construction | Andy Roberts

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Tunneling and Underground Construction Academy

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Tunneling and Underground Construction Academy
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April 18 2012, 1:19pm | Comments »
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Olympic stadium completed on time

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/29/olympic-stadium-completed-on-time

London 2012 Olympic Stadium designers hail ‘the beginning of the end’ of the construction phase as the main arena comes in on schedule and under budget.

This article titled “Olympic stadium completed on time” was written by Owen Gibson, for The Guardian on Tuesday 29th March 2011 19.51 UTC The designers of the Olympic Stadium in east London have hailed its completion as “the beginning of the end” for the construction phase of the 2012 Games. As International Olympic Committee inspectors arrived in the city for a three-day visit to check on progress, organisers hoped the good news on the completion of the Stratford stadium would overshadow an ongoing row with the British Olympic Association over how any hypothetical profit would be distributed. Lord Coe, the chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, watched Frankie Fredericks, a four-time Olympic silver medallist, lay the last piece of turf on the infield. The £486m stadium is the second major venue on the Olympic Park to be finished, after the Velodrome was unveiled earlier last month. “I do not want anybody to run away with the idea that this stadium is ready to stage a track-and-field championship tomorrow,” said Coe. “But as a chairman of an organising committee to be able to tick off this venue is terrific. It is fantastic. I think it will be an intimate theatre for sport and it has fantastic legacy potential, too.” Work began on the 80,000-seat stadium in May 2008 and the Olympic Delivery Authority, which is responsible for spending £8.1bn of public money on the infrastructure to host the Games, said its completion was a “huge milestone”. “The Olympic Stadium has been finished on time and under budget,” said ODA chairman John Armitt. “To complete a complicated project such as this in less than three years is testament to the skill and professionalism of the UK construction industry.” Rod Sheard, of stadium architects Populous, said he was looking forward to watching “this innovative design perform for the first time”. He added: “Its completion marks the beginning of the end of the construction phase of London’s Olympic Games.”

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March 29 2011, 3:35pm | Comments »
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French high-speed rail on track but progress too slow on commuter lines

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/22/french-high-speed-rail-on-track-but-progress-too-slow-on-commuter-lines

France’s TGV connecting with Eurostar is the envy of Europe, but the country’s commuter train services are creaking after years of under-investment

