It was revealed yesterday that Gordon Brown will spend part of his summer doing voluntary work in Kirkcaldy, the town where he grew up which forms the major part of his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It is also my home town.

Some uncharitable people have suggested that his job may involve digging holes, something he has done quite enough of as Prime Minister. More cutting might be the observation that voluntary work is the only sort of work you’ll be able to find in Kirkcaldy.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times ran a piece about the economic woes which have hit Kirkcaldy which was a talking point among some of my friends. Aside from apparently inventing the demonym “Kirkcaldians” (I personally prefer “Langtonian”, named after the town’s old nickname, the Lang Toun), I think the article is largely a fair and accurate reflection of the town.

I have written before about the sorry state of the Mercat, the town’s main shopping centre which used to house my former workplace, Woolworths. Over the difficult Christmas period the Mercat went from bad to worse. But it gets just a passing mention in the Times piece, with its mere eight or more empty units.

Apparently there are thirty empty units in the High Street. There is a particularly dire section in the middle of the pedestrianised zone, where three shops in a row — which used to be the Link, Adams and Icon Clothing — now lie empty. What remains has been criticised for exhibiting the characteristics of a clone town (PDF link). Beyond that, particularly in the west end, what isn’t a chain store is most likely a pawn shop or a charity shop.

Perhaps this is not particularly unusual. The death of the High Street has been widely advertised, so this is not a problem unique to Kirkcaldy. The Times article briefly touches on the retail park. It sits on the north-western edge of the town, well away from the centre. But it is currently being expanded, a development which feels like a desperately-needed shot in the arm for Kirkcaldy.

The problem is that it just is not enough. Indeed, the clamour over the few new jobs that are available serve to bring into focus just how dire the situation is. I have lost count of the number of people that I know of applying for the same few jobs.

A new B&Q has opened, although the old one closed. A number of my former colleagues at Woolworths have ended up working there. PC World is another new store at the retail park. But so many people I know applied for jobs there. A friend who got an interview there was told that they had been bombarded with over 700 applications.

If you got rejected by PC World, you could always try applying for a job at the new Toys R Us. The only problem is that they apparently had 3,000 applications. Only a lucky 350 got an interview, with just 40 places going.

An Argos Extra has also opened up. They held an assessment day at the Jobcentre a couple of months ago. I saw it with my own eyes as I walked past it. There were two queues coming out of the Jobcentre, one in each direction. I have been told that the larger of the two queues stretched all the way to the police station, which sits at the opposite end of a street which is the best part of 200 yards long.

The store has been open for just over a week now. The good news on that front is that my friend, who transferred to work there from the existing High Street store, reports that sales have been very encouraging. Whether that is simply down to the excitement of something new opening in Kirkcaldy remains to be seen.

As for the Jobcentre itself, that continues to hire new people, including one of my friends. What they’ll do with the new staff when demand for the Jobecentre’s services is not so strong is unclear. But at the moment that feels like a distant possibility anyway. Whenever I went there I was often told they were short staffed.

In the Times article, there is a quote about the Jobcentre by a man called Tam Collins: “they expect you to stack shelves at Asda.” I got exactly that when I visited the Jobcentre. Going there is a fruitless task which I have now given up.

The Asda is a new store which has opened up in neighbouring Glenrothes. It is probably the most exciting thing in terms of employment to happen in Glenrothes for years. That is another place where a few of my former Woolworths colleagues have ended up. In a way they were lucky — Asda received over 7,000 applications for that one store.

Meanwhile, the town’s largest employer, a call centre called MGt, has recently shed 65 jobs as a result of the closure of Setanta. 65 looks like a small number compared to the amount that are already looking for work. But MGt has provided a lifeline to Kirkcaldy in terms of employment since it set up around a decade ago. Today it has around 1,000 people on its books. I dread to think what Kirkcaldy would be like if it wasn’t for MGt. That even MGt is downsizing is ominous.

