PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: How Union Terrace Gardens could look.
The centre of Aberdeen could be filled with sweets as part of the City Garden Project, designers revealed today.
The raising of Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen would see over fourteen brands of confectionary dispersed throughout the Granite Web.
The sweets – including Smarties, Bassets Allsorts, Quality Street, Love Hearts, – would replace the 86 trees currently in Union Terrace Gardens, to help create the new City Garden in Aberdeen.
Designers have said there is also option to construct the elevated walkways out of Twix. Wham bars were initially considered, however they ruled out after they were found to soften in the Mediterranean climates predicted be brought by the creation of the Square Garden.
A spokesperson for ACSEF tonight said initial projections suggest that the City Garden Project's 5 acres of sweets would create around 6,500 long and medium term employment opportunities "What this development had highlighted is the periphery industries which could benefit directly from the project. We believe this would allow Aberdeen to become a centre for excellence in Dentistry."
Frank Furter from the Aberdeen City Gardens Trust Steering Monitoring Project Gardens Strategic Partnership Collective said "Whatever you want in it, you can have it."
A source close to the city council, who yesterday agreed on a range of measures to pave the way for the City Garden Project, subject to a “yes” vote when the result of the ballot is announced on March 2, claimed that elected members were very interested in this new proposal "especially if there was an option to include butteries."
Sir Ian Wood, who has underpinned the City Gardens Project with a generous donation of £50 Million from his personal fortune today said "Yummy."
Well, it has been a while since I last posted. While I was going to let sleeping dogs lie and use my current geographical shift to depart from the debate surrounding Union Terrace Gardens, the dogs have woken up, and in a fit have turned around and bit the good people of Aberdeen, and indeed anyone with any aesthetic or cultural sense firmly in the ankles.
Yes, dear reader, the Future is here! After much speculation ACSEF's shortlisted designs have been announced and revealed and (while us poor proles are not allowed to view the public exhibition at the former Pier building on Belmont street until tomorrow) released online. Regular visitors to this blog will have been used to serious hyperlinkage and cross referencing and a little bit of expose into the machinations surrounding the project, this special edition blog post will be a little different. I'm just going to take a little time to publicize the designs and let everyone have a look.
Six architectural teams have been assembled to provide designs for Sir Ian Wood's City Square Garden Project - but the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Up until now noone, let along the scheme's backer's have been sure what the project is all about. It started out life as a "Cross between Central Park, and a Grand Italian Piazza" it turned into "five acres of Garden, if thats what you want."
Team One have taken their inspiration directly from a spider's web - or from a doodle idly drawn on the corner of a notepad while on the phone to someone they didn't really want to talk to (ACSEF?).
On closer inspection the web-designs seem to constitute a series of raised walkways so you, too, can experience life in the pleasure domes from Logan's Run, or the Futuristic world from sci-fi documentary, The Jetsons.
Complete with travelators for traveling from the Denburn Car Park to the Trinty Centre Car park nestled helpfully underneath this meadow:
So if you see plumes of smoke - dont worry its not a brush fire! Its simply exhaust fumes, what more would you need from an inner-city-future-space-meadow. To top off the futuristic theme, the cherry on top of team one's design is this teleporation hub/gateway between dimensions:
In Team Two's aerial view they appear to have done nothing at all, however a giant transparent worm is in the middle of devouring the denburn dual carraigeway. (And there was much rejoicing)
Not even the cold weather of Aberdeen can deter this giant Glass beast as it ambles up to devour the unsuspecting Aberdonians milling around. Which they can do now that the worm has eaten the road and the railway.
Ok, its not that bad. The worm doesn't actually devour the humans, It appears to simply wine and dine them. Like a giant larval bad date.
Or it could be fattening them up - who's to say? These are only visualisations. The main problem I have with Team Two's designs are the inability to shake this comparison out of my head:
Team Three are most likely to be Sir Ian Wood's favourites. In that their designs are practically identical to those vomited onto paper by Haliday Fraser Munro for the 2009 Technical Appraisal:
Although it fails to bother cover up the road and the railway. But that will be forgiven given that the architects of Team Three prescribe to the same school of fantasy aboroculture as Sir Ian. The cross sections provided below show:
Can you see it?