This article titled “French high-speed rail on track but progress too slow on commuter lines” was written by Dan Milmo, for The Guardian on Monday 21st March 2011 18.22 UTC If you want evidence that the French rail network isn’t all high-speed brilliance and world-class service, then pay a visit to the platforms in the bowels of Gare du Nord on a weekday morning. At only 7am commuters are vacuum-packed into carriages – it’s just like home. The most powerful person on the French railways, Guillaume Pepy, admits the system has unwanted similarities with Britain’s. Describing some of the worst pinch points around Paris, he says: “It is like Clapham Junction.” For decades France’s national rail operator, SNCF, has invested billions of euros into making its high-speed network the envy of Europe. France has 2,000km of ultra-fast track, compared with our tokenistic-looking 109km. But until recently, the country’s regional services have been neglected at the expense of their speedier cousins. Pepy, SNCF’s 52-year-old chief executive, who describes himself as an “old railway worker”, says commuters have been overlooked as a huge effort was launched to lure the long-distance traveller out of planes and cars and on to trains. “There are passenger protests every day and they are right. I would like to have mass-transit services with the same quality of service as the TGV [high-speed rail]. Let’s put all the mass transit services to the same level. If we can run 850 TGV services per day, why can we not serve millions of people at 120km per hour every day? We need more innovation, money, the best engineers. It will take five, 10 years – I don’t know. But there is no reason why we should have poor mass-transit services and brilliant TGV services.” Jean-Paul Jacquot, a vice-president at France’s rail passenger watchdog, FNAUT, tells a tale of historic under-investment that will be familiar to UK commuters. “The rail network has been neglected during the past 10 to 20 years and therefore it breaks down quite often.” Pepy talks of at least 15 “traffic jam” points around Paris – both the French and British rail networks carry more than one billion passenger journeys a year. While Pepy is turning round SNCF’s commuter arm, construction is drawing to a close on the seventh TGV line, between the eastern town of Belfort and Dijon in the centre. Despite the successful opening of the modern channel tunnel link, most of the UK’s network dates from the Victorian era. But Pepy, an alumnus of the elite École Nationale d’Administration, is too diplomatic to compare Britain’s rail network unfavourably with its continental rival. “Personally I think that sometimes you are over-criticising your own railways. You have done a lot of things. Look at what you have done in terms of rolling stock; High Speed One. It is the best [high-speed line] in terms of reliability in Europe. I have to say that it works better than in France.” Given that France and the UK are learning the same painful lesson on commuter routes – under-invest at your peril – its extensive high-speed network still makes France the example to follow in rail. Pepy takes out a “crazy but fun” map that shrinks the distance between French cities according to the speed of their TGV links. Under this form of cartography, the sprawling country resembles a clenched fist as major cities like Marseille and Strasbourg are brought within hours of the capital. “You can see that France has shrunk dramatically,” he says. “It means that the communities, business, culture, intellect, health, everything is closer than it was.” In the UK, the high-speed London-to-Birmingham route is earmarked to open in 2026 but the £17bn project has been criticised by environmentalists and business leaders as a waste of money. Pepy is sympathetic – he says France has been through the same debate “seven times” – but he is adamant that the UK will benefit from high-speed. “Everything about high-speed is related to the long-term. We build the line for 50, 70 years and the system is a long-term answer to the community’s needs. If you just consider it on a short-term basis you would not be able to find a good business case.” Looking further afield, he adds: “I am very impressed that China has the same problem. It said ten years ago are we going to develop air transportation or have a high-speed rail system? And China made the choice in favour of high-speed rail.” As agreeable as he is, surely Pepy will be drawn into a testier state by a question on fares, the great bugbear of the British rail passenger. Instead, he is sanguine. TGV fares compare favourably with airlines and up to 65% of the price of commuter fares is subsidised by local authorities. Jacquot agrees: for all the problems with non-TGV services, exorbitant cost is not one of them. Pepy adds: “It is a decision to subsidise fares instead of building new roads, which is an historical choice in France.” Recent investment in transport indicates that the UK has made the same choice, but we’re a long way from catching up with le TGV.

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March 22 2011, 8:04am | Comments »
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Essex reptiles settle into new Wiltshire home

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/21/essex-reptiles-settle-into-new-wiltshire-home

24,000 adders, common lizards and other species moved from oil refinery site to reserves to make way for London Gateway container port.

This article titled “Essex reptiles settle into new Wiltshire home” was written by Steven Morris, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 21st March 2011 14.23 UTC They had lived peacefully in their tens of thousands on an old refinery site in Essex. Now after what is thought to be the UK’s biggest artificial movement of animals, 24,000 adders, grass snakes, common lizards and slow worms are settling well into new homes 140 miles away. The reptiles were transported from the east of England to reserves in Wiltshire to make way for the £1.5bn London Gateway container port and logistics park. Since 1998 the creatures have been captured by hand and moved in vans – early in the morning so they did not dry out – around the M25 and down the M4 before being released into their new homes. The reserves in Wiltshire have now been declared full and this year the relatively few remaining reptiles at the Essex site will be rehoused closer to another reserve closer to home. Marcus Pearson, environmental manager for DP World, said the move seemed to have been successful. Reptiles that had been moved and then recaptured to check their wellbeing seemed healthy and doing well in their new home. Construction is under way at London Gateway, 25 miles to the east of central London. Once complete the development will allow the world’s biggest container ships to berth close to the capital. But one of the challenges the developers faced was rehousing the animals that had moved on to the site after an oil refinery ceased operating in 1999. Homes were found nearby for the carefully protected great crested newts. But no new local habitat could be found for the reptiles so the decision was taken to move them to reserves managed by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. DP World also bought a chunk of land to link areas owned by the trust. It has moved 290 adders, 400 grass snakes, 17,000 common lizards and 6,000 slow worms. Pearson said finding a new home was tricky because they could not be moved to places where they were already large populations of a particular creature. The Wiltshire reserves are now judged to be full and the remaining reptiles found on the Gateway site this year will be moved to the RSPB reserve, West Canvey Marsh.

