felt like a batsman who had taken to the crease only to find himself facing a bowler using grenades. Time and again questions about the lack of transparency in the tendering process, the possibility of patients having to ‘top up’ the cost of their care and the existence of a preferred list of bidders bounced over his startled head.

In an exchange that drew a sustained burst of applause near to the end of the meeting Jan Zeblocky of the local Green Party accused him of ‘cognitive dissonance’, receiving the message he wants to hear not the one he’s actually been sent, regarding public support for privatisation. It was an apt metaphor for a CCG acting in the name of a government that seems to have been deafened to public concerns by the din of its own ideology.

Fittingly the last word of the meeting came from a woman with a cut glass accent who called out ‘what right have you to take away the NHS people have paid for,’ what right indeed. It was, if you’ll pardon the cliché, the voice of middle England and the government would do well to listen to it before assaulting the NHS people have paid for.

How we treat libraries says everything about the sort of society we want to be.

The former Stoke Library, a grade two listed building dating from 1878 and described as ‘iconic’ is to be sold off by the council as part of its plans to raise funds by disposing of unused buildings, the sale is thought likely to make £85,000.

Local residents aren’t pleased, the library itself moved to the town’s former indoor market in 2008, but they are concerned as to what use a new owner might put the building. One, Mick Jones (70), told the Sentinel on Wednesday that ‘once it is sold off the community won’t have any connection with its use’, adding that he thought it shouldn’t be sold to just ‘anyone’ because ‘my father, mother and grandparents all paid taxes towards places like this.’

By chance I’ve been thinking about libraries and what our attitudes towards them say about the sort of society we want ours to be quite a lot recently following a discussion that took place at the last meeting of the North Staffs People’s Assembly.

Staffordshire County Council wants to either close a number of its libraries with the option of some being taken over by community volunteers, Newcastle-under-Lyme council has its sights set on closing libraries too. As the annual budget looms what chance is there of Stoke-on-Trent City Council at least contemplating a similar move? I’m not in the business of making predictions, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

Stoke still has a library and it is liable to survive, for now anyway, because it is attached to the council’s Local Centre in the town. That just leaves the question of what should happen to its former home.

Let’s not be naive here, liked it or not the council has to sell of many of its unused or underused buildings to raise much needed cash. When the buildings in question have particular architectural merit or a strong community attachment though a caveat should be attached regarding their future use, the former Stoke Library fits both criteria.

It shouldn’t just be carved up into yet more office space that nobody wants to rent or turned into swish apartments for the sort of ‘young professionals’ estate agents so love to court, it should be turned into affordable housing. This would help make the struggling town centre into somewhere people want to live and raise families and pay a fitting tribute to the social conscience of the people who set up the library in the first place.

You could, of course, make a case for libraries being hopelessly out-dated institutions long ago superseded by the internet. Actually you could make the same case about cathedrals. St Pauls occupies such a first rate location, we’d keep the façade of course and turn the insides into the most divine apartments; it would be worth an absolute mint!

You’d probably think that counts as sacrilege and even though I’m an agnostic I’d be inclined to agree. Not least because cathedrals and libraries are both buildings that have a meaning which far transcends the use they are put to.

One answers to our desire for something larger and more mystical than our own experience of the world; the other seeks to enrich that experience through learning. Lose either in significant numbers and our culture becomes that little bit poorer.

In a city like Stoke-on-Trent where we need to raise people’s skills levels and transform their attitude towards learning, making it into a lifelong activity rather than something that happens in the few years you’re at school for, libraries should be at the centre of their community. A space where everyone is made equal by curiosity, a place of shared aspirations that challenge the self- interested individualism of the market.

This isn’t just lefty idealism, learning, culture, positive interaction between sometimes divided communities, all things libraries are ideally placed to promote, are demonstrably effective ways of improving the social and economic wellbeing of individuals. There is, of course, a place for volunteers in this, but the real drive has to come from local and national government.

How we treat our libraries expresses what sort of society we have made for ourselves, tabulates what it values that can’t be recorded on a spread-sheet. If we want ours to be a society where we are more than just producers and consumers; then we should be building libraries not looking for ways to close them down.

For £5.3million the council could pay for Kirsty Alsop to ‘distress’ their old furniture.

Smithfield, the development formerly known as the Central Business District really is the gift that keeps on giving; local tax-payers sleepless nights that is.

It was revealed in the Sentinel yesterday that Stoke-on-Trent City Council is to spend £5.3 million on furniture for its new offices within the CBD, this at a time when budgets are tight and services are being cut.

The money will be used to buy 2116 chairs, 1096 desks and 356 tables for the new offices to be used by the 1700 council staff due to relocate there, part of the money will also be used for furnishings for the town halls in Longton and Tunstall, Stoke Civic Centre and other of its buildings that will remain open after the big move.

Speaking to the Sentinel Alistair Watson, cabinet member for finance said the contract to supply the new furniture would ‘enable the council to take advantage of bulk purchase discounts so we can get the best possible deal.’ Then added with the touch of patronage we’ve come to expect from this council that ‘unfortunately furniture isn’t free.’

Gosh, thanks for reminding me, although I could probably have worked that out for myself. At least I could if I wasn’t so busy wondering why they can’t just use the old furniture in the new offices and thinking that for £5.3 million they could probably pay for Kirsty Alsop to come to Stoke and ‘distress’ the darned stuff with her own fair hands.

Commenting on the contract Dave Conway, leader of the City Independents told the Sentinel ‘this is a huge amount of money, what are they buying; gold plated desks?’

Alan Barret, chair of March on Stoke said, again to the Sentinel, that he realised councils are ‘held to ransom’ when buying furniture, but added that ‘people are already angry at the council spending all this money on the CBD, so they should be showing some common sense and frugality.’