How about now?
Team Four have provided designs for the UTG Commerative Plate.
Although viewed from serf-height, and not from the vantage point of the Hubble Telescope, it appears to be a Paddy Field, being worked by future children.
Obviously the current financial climate and Economic situation has seen
a reversal of lifestyles and fashions to a post-war situation:
You
will notice in the mid-ground that there appears to be a family
erecting a shanty-home. Obviously these are just renderings, as it is
doubtful that a Hooverville would be permitted in the centre of town.
They havent even bothered to finish that building.
Team 5's effort appears as though it is sponsored by a popular angular crisp brand. Although I dont wish to name the actual brand for fear they may sue for defamation at the remotest posibilty of being linked with the unpopular scheme:
"Is that really a flat, green triangle?" An online correspondent of mine asked upon viewing the above image. While obviously ACSEF will not have anyone mention the word "flat" anywhere near the project, (Use of the word "Flat" in beyond Holburn Street or south of King Street is rumoured to be prohibited in a local by-law) we have to give it local Guardians of Economic Future here, as this other image clarifies:
Yes. It is in fact an image of Nuclear Winter circa 2150 AD, as rendered by a re-animated J.M. Turner. Note the elderly couple from Raymond Brigg's When The Wind Blows, cowering in the foreground, and in the mid ground people in various stages of being vapourized.
Last and, by no certain means lest, Team Six appear to have done nothing at all to the gardens:
But have rather spent all their money on.....
wait for it....
THE MONOLITH!
You can imagine it now, projecting the eeiry high pitched whine, underpinned by a rough bass hum as it fires groups of birds at the Trinity Centre. It dwarfs Union Street, standing twice the size of Jamieson and Carry. Already it is rugged and moss-covered as though it has always been there, As it Should Have.On closer inspection it is giant sized Jenga, as scale of which only the Guardians of Economic Future themselves can play. In its rightful as the biggest thing in Aberdeen, nay The North East, nay Scotland it dwarfs even The King as he stands proud with his scepter and guilded Royal Football.
There you have it, the designs everyone has been waiting for. If you have to pick, I urge you to VOTE MONOLITH. However this is really because I didnt think there was a more rediculous concept than to pave over UTG and replace them with a car park/undergound arcade/street level piazza - and Team Six have completely proved me wrong.
Out of all of them the Fosters Team Two design is probably the best out of the lot, despite looking not unlike these fellas, from 1973 Doctor Who episode The Green Death: (which is pretty apt...)
But the passable designs dont fullful the perameters of Sir Ian Wood, the minority stakeholder (Who's silence since the announcement has been deafening) and the real tragedy may already have happened: the loss of the most beautiful design for Union Terrace Gardens.
Following the demise of the Northern Light Contemporary Art Centre Scheme, spearheaded by Peacock Visual Arts, following the decision by Aberdeen City Council on May 19th to accept "in principle" an alternative scheme for Union Terrace Gardens there was a surplus of unused and somewhat unusable £9.5 Million. This at direct contrast with the scheme which had been amber-lighted, oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood's 'vision' for a five-acre, three story plaza to replace the Denburn Valley, which is short by at least £90 Million, ten times the money which had already been raised by the Peacock scheme.
In the months following the fateful council meeting the £9.5 Million which had been pledged to Peacock inevitably began to filter away. The £4.3 Million Scottish Arts Council grant was returned to new cultural body Creative Scotland and redistributed to other projects throughout Scotland. Aberdeen City Council held onto the £3 Million they had pledged, minus a small amount released to keep Peacock's campaign team running in the lead up to the Council Decision. However in the past week doubt has been shed on the future of the £2 Million pledged from Scottish Enterprise.
Gordon McIntosh: "£1.6 Million handed back last April"
However, Scottish Enterprise strongly refute these claims stating that "at no point did SE withdraw funding for the Contemporary Arts Centre in Aberdeen. Had the project gone ahead as planned and outlined in the legal agreement then SE would have honoured the funding agreement." This stance is backed up by documents provided by Scottish Enterprise detailing how the organisation had contacted Council Officers on three separate occasions towards the end of last year: September 15th, October 19th and November 19th in order to discuss options for alternative proposals to receive the remaining £1.6 Million of Scottish Enterprise money.
