Professor Rentagob

I remember the economist Professor Jon Lovering when as a Bangor lecturer in the 1970s he played in a rock band called Hot Water (a popular beat combo, m'Lud). In the current issue of Planet he points out that you can always find some Professor somewhere to spout neoliberal nostrums in the media. He characterises this person as Professor Rentagob. The prime Welsh contender for this role is I guess Professor Dylan Jones Evans, billed by the Western Mail as 'the Professor who shoots from the hip'.

Professor Shootsfromthehip has an article in today's Western Mail where he complains about the number of jobs created in Wales 'predominantly in sectors that spend taxes instead of sectors that pay taxes'.

Now, I have seen the loss of manufacturing jobs in my own constituency, and the challenges that we face in this area are enormous. I have spent half my working life in the private sector, running small businesses, and I also set up my own business, built it up and sold it on. I don't know whether Professor Evans has ever done this. But I am clear that we need strong public services to underpin a dynamic economy. What I find unacceptable in Professor Evans's article is the implicit attack by someone in a well-paid publicly-funded job on the creation of valuable but less well-paid publicly-funded jobs in nursing, teaching and the police.

As Jon Lovering writes in another entertaining article in the Welsh Economic Review , 'Some commentators regard the public sector as an economic negative, except for those parts that can be squeezed into the definition of the Knowledge Economy...This is to develop policy-making for Wales as if it is really only a soggy version of Singapore in disguise.' He reminds us that public services play an important role in the most affluent regions of the world and argues against a 'reductionist' view of the public sector, rightly identifying the need for more political argument, not an empty consensus that fails to grip fundamental issues.


(c) Leighton Andrews 2005. Material from this blog may be freely used, if attributed to www.leightonandrews.blogspot.com