Hull: end of the line

Have you ever been to Hull? Neither had I, until I moved there. It is the city that Britain forgets. 245,000 live there, but you’d not know it from the UK’s media or from talking to its people.

It is off the map, geographically and literally. The M62 motorway traffic chugs its way through two of the north’s success stories: Manchester and Leeds. But it gives up before getting to Hull.

Trains streak by as fast as any in the UK (125mph), but they don’t bother with Hull either. From Scotland you have to get a scruffy regional train from York; from London you had to change trains at Doncaster (unless you were able to be on the one direct train of the day) and get a train which made you think: 'Why bother with fairground rides?' I'll just get on the bounciest train in Europe. At least that’s changed: an enterprising private train company now runs several direct services from London.

Its industries used to be a crucial part of Home and Empire. But being a centre of fishing and a great port didn't prove to be the best starting point in postwar Britain. Liverpool had the Beatles and is European City of Culture in 2008. Hull vies for the highest teenage pregnancy and truancy rates in the UK, the lowest GCSE pass rates, the highest levels of drug and sexual abuse, the lowest house prices.

What’s to be done? Certainly the corrupt local Labour government hasn’t helped. Amongst other sorry tales, when the local phone company, the last large remaining council-owned one in the country, was sold off. The resulting windfall (some £650million) did provide the Kingston Communications Stadium, but a lot fell between the municipal cracks.

Whizzy schemes to brighten council estates and deals with property developers to build glossy retail parks on waste land are not enough; what is needed is sustained investment in attracting the industries that Britain currently does well in (Leeds has gone for legal and financial services), but that wouldn't mind being in one of the cheapest operating environments in the country. It won't be easy, but if Hull Trains can pop up to offer a train service that at least approaches what the city deserves (6 trains a day), then that's a start.

Not enough

As the Middle East takes itself over the brink again, plenty of people will find plenty wrong with the start of this sentence. By that I mean that there are the two main sides and within that definition there are many important grades of subtlety and difference. Each side will argue that it is not ‘the Middle East’ that has made northern Israel and southern Lebanon a war zone: it was the Israelis who started it. Or Hizbollah.

Each news reporter must balance his or her own knowledge and the tastes of their employer in reporting what happens. But the conclusion they inevitably reach – that the cycles of violence will be further perpetuated by the piece of violence they are reporting on – tells us nothing. It’s a conflict that vividly demonstrates the importance of understanding history – though even that statement may merely direct a person to the biases of the past.

But it’s too simple to back out of history, too easy to say that the violence will continue unless it stops. It is right to ask the hard questions, because only then can we begin to understand the hard actions of those involved. It will nevertheless only be a beginning – never an ending – to our insight.

To apply this closer to home, it is not enough for Britons to ride the wave of partial prosperity that has been ours since the early 1990s whilst employing our tolerance for wrongness and farce to disgustingly high levels. By ‘not enough’ I mean that we should all be more aware of what the standards of public life are in Britain now (and aware that they have been both worse and better in the past), aware of the vital role our as-good-as-you-can-hope-for media plays. We should take politics and investigative media seriously, we should – as Churchill put it – ‘seek no sordid gain’ and we should be aware of what is right and what is wrong. There certainly is such a thing as society and we’re all living in it right now.

This is not a call to arms, but a call to thought. A call that says that laughing snidely about the Labour government’s shabbiness is not enough, that accepting appalling service is not enough, that being badly managed as a country, a region or a person is not enough. It’s easy to write this and much harder to do anything about it, I know, but, sadly, that conclusion is also not enough.

House prices

Britain’s land is very green, which Bill Bryson so rightly described as “an explosion in a chlorophyll factory”, is often remarkably pleasant for such a crowded place. It is also awesomely expensive.

Admittedly this is not true if the only use for a piece of land is agricultural. There the future remains highly partial, and often distinctly bleak. But watch the transformation if there is even a whiff of planning permission: British property prices reach new heights by the day.

A flat that you actually want to live in will cost £300,000 anywhere near the centre of London, £250,000 a short suburban train ride away and £200,000 a longer suburban train ride away. Any of these is most unlikely to have more than one bedroom. For Edinburgh, the starting price is £140,000; for Leeds, £120,000. There have been plenty of times in the last few years when prices have risen in a day by more than the vast majority of Britons earn in a day.