Two of the three documents provided by Scottish Enterprise clearly mention a March 2011 deadline for the re-allocation of the monies, while the third refers to identifying "alternative eligible projects which may meet SE's strategic objectives and conditions." The eligibility and strategic objectives and conditions relating to the grant were spelled out in a legal agreement between Scottish Enterprise and Aberdeen City Council dated 18th March 2009, which had been signed off by the city solicitor on 23rd March 2009, which also mentions a final deadline for allocation of monies by 31st March 2011.
The information provided clearly indicates that should the grant not be re-allocated then it would be returned to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities in April this year, not last year as Mr McIntosh suggested in January. While at face value, looking at the numerous documents it could appear that mr McIntosh's claims were the result of a simple mistake, that the council officer had simply gotten his dates wrong. It remains to be seen how a council executive with such a large responsibility to the city could make announcements based on a seemingly minor oversight - especially when receiving monthly correspondence from Scottish Enterprise regarding Aberdeen City Council's responsibility to spend the remaining money. It is reckless at best for a local authority with such major and widespread financial problems to simply lose over a million pounds of public funding.
Another interesting note is the apparent discrepancy between the £2 Million awarded from Scottish Enterprise to Aberdeen City Council and the £1.6 Million mentioned in the documents from Scottish Enterprise which was required to be re-allocated or returned. The original legal agreement between SE and ACC "envisaged that £300, 000 of the Contribution was to be advanced by 31st March 2009" in order to "contribute an equitable share towards the advanced design stage of the [Peacock] Project." To this end £226, 000 was awarded to Peacock for "Architect, Design and Project Management fees", but a further £190, 000 was taken from the £2 Million in order to fund the Haliday Fraser Munro technical appraisal into Sir Ian's "vision" on behalf of ACSEF.
While SE ensures that "had the Contemporary Arts Centre project gone ahead SE would have honoured the £2Million grant in line with the legal grant offer", their money was being used to back two conflicting proposals, and the money for both came from a grant offer made to one project which was already in advanced design stages and had received full planning permission. In addition to the £190, 000 used to fund the technical appraisal, the Press and Journal revealed this week that the council had "secured permission to use £375,000 of the grant funding for Sir Ian Wood’s city square scheme" meaning that, in total, £565, 000 of the Scottish Enterprise grant awarded for the Northern Light Centre has been spent on the scheme which caused its collapse. That's over a quarter of the original grant.
The technical appraisal brief states that "the commission must deliver a technical appraisal which will inform an outline cost appraisal for three main options to develop Union Terrace Gardens and the Denburn Valley." The appraisal was to be carried out under a particular framework:
The framework for the options appraisal will fall under the following 3 headings:
1. Full street level decking
2. Partial street level decking
3. Re-design of the existing site without any street level decking
The appraisal must take into account a currently proposed project, with planning consent, to and create a £13.5M Contemporary Arts Centre (3,000 m²) on the West Side of Union Terrace Gardens.
However the actual results of the technical appraisal pay lip service to the framework but adhere closely to Sir Ian Wood's personal vision for the space. While the Contemporary Art Centre is included as a must, it is only included on the West Side of Union Terrace Gardens in option 3, which is quickly and unceremoniously dismissed as it only "would create minor benefits for Aberdeen City and Shire." Option 2, while having the brief to look at partial decking, it is almost indiscernible from Option 1, and bypasses the instruction from the project brief of "incorporating elements from previously appraised/designed schemes where appropriate" and ignoring the Millennium Square scheme (pictured, right)which would fulfill most people's desire to cover the dual carraigeway and railway, leaving the gardens mostly intact. Option 2 inexplicably replicates the first option but only doesn't meet with Belmont Street on the western side.
The technical appraisal, while bringing the costs of the project in embarrassingly light, pushes for the first option - directly facilitating the abandonment of the designed and planned Contemporary Arts Centre for which the grant which paid for it was intended. An odd and consciously contradictory machination which is not wholly unexpected.