But that sums up Kirkcaldy. It lost its way after the industrial decline of the previous fifty years. Now if you want a job in Kirkcaldy you need to either work in a call centre or in the precarious retail sector. And even then, good luck to you. After my previous experience of working in retail, I am avoiding it if at all possible.

Seven months since losing my job at Woolworths, and over a year since I graduated, I still haven’t found a full time job (although I’m lucky to have found bits and pieces of freelance work). I have well and truly hit the buffers, and I am now starting with a blank sheet of paper to decide on my next move.

One of my biggest mistakes was to focus my search too narrowly on a small geographical area. I certainly didn’t bet on finding a job in Kirkcaldy — it was bad enough before and clearly getting worse. But I planned on finding something in the eastern part of the central belt — somewhere within an area encompassing Fife, Dundee, Perth, Stirling or of course Edinburgh. No luck yet. I will have to broaden my search further and hope that something comes up, or hope that I will be able to rely on freelance work in the long term. I wouldn’t like to bet on relying on getting a job at a call centre in Kirkcaldy.

It is sad that Kirkcaldy is like this. This is the town of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics who looked out onto the bustling Firth of Forth, full of trade ships, and was thereby inspired to investigate sources of wealth. Today he would only be inspired to investigate the weed growth in the derelict former workplaces.

Sadder is the role of Gordon Brown. Surely, some people say, if there was one man who could save Kirkcaldy, it would be the Prime Minister and former Chancellor, who grew up here and depends on the residents’ votes. Some are truly furious about it.

Others, as the Times article notes, inexplicably give him and the government the benefit of the doubt. Talking to people, it is genuinely true that there are people in Kirkcaldy who believe that Gordon Brown is a competent leader who has somehow been stitched up. Even for failed leaders, the halo effect is still in evidence.

That is the irony. The people of Kirkcaldy are probably the one set of voters in the country that Gordon Brown can afford to take for granted. Could it be that having the local man as Prime Minister has exacerbated Kirkcaldy’s problems?

It would indeed be harsh to lay the blame wholly at Gordon Brown’s door. Kirkcaldy had problems before, and most of what has happened in the past year can be put down to the global recession.

But the Labour Party is supposed to look after the interests of people who live and work in towns just like Kirkcaldy — a former industrial town that slips ever-further into the mire, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. On the evidence I see with my own eyes, the Labour Party have failed us.

Tonight is Burns Night — a fact that my dangerously nationalist self keeps on forgetting. I had forgotten once again until James Higham left this in a comment:

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o’ the Puddin-race! Aboon them a’ ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye wordy of a grace As lang’s my arm.

Which I assume is some Burns. I recognise the second line, but none of the rest. Which probably proves something about how much of a philistine or traitor I am. But I don’t care.

Anyway, it just so happens that last night I went on one of my (very) occasional trips to the Scots Wikipedia.

Guid tae see ye at the Scots Wikipædia, the first encyclopædia in the Scots leid!

Noble though it may be, it does make me giggle a little bit whenever I read these attempts to take what is essentially slang very seriously. I must try and pick up some of those weighty documents that the Scottish Parliament apparently publishes in Scots. It would make some of those train journeys pass by quicker.

For the most part, English Wikipedia is written in a very formal manner. Scots Wikipedia is like reading Oor Wullie explain quadratic calculations. Here, for instance, is part of the article on naitural philosophy:

Pheesicists studies a braid reenge o pheesical phenomenae, frae the sub-nuclear pairticles that maks up aw ordinar maiter (pairticle pheesics) tae the maiteral Universe as a hail (cosmologie).

I also like this message that appears at the top of some pages (such as this one about Commissioners tae the Scots Pairlament):

The “Scots” that wis uised in this airticle wisna written by a native speaker. Gin ye can, please sort it.

I guess the slightly slap-dash, antiquated nature of the language part of the charm for some people. One of my maths teachers used to drop in loads of baffling slang words which were presumably meant to be Scots, but I’m certain she just made them up on the spot.