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March 21 2011, 4:45pm | Comments »
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London Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/20/london-orbit-tower-rises-at-olympic-park

Video show the construction well underway of the Orbit Tower at the London 2012 Olympic Park site in Stratford East London. Click here to view the embedded video. The 115m tall art sculpture with a public viewing platform is formally named the Arcelor Mittal Orbit, and will be 22m higher than New York’s Statue of Liberty when completed, which looks like a matter of weeks as the pr-constructed iron pieces can be seen waiting on the site ready to be welded into place. Further pictures and videos of the growing installation will be uploaded over the coming period. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park

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March 20 2011, 5:26am | Comments »
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Tsunami survivors in town that vanished search for hope and shelter

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/19/tsunami-survivors-in-town-that-vanished-search-for-hope-and-shelter

On one of the most badly hit parts of Japan‘s coast, roads have been cleared and a supply chain is being rebuilt after the deadly earthquake and tsunami

This article titled “Tsunami survivors in town that vanished search for hope and shelter” was written by Jonathan Watts in Minami Sanriku, for The Observer on Saturday 19th March 2011 19.43 UTC Yasuo Kono is digging. So are his daughter and two grandchildren. They scrape deep into the gravel beside a block of concrete that is all that remains of their former home. It is tough and, so far, unrewarding work. But just over a week after their world was turned upside down by the tsunami, Kono is pinning his hopes for the family’s recovery on what they might find in the rubble. “We’re looking for our safe. It’s got everything in it that we need to start again – a million yen, our seal, our family registration documents and our bank books,” he says. “It was very heavy, so I don’t think the tsunami can have taken it very far.” This is optimistic, given the elemental force that tossed cars and trucks around like children’s toys and ripped up the massive concrete sea wall that was supposed to protect Minami Sanriku. But Kono – a widower for two years – half-jokingly believes the spirits in the family shrine will aid his mission: “I think my old wife’s ashes are down there too. She was very careful about money and would never have let it get away from her.” It may seem premature to consider money. But for survivors of Japan’s deadliest postwar disaster, as much as for the government, there is a growing need to calculate the scale of their losses and how to fund a path to recovery. Kono and his family want to get out of the disaster zone of Minami Sanriku, which was pulverised by the tsunami. The roads are open and fuel supplies are starting to return to the area, but unless they can find money, they will be stuck at the shelters that have become home to almost half a million people. In this fishing community, the biggest shelter is the Ocean Plaza gymnasium, where more than 700 people are crammed into corridors, stairwells and offices. Some have made walls from cardboard boxes. Most mark out territory with layers of blankets and futons. It is an impressively functional instant community that appears well organised and polite. Dinner queues are scrupulously observed and people are as careful about taking their shoes off before stepping on cardboard as they are before entering a home. Doctors and nurses provide basic medical care at a makeshift clinic in the former training room. Weightlifting equipment and exercise bikes have been pushed into one corner to make space for the patients, pharmacy and office. Most of the sick are elderly patients with high blood pressure, at least one of whom has died from a combination of cold, poor nutrition and inadequate drug supplies. “We need more medicine, especially drugs to lower blood pressure and laxatives,” said Masafumi Nishizawa, a local doctor who has been running the clinic since his former hospital was destroyed. He was confident that the acute problems were over, but said the chronic problems were likely to get worse in the weeks ahead. “People here have no baths, no beds and no toilets. They will get tired and vulnerable to contagious diseases… It’s a real concern.” But, after days of survivors having to cope on just one piece of bread or ball of rice, the food situation is improving. Saturday’s dinner in the Ocean Plaza disaster shelter is a boiled egg, a helping of rice and a scoop of seaweed and vegetables. It is the third meal of the day. Minami Sanriku’s mayor, Jin Sato, says he can see hope that the worst might be over. Two roads into the town have been cleared. More supplies are flowing in. The gymnasium is now stacked with hundreds of 50kg bags of rice, piles of donated clothes, giant bundles of blankets, countless boxes of toiletries, instant noodles and nappies. Sato has started to turn his mind from short-term survival to the construction of longer-term housing. “We have food now, but I cannot say it is enough. We have to provide so many meals. We really need more petrol. Without that, we cannot transport supplies and people.” Uncertainty plagues the communities almost as much as the instability of the ground beneath their feet. As in other evacuation centres, there is a noticeboard here, where people post requests for information