Those that don’t own property emit wry snorts when asked if they’re thinking of buying 'a place'. Those that do own property are working out many things: how to release equity; how to avoid the inheritance tax bill (Gordon Brown’s spending habits mean he is in permanent search of nice little earners, and this one is growing extremely rapidly).

But what of the other effects of these enormously high house and property prices?

Transport use has risen faster than anyone predicted. Is this because we are so enamoured of our buckled, crammed roads? Are we inspired to lumber along our farcically-privatised train network? No. There are many factors involved, but one must surely be house prices. Why do people commute ever-bigger distances? For the fun of it? Or is it partly because with each train station or motorway junction the house price falls and with it the burden of repayment once the banks (who can’t count the money fast enough; see recent profit stories) have taken their slice?

Our birth rate is declining. But when you are paying a vastly greater proportion of your post-tax income in mortgage payments, can anyone be surprised? Each child is estimated to cost £170,000 to bring up. Statistics prove anything, but what is certain is that children are damned expensive even if you borrow clothes for them from everyone you know, don’t buy them toys and put them in state-funded school.

And what about career choice? Graduates from British universities have the highest-ever level of personal debt in real terms. That is hardly surprising: the universities, starved of money for so long by successive governments, are desperate to gain some extra cash in any way the Government will allow. Suppose you graduated this summer. Your debts may be over £20,000, depending on how frugal you were, how much your parents paid for and what summer or part-time jobs you did.

Perhaps you want to do something a little away from the milkround mainstream: journalism, work for a charity or a museum, make films, be a social worker. If you want to have a family home (and Britons’ liking for owning their home goes hand in hand with the fact that there are fewer chances to rent in a stable, long-term way) you will need a Lottery win, richer partner, beneficent parents or all three to afford a place to call home. You cannot live in a cheap place on a modest salary and get a home of your own. At the other end of the scale, only City salaries have kept pace: even senior civil servants would find buying a suitable home difficult were they not already on the property ladder.

The reasons for the unprecedented amount of money located in the UK housing market are various – re-investment of gains by elders and investors; the cheapest money in fifty years; a buoyant employment market; increasing concentrations of wealth in urban centres; the lack of capital gains tax on first properties.

New Labour has enjoyed the benefits of this in the form of an ever richer-feeling electorate. Britain builds well under half the number of houses it did between the wars, when the fragmentation of families was as nothing compared to now. Nor was the population, which was then around 45 million. The Government's has a role in both. And what if you can't afford even the tiniest flat, despite your hard work and commitment? Tough.

If you haven’t been to Edinburgh, go now, this very instant. If you’ve had the persisting nag of thinking that Britain just isn’t delightful enough given how crowded and expensive it is, this is part of the answer. If you’ve been puzzling what British cities were like before the ravages of war bombing and post-war planning and construction chewed over them, this is part of the answer. If you’re wondering whether any British city can balance the charm of smallness with the sense of being at the centre of things, here it is.

You can stand on a hill and breath in the fresh air, stirring architecture, volcanic topography and sense of dynamism in Edinburgh as in no other city. And, despite being a hub for a government, the world's largest arts festival, a separate legal system and one of the UK's most important financial centres, it's still cheap. You can rent a room (with great views and soaring ceilings in a desirable part of town from which you can walk to the centre) for £250 a month; you can dine out excellently for £10 a head; you can get to the (long, sandy, beautiful) beach for £4 return; a day's travel on the (locally-owned, well-run) bus network costs £2.50.

Yet it’s not perfection, not quite. There’s the weather, which is an average of four degrees down on London. That’s not much; it’s more the fact that you can never trust summer to arrive and stay – it’s a tempestuous, flighty lover who will listen to no remonstrances about providing some balance to the bitter wind of winter. But when the summer is good, the delight is double.

The road surfaces are dreadful, but there is a highly ambitious heavy and light rail construction programme in hand. The nightlife outside of the festivals isn’t as good as Glasgow, but you can stay in the (smoke-free) pub until 1 in the morning and the music scene is jumping. And you can be in Glasgow in the time it takes to cross London. There is a nagging parochial quality to the Parliamentary debate and governmental action, though Holyrood's construction costs look very reasonable when compared with the Dome.

Someone recently commented in the Scottish Parliament that Edinburgh watched as the world visited it every August for the festival, and then watched as they all left again. Retention of talent is one of Scotland's biggest problems - its population is shrinking still - although it is making some efforts in a UK that seems to be happy to be ever more London-centric.

But one visit to Edinburgh might change your thoughts, especially in the age of broadband.