However it is difficult to quantify exactly how "strenuous" these efforts were to draw up proposals for spending the remaining money when just over a month ago SNP Councillor Stewart, who is also convener of the council's finance committee expressed that "It comes as a surprise to me that this money was withdrawn long before we made decisions about Union Terrace Gardens." How could Aberdeen City Council be making strenuous efforts to retain money that apparently wasn't there?
The attempts made to steamroller through this mega-proposal are spreading their debris throughout the city council. It seems that in the haste to chase Sir Ian Wood's yet-to-be guaranteed money for a project which will see him as the shot-calling minority shareholder, due process is being cast aside and Aberdeen City Council are tying themselves up in knots over it. As the Union Terrace Gardens saga continues with breakneck twists and turns, game changing revelations and scant regard for what the general public want to see with this public development, even those who support and champion the development are becoming unsure of what stage the development is actually at. Only once the City Square has succeeded in its inevitable self-inflicted downfall will the true costs of the vainglorious project be apparent to the city of Aberdeen. We can only hope that by that point it is not too late to give Aberdeen the regeneration it deserves.
In January this year, Hillary Clinton wrote in The Guardian "defending online freedoms." In her article she discussed the apparent merits in the free and instant access to information that the internet provided, even describing how "During his visit to China in November, President Obama defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens hold their own governments accountable" going further to warn of the dangers of stifling that information, saying "technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights."
In the digital age, information is the most powerful weapon anyone can wield. Rather than the Christian adage of ignorance being bliss, knowledge is power, and the pen is mightier than the sword - or rather the keyboard is mightier than the A-Bomb. Information is the weapon with the power to destroy entire governments but leave people and buildings intact.
Not that the notion of the power of information is anything new, the disclosures and investigation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for The Washington Post into the Watergate Scandal was instrumental in bringing down the Nixon administration. The main difference is the ease and methods of dissemination of that information. Now you don't need to pass bulky documents around, photocopying or transcribing the contents, information can be passed from one person to hundreds of recipients at the click of a mouse, it can be posted as a status on Facebook or Twitter and be all the way around the world and back in an instant.
With the release of the leaked video, so too came the clarity. The journalists were not killed by Iraqi insurgents, in fact the video clearly shows that there was no fire in the area they were in, there was no small arms fire and although some of those gathered in the area were armed "the permission to engage was given before the word RPG was ever used," and not content with opening fire on the suspected insurgents, the helicopter returns to the scene and re-engages a wounded, unarmed journalist and the occupants of a van trying to help him.
As well as highlighting the true trigger-happy nature of US combat in Iraq, displaying the disturbing reality of warfare and the dangers for Journalists trying to report on the conflict, it also reveals that those perpetrating the crimes are well aware of what it is they are doing and do not want the general public to know. As Winston Churchill pointed out, "History is written by the victors," had the video not been leaked then the 'victors' of this particular skirmish would have been content to leave it "unclear whether the journalists had been killed by U.S. fire or by shooting from the Iraqis targeted by the Apache" and eventually the whole event would have been forgotten and the people killed simply added to the tally of Iraqi's killed during the conflict and the actions of the helicopter crew, clearly working against their own rules of engagement, would never be known.
America loves a witchhunt, be it looking for actual "witches", "communists", "terrorists", Taliban, Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Fidel Castro - now they have Julian Assange. In their haste to pin a conspiracy charge stick in order to prosecute him under the 1917 Espionage Act, US Senators, pundits, judges and lawyers are already running rough-shod over the supposedly sacred First Amendment and international human rights and privacy laws. The reality of the situation is that the curtain has already been pulled back, the truth is out in the open and no amount of denial is going to change that. Rather than chasing and punishing anyone related to the leak, threatening the future job prospects of University students, or forcing companies to strangle organisations dedicated to revealing war crimes or injustice perhaps it is time to look into the core values of democracy: transparency and openness. It is time to investigate what has gone so horribly wrong and the damage that this culture of secrecy and lies has done and will continue to do if left unchecked.