I also know that, for instance, Kirkcaldy has several different spellings in Scots. The Scots Wikipedia article spells it Kirkcaudy, which is redirected from Kirkcawddy — but, of course, you and I know it as Kirkcaldy!

The famous (in Kirkcaldy) poem, ‘The Boy in the Train‘ uses a yet another different spelling of Kirkcaldy (the collogue page at Wikipedia touches on this).

When the train station was rebuilt in the early 1990s the whole waiting area was decked out in linoleum — Kirkcaldy’s greatest export, and the cause of that famous “queer-like smell”. The smell can linger in the east of the town, particularly when it’s raining. It’s the kind of smell that, a bit like coffee, is really foul when you are a child but eventually you become fond of it as you grow older. I imagine if I ever move out of Kirkcaldy I’ll want to occasionally visit to catch the smell again.

In the linoleum-covered waiting area of the train station, the poem that makes reference to this smell takes pride of place above the stairs. Appropriately enough, the poem itself is cut in linoleum as well. I stand in the waiting area and try to decipher the poem when it is raining and I can’t stand outside on the platform. It seems as though when it’s raining in Kirkcaldy you just can’t escape linoleum!

From my memory, the version of the poem hanging on the wall in the station uses more than one different spelling of Kirkcaldy, but I could be wrong. I’ll have to take a look at it tomorrow. But it does seem as though Mary Campbell-Smith, judging by the rhymes she tried to pull off, thought that Kirkcaldy was pronounced “Kirkcaddy”. I suppose it’s an improvement on many non-natives’ attempts to pronounce the ‘l’ which is actually silent.

Best just to stick to ‘The Lang Toun’ really…

Other interesting Wikipedia projects

• Kernewek, currently standing at 1,233 articles.
• Anglo-Saxon, with 744 articles.
• The inevitable Klingon, with a surprisingly low 62 articles.
• Full list of Wikipedias

One of the most interesting things about libertarians is how quickly their devotion to free markets and capitalism disappear so quickly as soon as it involves those dirty foreigners getting a piece of the action.

The Devil’s Kitchen likes to describe himself as a libertarian (as he did in a self-congratulatory post today) and makes much of his support for free markets — albeit almost always in terms of how much tax he has to pay.

But yesterday all of that talk about free markets was thrown out of the window when he approvingly posted a video of Swivel Eyed Farage on Sunday AM.

DK says:

And, on current showing, there is simply no major party that supports the libertarian agenda (I believe that UKIP are the closest that we have, hence my support for them).

Ukip libertarian? I hardly think so. Here is Swivel Eyed Farage in action.

I read one person somewhere (sorry, I’ve forgotten who) complaining that the amount of time Ukip was given on Sunday AM wasn’t enough. Having now watched the clip, I can understand why. If it continued for much longer it probably would have counted as a Party Political Broadcast. How Farage could get away with making such glaringly inconsistent statements almost in the same breath without anything less than fawning deference from Huw Edwards is beyond me.

Farage said:

Should somebody who’s interviewed as a school teacher and then changes faith midway through be allowed to teach a class of children when they can’t see her face? I wouldn’t have thought so, no.

Immediately afterwards, when Huw Edwards asked about the British Airways worker who was asked to cover her cross, Farage’s response was the exact opposite! One rule for Muslims and another for Christians.

Well I find that amazing, I mean British Airways are one of those companies that have consistently been anti-British… So I’m not surprised at all by BA’s behaviour.

Later on he says:

The underlying philosophy that runs through every single Ukip policy is that we want less government interference in our lives.

But predictably, just one minute later, he advocates the view that governments should be able to tell people where they can and can’t live. The reason why? As DK says:

His point about differing GDPs is a good one, I think, and forms the basis of my reservations on the unfettered free trade of peoples between countries. It seems to me that, inevitably, should you allow this, many more people will flow from the lower GDP countries into the high GDP countries and, realistically, that there will be far fewer emigrating to those lower GDP countries.