about loved ones and scan through registers of survivors at other evacuation centres. NTT, Japan’s giant telecoms company, has restored mobile phone signals and organised a charging point outside the shelter. Other help appears to be on its way. Petrol tankers have become far more visible on the local roads and drivers are filling up again at the pumps – albeit often after waiting for several hours. On the road into Minami Sanriku, several shops outside the disaster zone have re-opened and are offering fresh stocks on the shelves for the first time in a week. The 24-hour convenience stores – one of the symbols of modern Japan – expect to follow suit soon. “In the five years I have worked here, we have never closed for even a second. But I had to shut up shop two days ago because we ran out of things to sell,” says Toshiro Abe, manager of a local FamilyMart. “My boss is coming over today to work out how we can start business again.” The economic impact of the earthquake and tsunami has been conservatively estimated at £120bn, but in a country that now faces rolling blackouts, dozens of wrecked ports along a large stretch of coastline and a nuclear industry in crisis mode, this looks like an underestimate. Japan is unsure how many of its people were taken by the sea. The confirmed fatalities are 7,348 – easily outstripping the 1995 Kobe earthquake as the deadliest disaster in the nation’s post-war history. But the number of missing is far from clear. It could be nearly 11,000 – which is the number of reports filed to Japan’s National Police Agency – or even double or triple that figure because many people have been without communications since the earthquake so have no way of reporting a person missing. Minami Sanriku highlights the difficulties of making this grim calculation. In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, it was feared that the death toll might be higher here than anywhere else because the destruction was so widespread. Initial accounts suggested 10,000 of the 17,000 population were missing, presumed dead. Yet the official casualty count is just 214 bodies. When the Observer asked mayor Sato to account for the discrepancy, he said the problem lay in the manner of counting. “At first we assumed only the 7,000 at the public shelters had survived, but we realise now that many others sought refuge with friends or left the town. That was our mistake. I still can’t tell you how many are dead. We still don’t know how to make an accurate estimate.” Yoko Saito has come to her own conclusion. Crying in front of the debris that was once her childhood home, she believes her mother is dead, though her body has never been found and she is not included on any casualty list. “She was here when it hit. We have been to all the shelters and cannot find her. I came here to look for something to remember her by. But there is nothing. Nothing at all.” When Saito was a small child, her mother carried her to safety from a tsunami. Since then, the town has built a huge sea defence, run simulations on where the next wave might hit and drilled its citizens on where to evacuate. “I think my mother would have remembered what happened last time and assumed she was safe,” sobbed Saito. The same story can be heard at several points along the coastline. This part of Japan is prone to tsunamis and has some of the world’s best precautions against them. Concrete sea defences have been erected across the mouths of harbours. Residents are instructed each year about warnings and the evacuation plans for their area. But these preparations were based on the last tsunami, 1.5 metres high, which struck 50 years ago. The one that struck last Friday was 10 times higher. The sea walls did not stand a chance. Nor did many of the people who thought they were on safe ground. Takuma Abe, a 36-year-old chiropractor, had rushed his pregnant wife and mother into the hills. They were halfway up the slope when the first surge arrived. “I didn’t think the tsunami could ever get that high, but it caught us,” he says. “We got out and tried to climb on to a rail track, but my arm got trapped and I couldn’t help them up. They were washed away.” His wife’s body was found nearby. His mother, remarkably, survived and is now in hospital. Abe has volunteered to help in the shelter’s clinic. “I have to do something to stop myself going crazy. I still don’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. I can’t think of the future. My wife is gone. My home is gone. All I have in the world is my driver’s licence and 2,000 yen. But that’s normal here. Everyone has lost so much.” Yet there is hope too in the refugee centre. Takako Abe is nine months pregnant, but was able to move rapidly to safety just before the tsunami struck. “I didn’t pay much attention to the warnings until people screamed at me to evacuate. I couldn’t run very fast, but luckily my home is close to a slope. I was too scared to look back, but I could hear the tsunami behind me. It destroyed my home,” she says. She is now safely ensconced in the Ocean Plaza evacuation centre, where she is close to doctors, medicine and ambulances. The noise and germs, and the lack of sanitation and nutrition, are far from ideal for a pregnant woman. Sometimes there are just two small meals a day. But Abe is just glad that she, her baby, her husband and her parents are still alive. “We’ve lost our home, but so has everyone here. We are luckier than most,” she says. “It’s no good dwelling on things that can’t be changed. We have to look forward and think positively. Things will work out.”