Should accountability and punishment lie with Wikileaks, Julian Assange, News Organisations or internet activists for making this information public, and not the system which has allowed thousands of civilian deaths to be covered up, forged war under false pretence and systematically mislead and lied to the people of the world then we will be heading down a very dark and precarious path.
"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
Robert M. Hutchins, 1899-1977
A recent comment response to a post on this humble blog came with a call to "live with the result and don't whine about it" as "What's been done is not illegal, it may be slightly shady but that's life." While loath to get into the specifics of the nature of the call, or indeed the blog post in question, this response, rather than anger or irk, saddened me as it is symptomatic of widespread attitudes towards activism or, to put it more generally, caring within today's world.
Not long after the comment appeared, around about six weeks ago I began writing this post. It was primarily influenced by this, but also to a general sense of impotence which seemed to be arising around certain issues: for instance the lack of reaction to a student protest petition against proposed redundancies at Grays School of Art, with The Robert Gordon University's acting principal John Harper's response nothing more rather dismissive rhetoric and an empty statement to the effect that "I’m confident that the recommendations will ensure that the University continues to produce a steady stream of talented graduates who will drive the regional creative and cultural economy." The assurance that "Further consultation sessions with students will be arranged at the appropriate times" seemed enough to dissuade a number of students from taking the matter any further feeling it was outwith their control.
I was, at the time, poised to write a post discussing this, and also the binds of non-disclosure agreements which restrict academics disclosing their opinions of the growing corporation of Universities and education and the general levels of apathy which have dominated the British Public. However, I focused on another set of topics I believed more pressing at the time before returning to this post in an attempt to get it down, when this happened:
Millbank Tower Protests - Photograph: Ray Tang/Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features
While I am certainly not going to condone or advocate violence on this blog, whether be towards a protester, innocent or police officer who is merely doing their job, I will say that it is something I can understand, and something which was justified in a statement from lecturers at Goldsmith's College "The real violence in this situation relates not to a smashed window but to the destructive impact of the cuts." Anger and discontent is widespread and rising amid the lies and hypocrisy being espoused by those in government and the rapid and alarming breakdown of the basic principals of democracy. It seems the democratic process only comes into force once every four or five years (depending on jurisdiction) when an election approaches and the general population is required to see one party (or two as is currently the case) into power. Even then this year's UK elections have seen even the polling booth to be a hollow gesture where the thoughts and opinions of the voters mean nothing, given the Liberal Democrats finding themselves in a position to turn the tide of political governance mostly based on a pledge which they apparently planned to drop regardless of the outcome. It is unseen how a Lib Dem pre-election pledge which did get through, the "powers of recall" will effect the Liberal Democrat mandate to govern, but it is very clear that the student occupation of Millbank tower was "just the beginning."
UK Uncut protest in Brighton. Photograph: Howard Davies/www.reportdigital
As the commons vote on the tuition fees on 9th December approached two more protests occurred on the 24th and 30th in the capital with many more emerging across the country. Following from the Goldsmith's College Occupation last month, students across the country began to occupy their University buildings and for the first time pupils occupied their schools in protest as the biggest demonstration march approached to coincide with the crucial vote. Despite Downing Street's condemnation of lecturers who had supported the protests at Millbank, lecturers, trade unionists and schoolchildren joined the students in the protests last week. Following criticism of the policing of the protests a month earlier, the Metropolitain Police were infinitely more prepared for the trouble which emerged when the protest again deviated off course and saw thousands of protesters enter Parliament Square.
When you look beyond the media emphasis on violence which undermines the voices of campaigners and masks the real issues, that of a systematic dismantling of the education system and the UK Government's unflinching bias towards big business.The Government continues to hand over policy-making roles to representatives from business such as Philip Green and ignore the wishes of the voters, including inviting fast food giant MacDonalds to inform public health policy. Education is not simply a tool to be used by commerce or business in order to train workers into functional obedience. A day after the Government voted through the rise in fees a statement from CBI Director General Richard Lambert states "business will have to play a much more active role than it has in the past in informing students about its likely future needs" even going further to suggest that business should be influencing which courses Universities offer and steering the choices which students have to make much earlier. Society as a whole benefits from an educated populous, it is a right and not a privilege, which drives forward innovation and invention and should be free and accessible to all.
