Another Stubborn Part of An Ethnographer in Paradise. 

To live in the West in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is an extraordinary gift of fortune. Though we like to complain, we would not swap our health and wealth prospects for those of by-gone ages. A young man or woman today will, typically, have unprecedented experiences available and unfolding. They would not swap for a birth date of 150 years earlier, 100 years earlier, or even 50 years previous. It may be deeply unfashionable, but sometimes it is good to count one's blessings.

Of course, I write as the Basse Corniche awakens under the garden of my apartment. I can see that the Christina Ois resting in the sunny bay and, if I stand on my tip-toes, I can report that I am the immediate, rear neighbour of The Edge of U2. I can just about see the back-gate and yellow chimneys of his beach-house as the hill slopes the short distance to the Mediterranean. Next door to The Edge, of course, is Eze Les Roses, the wonderfully named house of his Dublin band-mate, Bono. To my eyes, both houses are quite beautiful, especially Eze Les Roses which looks as is if might be an early example of French Modernism. I could easily be wrong and so I will try to find out more.

It does seem to me that this life is as I put it, an extraordinary gift of fortune, but as I say this I am actually not thinking immediately of the Riviera. I am just a.n.other holidaymaker here, another face in the Marche U supermarket. Rather, I am thinking again of the city where I grew up, Manchester. Although overall it is a very mixed experience and can be brutal, for most and for most of the time, life in Manchester is good. And the city has a special claim in this great, globalised world, for it was, of course, the crucible, the test-bed, the pilot of the modern industrialised age. The industrial revolution roared out from the North of England, but Manchester was the epicentre of the quake. And today Manchester can claim an extraordinary heritage in technological and social innovation. Manchester's c.v. reads with the railway, steam, atomic theory, and the computer. It has the Trade Union movement, the suffragettes and associations with Marx and Engels.

When one considers such a c.v., one might ask why Manchester is not one of the richest cities in the world. Why isn't the crucible also a leader today?  For it isn't. Manchester is enjoying substantial renewal, it is difficult to get a hotel bed there on almost any weekend, but it isn't in the first division of world cities. It isn't a London, a Shanghai, a New York, a Paris or a Madrid. It isn't Rome. I am told it is not a Sydney or a Vancouver either. Mancunians, with their legendary selective vision, may protest this but culturally, for sheer scale, for sheer wealth, it is not amongst the elite. Not even now. Why not? Why did the fruits of its innovation, of its leadership, not come back to it in a more fulsome way. Where did its wealth go? And why?

Manchester is a very good contender but not an elite-player. Deansgate and St Anne's reward the visitor, and its rural hinterlands will surprise many, but it is not London. It can claim to be cool, savvy, innovative and niche, but might it, once upon a time, have had still greater aspirations? When it led the world into a new age, might it have considered itself to have a still greater future ahead of it?

Where did all the money go?

Of course, there are many ways in which money can leak from a city or regional economy. It can, for example, never properly arrive in the first place, but be managed from distance by international financiers and institutions. Some trickle-down will occur as wages are paid, but unless there is an opportunity for local taxation, money will wash back in the direction from whence it came. Moreover, a new middle class will itself be mobile. If a city cannot keep its newly-wealthy, then it loses finance, knowledge and emotional know-how. Money goes to where the people want to be (hence the dramatic success of the French Riviera since the 1960s. ) 

It is time to talk about devolution.  Two immediate problems afflict anyone who raises this issue in the UK. The first is that it is taken to be an anti-London stance. I love London; its architecture and world-role are beyond contest. Its vowel sounds must roll like a dream for so many of the world's dispossessed. It is League One, Serie A, Premiership. So, my toe-entry into the devolution debate is not anything to do with being anti-London. Like Dublin, like New York, Madrid, Barcelona and Paris, it is on my personal list of favourites. However, the second problem to afflict any would-be devolver is the 'B' word; bureaucracy. Aren't proponents of devolution simply likely to put more administrators, more committees and more politicians between the people and a decision. Isn't it is a recipe for bureaucracy? This argument carries some punch.

I think that we need to revisit our base concepts about public services before we think again about devolution. In the end, the two go hand in hand. We need a dramatic vision of an innovative public sector to accompany a claim for devolution. Perhaps the failure to rethink and encapsulate a vision of public service was actually a large part of the failure of John Prescott's regional devolution agenda. It felt like people were being asked to embrace more of the same. Perhaps what was needed was a more exciting model in the first place, and thence the claim for local control.

And it is the creation of this exciting vision that is the hard part. This is a theme that I will return to should chance allow. For now, I'd just say that technology is very often the key for new technology may change the way we organise (see, for example, Clayton Christensen writing on Social Innovation in a recent Harvard Business Review article). Now, in the age of the internet, in the age of Web 2.0,  might we be able to rethink how government works? Might we be able to manage the transaction costs of government so that we can efficiently localise control? Might we build a better case for devolution if we can also claim that it will be associated with a lighter-weight but more effective public-sector?

All of which brings me finally to the death of Anthony H Wilson. There is a fine appreciation hereon Dave Carter's ONE Manchester blogsite. I am not going to go into all the Factory history here, others know more and have written better. My contribution to the commemoration of Anthony H Wilson is to say that when I read Dave Carter's blog, and put this together with Anthony's recent campaigning for devolution, I began to think that here was a man who could maybe have helped put the triangle together:

New technology / New Model of Public Sector / New Devolution of Control  

A triangle with two sides is no good. You need three.

This is another reason to mourn Anthony H Wilson. Maybe, just maybe, for all his achievements, his greatest work was still ahead.

Finally, I finish these thoughts in Monaco, latterly home to John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-1993). This other Wilson was a great Mancunian and came to live in Monaco in the 1970s. Recently, a UK media troubled by stories of youth violence has been revisiting A Clockwork Orange, one of his greatest novels. For me, Burgess is one of the reasons to be in Monaco. Like his namesake Anthony H, John Anthony Burgess was more-interested in the legend of his life than in its contestable reality. But what a life it was. What a legend.

Read the two parts of his autobiography, 'Little Wilson and Big God' and 'You've Had Your Time.' 

As I have been writing so much about Manchester today, herein I launch my campaign for some official commemoration of Burgess in the city. He is one of the greatest.