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March 19 2011, 3:43pm | Comments »
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2012 Olympic Park: after the Games

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/17/2012-olympic-park-after-the-games

The man and woman guiding the future of the London 2012 Olympic Park after the Games themselves are over were questioned by the London Assembly yesterday.

This article titled “2012 Olympic Park: after the Games” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 17th March 2011 14.27 UTC The Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC) is the organisation responsible for making the vast public investment in next summer’s three weeks of sporting endeavour pay off for decades after the medal podiums have been packed away. Its chair is Labour Baroness Margaret Ford of Cunninghame, formerly of government regeneration agency English Partnerships. Its chief executive is Andrew Altman, who used to be Philadelphia’s Deputy Mayor for planning and economic development. Together they took questions from the London Assembly yesterday. Their answers both solidified in my mind’s eye the shape the Olympic Park is intended to take after the Games and showed how much of that shape is still shrouded in mist. The points that interested me most were as follows: One: The OPLC top brass are upbeat. Ford kicked off with a list of big achievements over the past twelve months. One was the rescheduling of £600 million of debt accrued by the London Development Agency – the economic development arm of the London Mayor – in buying up the many small plots of land that now comprise the Olympic Park. Both the present and the previous governments have enabled this. Ford was very grateful: “The original debt schedule had the company starting to pay back that £600 million very, very quickly. We’d have had to just put a for sale sign up and flogged it to the highest bidder. We don’t have to do that now.” She professed delight too with the new park masterplan, unveiled by Boris Johnson and Jeremy Bunt (sic) last autumn. Ford described it as “rooted in family housing,” significantly more (40 percent) of which is now envisaged. She was delighted too by the government earmarking £220 million over the next four years for switching the park from Games mode to post-Games community mode. This sum, she said, will pay for all the necessary infrastructure for “the early stages of developing the entire site: the signage the security the lighting, the children’s playgrounds, the toilets.” She was chuffed too that a preferred anchor tenant – West Ham, in partnership with Newham Council – has been found for the main stadium. Looking ahead, Ford saw finding equivalent occupants of the giant International Broadcast Centre – big enough to hold five jumbo jets – as a major challenge in the coming year. “It’s not going to be one company,” she said. Instead, it will need to be “the right group.” The adjoining Main Press Centre too will need filling once the global army of Games hacks have disappeared. Market testing has been undertaken. Ford was candid about this part of “legacy” being the company’s “most difficult task.” Altman described wanting to have everything required for the post-Games evolution of the Park in place before the Games themselves, including operators for all the sports venues and other attractions, notably the rapidly-forming ArcelorMittal Orbit. Two: It’s not clear how affordable the park’s “affordable housing” will be The new masterplan envisages up to 11,000 homes being built in the park eventually, including about 1,300 already under construction in the athlete’s village. Lib Dem AM Mike Tuffrey was pleased to be reassured by Ford that she still thinks 35 percent of that 11,000 will be “affordable”, though that term can encompass anything from houses or flats for “social rent” to the more expensive “intermediate” variety that provide a toe hold on the London housing ladder. The government is introducing a new “affordable rent” model, which many feel will generate homes for rent that people on low incomes will find far from affordable. When asked by Labour’s Nicky Gavron how many of the park’s “affordable” homes might be for social rent – within the range of households on low incomes – Ford explained that the OPLC was still trying to work through the implications of the new model. To me, these already appear ominous. Bids for the first 800 post-Games homes have recently been invited. Three: Leyton Orient will not find a new home on the park. Ask Owen Gibson. Four: It’s hard to tell how much local people will benefit from new jobs, opportunities and skills Ford told Labour’s John Biggs, one the two AMs who represent the Olympic boroughs that, “Every investment that we make in the park we have to look at through the prism of, how does this help with education, how does this help with jobs, how does it help provide opportunities for local enterprise or social enterprise.” Biggs thinks, rightly, that delivering this community legacy is vital if the Olympic project is to succeed. His Labour colleague Jennette Arnold, the other Olympic boroughs representative, asked if Ford and Altman were committed to creating local employment for the full diversity of local people. Ford said she hoped to “import” the good work done in this field by the Olympic Delivery Authority and said that over the next twenty years the development of the park – in construction, horticulture and so on – should provide “a generation’s work opportunities”. That’s an aspiration to keep an eye on. Five: the park’s attractions won’t immediately be available to the public after the Games Conservative AM Andrew Boff extracted some detail about this. Altman explained that “a huge amount of work” will have to be done before the park can be re-opened after the Games: seats will be removed from the aquatics centre; the main stadium will be transformed; the handball stadium will be converted. Ford said they were chewing over where it is “better to put the fence up round the park, make it secure and safe, get the job done really quickly then open the whole thing up,” or better to cordon off and open up different bits at different times. She was “moving towards” the former option, but no decision had been taken. Either way, she and Altman are thinking summer 2013 “at the earliest,” before “a staggered opening” of venues and attractions starts. You can watch a webcast of the hour-long session here (assembly plenary, 16 March) which is followed by Sir Simon Milton, Boris Johnson’s chief of staff, taking questions about the transformation of the OPLC into a development corporation under mayoral control later this year. Your comments and queries on any aspect of yesterday’s business are very welcome.