The fact that different countries have different GDPs is not a good argument against “the unfettered free trade of peoples between countries”. GDP is a measure of all of the income earned in an economy. So if you say that a country has a lower (per capita) GDP than another, that just means that the average income of a citizen of that country is lower.

Different people have different incomes. That is a fact of life. These differences in income exist within Europe. They also exist within the UK. They also exist within Kirkcaldy.

If this is so much of a problem that the government has to set some kind of limit to immigration, then it must also be enough of a problem to set a limit to the amount that people move within a country. There would be quotas on the number of people who can move from the Highlands to the Home Counties. They would build a moat around Ferguslie Park.

But they haven’t. That’s because the economy can cope with people of different economic backgrounds moving around the country. It is a fact that Scots prepared to move to England and English people prepared to move to Scotland in search of work will make more money than if they just stayed where they were born.

The economy as a whole benefits from this free movement of people. If Mr S from Scotland is really good at making widget X which is made in England, Mr S will move to England to work in job X because that’s what he’s good at, so he’ll make the most money there. And because he’s really good at his job, he makes widget X more efficiently than the average Mr E from England would have. Because Mr S is better at his job, firm X’s costs are lower and the benefits are spread to the economy as a whole.

Just because the line on the map has moved doesn’t make this fact untrue. And this isn’t just some pie in the sky economic theory. I am sure that everybody can think of several people who have moved long distances to get a job because they could see the clear benefits of doing so. DK himself is an Englishman living in Edinburgh for crying out loud! Just imagine how much of an economic shithouse the world would be if nobody ever moved away from their place of birth.

I really don’t see how it can be consistent to support a free market within a country but then advocate that the free trade — which is supposedly so beneficial to all — should end at the line drawn on a map.

Given that DK is such a “libertarian”, I am sure he will be familiar with the section of libertarian poster boy Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations dealing with protectionism (Book IV, Ch II). Smith might be talking about goods, but I cannot see any reason why what he says does not apply to labour aswell. If anyone has any reasons I would love to hear them.

Saying that the fact that countries have differing GDPs is a problem for a free trade area is a bit like saying that having firms of differing sizes is a problem in an economy. It is not. DK is probably right when he says, “there will be far fewer emigrating to those lower GDP countries,” if free trade of peoples is allowed.

This kind of thing is usually celebrated by libertarians. It’s freedom of choice, you see. So when there is competition, firms that don’t match the expectations of their customers have to adapt in order to survive. It is exactly the same for countries. When people can pick and choose where they live, governments are forced to take a long, hard look at the way they are running their economies. Sometimes they might even reform.

If, as libertarians suggest, it is the case that cutting back on welfare benefits, lowering corporate tax and so on improves a country’s economy and living standards, then open borders will force governments to adopt these policies as they try to attract jobs to their economies.

I thought that was what DK wanted? But by opposing the “free trade of peoples”, he could well be supporting the continuation of the welfare state.

Adam Smith on MPs’ wages.

The last recorded fatal duel in Scotland took place near Kirkcaldy. A descendant of one of the duellers, BBC political correspondent James Landale, has written a book about it. Interesting article.

Ah, the (very) occasional Famous Langtonians series returns. Today, Jack Vettriano.

At the top of Kirkcaldy High Street there is a frame shop. For such a long time, probably years, whenever I looked into the window there would be a frame there with a picture in it. It might even still be there. That there is a frame in the window of a frame shop isn’t surprising.

Then I heard of Jack Vettriano, or Jack Hoggan to be precise (Vettriano is his mother’s maiden name; presumably having an exotic name like Vettriano makes it easier for medicore artists to be noticed). I can’t even remember what the first Vettriano painting I saw was. It might have been The Singing Butler, or one of the other ones that actually look quite similar anyway.