For several months now I have been following the magnificent Other Aberdeen blog. The blog is a psychogeographical insight into the fabric of The Granite City, which explores areas off the beaten track, at right angles to the usual and those elements of the city which most people in the course of their lives in the city either miss out or ignore.
Recently as part of a project I am currently working on I had the pleasure to meet and have a chat with Alan Gatt, who with his wife runs the blog. We discussed a number of topics relating to Aberdeen, and I asked him about the concept of psychogeograpy - which I believed I was unfamiliar with. However just this morning while mulling over our chat I realised that I had indeed come across the concept before, and had actually written about it.
Earlier this year I was asked to write an introduction to a catalogue of a public art project carried out by third year Sculpture students at Grays School of Art. The project was pure psychogeography, with the students working with the concept to create artworks which highlighted the city around them and those areas which had become forgotten or overlooked.
View from College Street Car Park - Aberdeen
Tracing Place
The notion of place is one of the universal concerns intrinsic to the development of our species since long before we crawled out of the oceans and grew legs. Our immediate and extended context has dictated how society has developed, we have always reacted to the space around us: celebrated it, took inspiration from it, amended it, created new spaces or simply destroyed it.
For an artist, the contemporary concerns about space are often as important to a practice than the materials used or sometimes the final artistic output. While pre-Duchamp, the interest in place was mostly representational - afterwards the focus shifted from representation to an overriding analysis of context that the conceptual concerns with our surroundings came to the fore.
At the dawn of a new century, we seem on the brink of a critical point in perspective and thinking. Two hundred years of industrialization have irreparably changed the face of the world we live in and it is our generation that has to confront the consequences of this “progress.” Within contemporary practice, the approaches to making, creating and concept often involve working in the public realm, whether large scale site-specific commissions or more subtle interventions or subversive, in-your-face street art, the artist is no longer confined to the studio and artwork no longer to the gallery.
Widespread industrialization and population migration from rural to urban spaces caused the rapid, unplanned, transformation of cities. Tenements, factories, mills, foundries, stores and roads emerged as societal perspective and priorities changed and our surroundings became less important. The human race had abandoned its former fascination with synergy and natural order with the emergence of the hedonistic pursuit of Capitalism.
Rachel Whiteread - House (1994)
In the inevitable decline of heavy industry, forgotten spaces became ubiquitous in the urban landscape, monuments to short sightedness of our forefathers and reminders of the effect of progress on our planet. The transitional period we find ourselves is an area of certain fascination for artists. Gormley’s Angel of The North, built through the processes and materials common to Newcastle’s manufacturing heritage, looks over the city symbolizing the cultural awakening of the city; Rachel Whiteread’s House represented the living space of a street which no longer stood, erased from reality and from our memories.
Tracing Place seeks to highlight those forgotten spaces throughout Aberdeen. Simple interventions, such as Amy Flint’s outline footprints, encouraging the viewer to see the cityscape as artwork, or Hannah Malone’s Castlegate, a series of sandcastles crumble across Aberdeen’s Civic Square emphasizing the fragility of the space around it: an underutilized, yet historically significant part of the city.
Wallace Tower - Netherkirkgate, Aberdeen
Aberdeen differs greatly from the post-industrial centres discussed. As heavy industry declined across the UK, North Sea Oil gave Aberdeen its own Industrial Revolution. A great many unique features were swept away: historic buildings on Broad Street replaced by St Nicholas House; Old Torry by an oil refinery; the Wallace tower, making way for Mark’s and Spencer.
Even today, with a global shift in priority, Aberdeen, still in the grips of the billion-dollar oil boom, seems destined not to take heed. A project for culture-led rejuvenation of Union Terrace Gardens, a gift to the people of the City, is under threat from a boorish scheme reeking of sixties modernism brought forward by those who have personally benefited from industrial exploitation would see these Gardens ripped out, covered over and wiped from existence.
Projects such as Tracing Place are vital at this particular juncture. The role of the artist is to celebrate our context, remind us of what we have and what we have lost. We must be able to stand back and embrace the beauty around us or we will be forever destined to repeat the mistakes of our past at the expense of our future.