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March 17 2011, 12:15pm | Comments »
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Mervyn King: rebalance global economy or risk a trade war

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/15/mervyn-king-rebalance-global-economy-or-risk-a-trade-war

Funny the way nobody seems to ever listen to the governor of The Bank of England.

This article titled “Mervyn King: rebalance global economy or risk a trade war” was written by Larry Elliott, economics editor, for The Guardian on Monday 14th March 2011 07.05 UTC Mervyn King will be able to see for himself the devastation wrought by the natural disaster in Japan when he gives a speech in Tokyo today* stressing the need to rebalance the global economy and to head off protectionist pressures. Like the rest of us, the governor of the Bank of England could be forgiven for thinking that the gods continue to punish us mortals for the greed and stupidity of the bubble years. The first obstacle thrown in the way of recovery from the Great Recession was the ruinous cost of the crisis to sovereign states. Then, violent political unrest rippled across the world’s most significant oil-producing region, sending the cost of crude rocketing. Now, Japan has been laid low by one of the biggest earthquakes of the past 100 years at a time when its public finances are in a parlous state. In a sense, the obstacle-strewn road to redemption should come as no surprise. This was no ordinary crisis and it is proving to be no ordinary recovery. The debts that caused the global system to self-destruct back in the summer of 2007 have not gone away, they have merely been passed on to the public sector. This was always a solvency crisis, because it was clear four years ago that many banks were bust and would have gone under without the aid of governments. It is still a solvency crisis, because some countries – Greece, Ireland and soon perhaps Portugal – are struggling with the enormous cost of paying off their debts. But it is not just the small fry who are financially impaired. Japan already has a debt-to-GDP ratio of getting on for 200%, while the US national debt is now in excess of $13tn (£8tn), up from $1tn 30 years ago. This, of course, is before anything like the full impact of the ageing of the baby boomer generation has been felt. Here, then, are some predictions. Contrary to the knee-jerk reaction in the oil market on Friday, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan will be positive for growth, at least given the somewhat bizarre way statisticians calculate gross domestic product. There will be a massive reconstruction effort in Japan, which will be funded by a mixture of quantitative and fiscal easing. The rest of Asia will continue to expand briskly, leading to higher demand for oil. Crude prices will continue to rise, with Brent hitting $130 a barrel in the spring if speculation about turmoil spreading from Libya to Saudi Arabia continues. City analysts who travel to Asia and Latin America return with tales of how the emerging world is booming. It is certainly true that the big developing economies have been crucial to the recovery of the global economy since the spring of 2009. But the warning signs, flashing amber a few months ago, are now flashing red. Commodity prices, especially oil, were on a sharp upward trend before the unrest began in north Africa. Higher oil prices mean higher inflation, which in the four previous oil shocks has tended to mean higher interest rates. The European Central Bank will be the first to move, having signalled that it feels the time is right to start unwinding the ultra-expansionary policy stance of the past two years. In the UK, there will be intense pressure on the Bank of England to follow suit, not least because the ECB’s action will result in a weaker pound, making imported goods more expensive. Dearer borrowing will be a double whammy for the weak countries on the fringes of the eurozone. It will slow their growth and make the cost of paying their ruinous debts more expensive. Europe provided itself with some additional firepower to tackle a sovereign debt crisis late last week, but this will deliver only short-term relief from a problem