Anyway, I saw this picture on the television and I thought, “that looks really familiar; where do I know that picture from?” Then it dawned on me. It is the picture that’s in the window of the frame shop. I always thought that was just some kind of demonstration picture, to sort of say, “look, this is what you do with a frame — you put a picture in it. But maybe put your own one in.” Like those photograph frames that already come with a generic smiling blonde 4-year-old girl.

I’m not big on art really. But of course I know what I like. And I don’t like Jack Vettriano’s paintings. I always found The Singing Butler weird. I mean, why is the guy holding the umbrella like that. Have you ever seen anybody hold an umbrella like that? And what’s meant to be so “erotic” about his paintings? They’re about as erotic as chicken soup. They look kind of flat and boring. As I said, like a generic demonstration picture or something. Like, oooh, maybe something from a how-to-draw book

Like twee chart music, though, people like the easy-going stuff, and Vettriano is one of the world’s most commercially successful painters. This is despite being snubbed by every art gallery in the land, apart from that one that’s next to the train station in Kirkcaldy (which is, incidentally, meant to be one of Michael Portillo’s favourite galleries!).

Vettriano, and others, said that this the fact that major galleries ignored him was just snobbery; that the fancy-pants galleries wouldn’t display Vettriano’s paintings because he came from a working class background, or because he was self-taught, or because you can buy the same bloody painting on a poster for a fiver from the art shop down the road. Despite his huffing and puffing he told The Guardian last year:

I would rather my paintings sold to ordinary people, rather than being stacked in a store house at the National Gallery.

Because so many ordinary people can buy a painting for six-figure sums, of course.

I made a mistake going to university. I’ll just get the tracing paper out and say I’ve “created a new narrative” then flog it for millions. Quids in!

[The Singing Butler] was one of these paintings I ought not to have been able to do. It was like I cheated. It was 1992, I was hardly in the back door of the art world when I did it.

Students don’t seem to be too happy about the new name for the merged Fife and Glenrothes colleges, Adam Smith College (irony alert: you can’t study Economics there).

In what may be a unique move the Students Association will not be named after the college.
Instead the economist’s name has been binned in favour of Jennie Lee, the Lochgelly miner’s daughter who became a socialist MP at the age of 24 and was instrumental in setting up the Open University.

Heh!

I’m posting this in every single category to make sure everybody who might need this gets it.

I’ve decided that my categories are a mess, and tomorrow I’m going to attempt to clean them up a bit. I’ll be creating new categories, deleting rubbish old ones, and changing where they go. Some posts might end up in different places. Just a heads up, because it does mean that some feed URLs, and indeed website URLs, will change.

The latest in the stuttering, unpopular and (un)occasional series Famous Langtonians. That’s people from my hometown of Kirkcaldy, in case you didn’t know. I always sort of plan to write these, but never get round to it. This was originally a very short post about Coldplay, which was as follows:

Coldplay’s first album was quite good. But they were trying to be too clever in their second album, and ended up sounding inept, pretentious and mediocre.

But did you know that Coldplay’s bassist, Guy Berryman, is from Kirkcaldy? Bet you didn’t, but you probably wouldn’t want to. Apparently he “is known as the soft-spoken member of the band.”

I didn’t know this!

Jocky Wilson, the 1982 Embassy world champion… the stocky Scot from Kirkcaldy…

At times like this, it is nice to know that Langtonians can be good at some sports at least.

I never knew this – the person on which Ebenezer Scrooge was based (erroneously, so it turns out) – Ebenezer Scroggie.

In life, Scroggie was apparently a rambunctious, generous and licentious man who gave wild parties, impregnated the odd serving wench and once wonderfully interrupted the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by grabbing the buttocks of a hapless countess…

Scroggie was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife; his mother was the niece of Adam Smith, the 18th century political economist and philosopher.

That was almost two meanies from Kirkcaldy then! (Just kidding, Smith fans.)