Commissioned for Stage 3 Sculpture Catalogue of the same name, Grays School of Art: April 2010
"Money is a magical phenomenon. Because there's nothing there. You didn't burn, for example, food. Most of the governments of the world destroy food every day so as not to bring down the market price. You didn't burn Art (the pictures on the notes are okay, but you wouldn't want them on your wall); you didn't burn Literature -both of these things are burnt every day; you didn't burn people. What you burnt was paper that is a symbol of value."
Alan Moore, on the K Foundation's burning of £1 Million
from The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid, 1995
A conflicting argument to Moore's assessment of money can be found in the musical Cabaret which debuted on Broadway in 1966, that of the song lyric Money Makes The World Go Round, which has become somewhat of a motto for those occupying the board rooms of the huge corporations around the world, as well as those gambling every day in The City and on Wall Street. Far from being billions of years worth of cosmic dust barrage from even before the formation of the planet, money plays no part in the rotation of the Earth. In fact, if anything, Money may be the one thing that will cause the world to stop rotating, burst into flames and fall out of the sky.
North of the Border we will have to wait until the end of this month to hear John Swinney's Proposed Budget for the next fiscal year outlining how Scotland will deal with the "£900m reduction", although at the moment unknown, some suggest that there is very little left to cut. The two issues discussed above, that of Education and Culture are devolved issues, dealt with and administered by our SNP Government, who's future is in the balance given the upcoming Scottish Elections in May. However Scotland faces its own cultural confusion around the emergence of the Creative Scotland, and already our education establishments are preparing to weather the storm, while others are beginning to crack under pressure.
Much of the College's cash woes centres around the redevelopment of Evolution House in the City's Westport. The Sunday Herald article points out that "The college has spent £21m on Evolution House but it is now worth only £10.6m" and "that Lloyds Bank could in theory at any time require repayment of the whole £11.5m loan, because the college’s financial performance has meant covenants with the bank have been breached." Among other shady dealings, ECA has been granted a £1.6m advance from the Scottish Funding Council, and borrowed almost half of its Andrew Grant Scholarship fund, a move which the report claims "the university’s own legal advice suggests that it is not clear that the trustees were working within the law in making this loan.” All in all, the leaked document paints a disturbingly glum picture of the College's financial situation, which also states that "“ECA would not now be trading if it had not received advances of grant from the SFC.”
The motivation behind the Comprehensive Spending Review is by no means far-sighted, in no way looks towards any notion of a "bigger picture", it is simply an exercise in backpedaling, with the way of life of everyone in the country paying for the mistakes and reckless gambling of the few. The spending review is based on the idea that "reducing the deficit is a necessary precondition for sustained economic growth", but essentially it is about reducing how much debt the county is in so we can start over again, return to the status quo and let the cycle run its course once more. "The Spending Review is underpinned by a radical programme of public service reform, changing the way services are delivered by redistributing power away from central government and enabling sustainable, long term improvements in services", but it in no way examines how we got in this mess in the first place, it no way intends to reform the fiscal system to which we are all unwitting prisoners. Love it or loath it, the capitalist system by which our wold prescribes has failed, not just in the last two years since the nightmare of the Credit Crunch, but it has always failed, it is destined to fail. Every ten to twenty years we find ourselves in the same situation, it happened in the mid seventies, the early eighties, the early nineties and now the late 2000s, and what always happens is a "tightening of the belt", cuts to frontline public services until economies begin to grow again and then we just get back to the way things were.
A reform of the ecomonic system, perhaps a movement away from a monetary based system (given that, according to Moore, it is based on something that doesn't exist in the first place) would require a sort of global joined-up-thinking which our politicians and managers seem unable to engage in. It would require putting aside petty differences, it would require putting aside nationalism, imperialism and one-upmanship. It would require the global communities to sit down and think about a solution which is better for the world, one which not only takes into consideration economies, but other global concerns, overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, climate change etc. However to think on this scale would require looking at what is best for the many, rather for the few, and what is best for all of society and the planet, not just the west.
It would require the relinquishing of the the very thing that money represents: power. And with power comes control, and inequality, as former US president said in 1826 "There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword, the other is by debt."