that will eventually ensnare Spain and Belgium as well as Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The position of these developed countries is little different from that of poor countries in the 1990s: they are burdened with excessively high debts. Yet there is no Jubilee 2000 for Greece, and nor is there a bankruptcy mechanism for sovereign states. It is infra dig to suggest that bankers and bondholders should “take a haircut” for their duff decisions, and since they have declined, ordinary taxpayers will have to do so. The fundamental problem for countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal is that they need growth to pay off their enormous debts, yet are unable to do so because of the deflationary policies inflicted on them by the European Union and the IMF. The widening of bond spreads suggests that something is going to give sooner or later. This can either be in an orderly manner if policymakers get their act together or in a chaotic fashion if there are attempts to get through the crisis with a mixture of bluster and confusion. The debt crisis, tighter borrowing conditions and the squeeze on incomes and profits caused by higher energy costs will mean that global activity will start to cool over the coming months. Indeed, we could be quite close to the point where the main cause for concern ceases to be inflation and becomes growth. Interest rates will rise but not by nearly as much as the markets expect. In the UK, inflation will hit 5%, intensifying the policy debate at the Bank of England. If the Bank does act, a combination of tighter monetary policy and fiscal austerity will push the economy back into recession. Watch out for the second quarter of 2011: it is not going to be pleasant. Elsewhere, a deep and long recession will be followed by an unusually weak and shallow upturn, particularly given the size of the stimulus provided by central banks and finance ministries. The realisation that there will be no easy return to pre-2007 business as usual will trigger a wave of bankruptcies among firms that have been kept on life support in expectation of better times. Banks will have to own up to some of their hidden losses, resulting in a second phase of the financial crisis. This will be a bitter-sweet outcome for people like King, who have been warning that there will be no permanent solution to the crisis without addressing the global imbalances and to rein in the activities of big finance. Who knows, if things get really bad, his warnings may be acted upon? * The text of the speech was released ahead of Mervyn King’s visit, which was cancelled in the light of the earthquake.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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March 15 2011, 6:25am | Comments »
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Wanstead Flats Campaign

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/10/23/wanstead-flats-campaign

Join us for ‘Take Back Wanstead Flats’ on 2pm on Sunday 21 November. The Save Wanstead Flats campaign plans to use wooden stakes and tape to mark out the boundaries of the proposed police base on the Flats, in order to show just how much space it will swallow up in 2012. Maps or drawings can never make as much sense as… seeing its massive size for yourself but we’d prefer not to wait until construction starts and it’s too late… to stop these plans. Facebook: Protect-Wanstead-Flats-and-Epping-Forest

As you can see from the publicity, the message behind this event also harkens back to the historical opposition by local people to enclosure of the Flats. We hope people will see this as an opportunity to come along and celebrate in their own way our right to enjoy our open spaces – although it is late November, so we do recommend that people wrap up warmly! Leaflets available to download from http://scr.bi/9sZkjy and A3 posters from http://scr.bi/9AgXOE – please ask local shops and businesses to put up a poster, or stick one up in your window (but no flyposting please, as it gets some of us in all sorts of trouble!) Take Back Wanstead Flats

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October 23 2010, 1:58am | Comments »

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