Common sense and frugality, if either were mentioned in the cabinet debates on whether or not to build the CBD in the first place, let alone spending yet more money fitting it out like something off ‘Cribs’ they’d have had to fetch a dictionary to look up what their meaning.

The use of common sense would have entailed a serious discussion as to whether there was any genuine need to build, using borrowed money, a new council HQ at a time when the core services local people depend on are under an existential threat. It would follow logically on that there isn’t and the council’s money should be used to protect vital services, not fund a huge and unnecessary debt. Unfortunately there are precious few photo opportunities in protecting services and so and so the cranes have started swinging and the debts are rising by the day.

As for frugality, that’s something that gets imposed on someone else, whilst the council does its usual Janus faced trick of piously preaching fiscal restraint, claiming that the cuts are nothing to do with them they’re just following orders from the nasty government and then pouring money down the black hole of the leadership’s pet projects like the CBD and the doomed bid to bring HS2 to Stoke.

No wonder Mr Pervez and his cabinet were so keen to force plans for the CBD though the system, had they been exposed to sustained scrutiny they would have dissolved into dust like a mummy left out in the sunlight.

In a city where public faith in the political process is at an all- time low and electoral turnouts are miniscule this is highly dangerous. An electorate that feels its concerns are always going to be ignored by a council dominated by a single party led by people who are out of touch with the public mood will withdraw even further into apathy, perpetuating the cycle of decline that has dragged the city down.

The need grows clearer every day for a greater spread of parties, voices and experiences within the council chamber; a proper opposition that will push the Labour group hard and offer voters a credible alternative to their continued dominance. It may be too late to stop the CBD project, but such an opposition could and should challenge every extra cost imposed in its name.

Whenever I travel into Hanley my eye is caught by the huge cranes swinging girders about as the Smithfield project rises around them. It is a reminder that these controversial buildings are going to be part of the city’s skyline for decades to come; the debt and political damage they have caused may be around for just as long.

Are the Greens the only party willing to talk honestly about taxes?

People with wealth of over £3million should pay a wealth tax of between 1% and 2% according to Green Party leader Natalie Bennett. This would raise between £21.5billiion and £43billion annually.

Wealthy people, Bennett told the BBC on Thursday, can afford to pay more and it is in their interests to do so, she said ‘we’re not talking about dinner ladies who have paid their whole lives into a pension pot. It’s people who have very large assets; frankly we’re talking about people who can afford it.’

If support of imposing a wealth tax the Greens cite the fact that the UK is the seventh most unequal nation in the OECD, with Bennett saying that ‘inequality is a problem we have to tackle.’ They also point to the use of a similar tax in countries such as France, Norway and the Netherlands.

The new tax would, along with the introduction of a living wage and company- wide pay ratios, Bennett said, be part of a ‘range of measures’ the party would implement to ‘address persistent inequality.’

Ms Bennett concluded by saying that at a time when there was a resources boom at one end of society and a cost of living crisis at the other ‘the time has come to introduce a tax on wealth to ensure the richest pay their fair share back to society.’

The art of taxation, so the old saying goes, lies in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing. In practice that means governments tend to talk tough about clamping down of corporations and wealthy individuals who duck their taxes and then do nothing.

Certainly no government, either of the left or the right, so far as such distinctions still apply would dare these days to suggest taxing the rich more for fear of being consumed by a whirlwind of hissing, feathers and flapping. The thing is though the conventional wisdom on tax just doesn’t ring true anymore, public and politicians alike know this to be true; but the latter lack the guts to admit it.

This makes what Natalie Bennett said genuinely radical, there has always been a shortage of out of the box thinking in politics, but just lately anyone capable of even attempting it has been an endangered species. The right wing press, if they pass comment at all and they tend to ignore the Greens, will no doubt portray this as a bellow of ‘soak the rich’ coming from the far left; it is nothing of the sort.

What Natalie Bennett has done is have the courage to speak openly about something most people have known for years, the current tax system doesn’t work because proportionally the riches people pay the least and the government colludes with them in doing so in the name of free enterprise.

It wasn’t always like this, once upon a time the rich saw their good fortune as coming with responsibilities, motivated by a mix of paternalism and philanthropy they routinely put back into the society that had helped to generate their wealth. Then along came the welfare state and it all went to pot, not, as the right would have it because it made the poor less enterprising; but because it made the rich less reliable.

All of a sudden tax became a burden to be dodged rather than a chance to put something back into society. Just look at the world it has given us, not, I fear, a paradise or justly rewarded striving so much as a cramped and ill at ease place where the lines are growing outside the food banks and the rich hide within gated communities.

Public and politicians alike know we can’t go on like this, something has to change or something is going to give with nasty consequences. Nobody, including the Green Party, is talking about taxing the rich ‘until the pips squeak’, even if they paid an extra 2% in tax every year someone with assets worth over £3million would still be comfortably off.

More to the point the extra revenue could be used to preserve and improve public services, meaning the impact of deep generational poverty and ill health could be addressed, making ours a fairer and safer society in which to live.

The media might not be impressed by what Natalie Bennett has to say, not yet anyway, in time they might just have to sit up and take notice. After the European elections the big story was how well Ukip had done, nobody noticed the Greens coming in quietly in fourth place, they should have done though.

All across the country the Green Party is quietly growing in strength, taking some council seats and coming second and third in others, it is a young party with a youthful and active membership at a time when the mainstream parties are looking ever more old, tired and out of touch.

The thing about young people and young parties is that they aren’t tied to the old ways of thinking; when it comes to sorting out our complicated and unfair tax system that is no bad thing.