Conventional economic wisdom has it that developing countries need to put up with poor working conditions and pay so  that the country can become wealthy and their conditions improve. 

A quick glance at the history books and we can see that’s exactly what happened during the industrial revolution.  Demand grew, labour became scarce and so wages and conditions were improved to entice workers. 

But things have changed since then. 

Take Bangladesh for example.  It’s the worlds 2nd biggest clothing manufacturer (after China) and iirc the worlds biggest shirt maker since the 90s – yet typical wages are still around UK 7p / US$0.13 per hour, with 60 hour / 6 day weeks the norm. 

How many decades then before they earn the British minimum wage of over £5 an hour? 

Well I bought some £2 shirts from Primark when I started my new job – and they are as good as shirts I’ve paid £10 – £15 for in the past.  So there isn’t much scope for earning more through improving quality. 

They could perhaps dig into China’s share of the market – but they already have a huge share of the global trade, so short of discovering lifeforms on other planets to export to, again there isn’t that much scope for growth. 

The problem is that economic thinking hasn’t really kept up with developments in technology. 

Manufacturing is now much less labour intensive than in the days of the industrial revolution, and many jobs are much less skilled, so the prospect of a shortage of labour in Bangladesh pushing up wages seems very remote. 

And if the Bangladesh government were to impose a minimum wage, global manufacturers would simply find another poor country to exploit. 

It’s unbelievable some of the excuses people come up with.   Here for example: http://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/53_sweatshop.pdf they claim that global firms aren’t really exploiting workers by paying them 13cents an hour, because domestic employers pay even less!  Missing the point somewhat I feel. 

Obviously the cost of living in poor countries is much cheaper than in developed countries – but why not pay workers at least enough so that they can work a 40 hour week and not work themselves into an early grave?  And get more shift workers to fill up the shortfall, giving more people the chance of a job. 

In a 10hr day the typical employee can stitch 200 shirts apparently.  If Primark were able to give the Vat cut directly to the employees they could earn the same as they do now for a much shorter working week. 

In fact I’d happily pay £3 for one of these shirts, and still feel like, well I was stealing the shirt of their backs!  200 shirts at an extra £1 each, steady on, they’d be earning more than me!  To be fair, their sewing is much better than mine. 

But getting back to the main theme of my post though, it’s easy to understand a photolab going bust after the boom in digital cameras, but when entire global industries that are still relevant such as the car industry are unable to make a profit, something has gone wrong somewhere. 

Moving  jobs from developed countries to developing countries on a large scale is great for the middlemen and investors who become filthy rich, but not a lot of fun for those in the developing world who work for a pittance in often scandalous conditions for long hours, nor for the people in the developed world who lose their jobs and can no longer afford to buy the goods made in developing countries. 

We are in uncharted waters here.  Yes genius economic minds of the past can give us some general guidance, but we need to start rewriting the rule book if we are to share the worlds resources more fairly and give everyone a better chance of a decent life.

Many people suggest that those who bemoan the demise of our manufacturing industry are merely stuck in the past and/or snobbish and that service industries are every bit as valid as “making things”. 

Well I’m a programmer by trade, so you won’t get any argument from me about service industries being a perfectly valid way of making a living. 

However, for one thing there are a limited number of service industries that can be exported – and if we import most of our consumer goods then we need to export something to pay for them. 

The other issue I have is that so many of the service industries I’ve seen first hand do very little to improve life. 

For example, when I was doing some work at an advertising agency, we went out to one of these daytime tv secured loan companies, where they explained that they never give anyone the amount of money they ask for. 

Their computer screen tells them how much equity is in the callers property, so if someone rings up trying to reconile £5K of credit card debt and they have £20K equity in their property, they will have an innocent sounding chat with them “have you had a holiday this year?”, “no? well why not borrow another £5K and have a dream holiday?”  “How’s your car?”, “Knackered is it?  Why not borrow another £5K and get a newer one?”.  etc etc. 

Not exactly ethical in my mind to be putting temptation in the way of people who are already reconciling existing debt – but the employees who get callers to spend the most get rewareded with luxury holidays and other incentives.  A far cry from the days when in order to get a mortgage you had to put on your best suit to see your bank manager, and he’d send you away to save a bigger deposit if he didn’t feel you were ready for the financial commitment yet. 

It’s no wonder our collective debt has spiralled out of control.  And of course houses are only worth what people are willing (and able) to pay for them, so many of these people who borrowed against equity may well now find themselves in negative equity thanks to some pushy operative obsessed by some prize on offer. 

A flatmate of my ex used to work for a food magazine selling advertising space.  She was very good at it, and got headhunted by an IT recruitment firm. 

This was a surprise to me as she barely knew how to switch a PC on, but she had a half days training in the buzz words she needed to know, and she winged the rest. 

The agency would charge employers 1/3rd of the candidates first year wages if they stayed for at least 3 months.  For the typical programmer earning £30K, the agency would cop £10K  and pay £1K commission to the operative, who could earn £100K per year if they went at it hammer and tongs and worked weekends and late evenings. 

Again there were incentives such as taking the whole office on a shopping trip to New York for the weekend if everyone met their targets. 

Part of their routine was to wait until the successfully placed employee had been in their new job for 12 weeks, and the the agencies commission was therefore safe, then they would make a “courtesy call” along the lines of “How are you enjoying the new job?  I’ve got this new vacancy that I think you’d be perfect for, and it pays an extra £5K per year”. 

If they successfully managed to lure the employee away, they’d then make a “courtesy call” to the employer, acting surprised when they were told that they had left, “but I’ve got another candidate here that is even better”. 

The agency were really doing very little for their £10K or so per candidate placed.  The people on the phones were merely sales people, they didn’t know or care whether the candidates they put forward were any good or not, all they really did was put people with certain keywords on their CV in touch with employers looking for the same keywords – and charging through the nose for it. 

This company traded under various names  – it wasn’t a one off, it’s pretty much how most of them operate. 

Another company I came across recently ring you up and act like a recruitment agency who are really keen to see you.  It turns out that they spend 3 hours ripping you to shreds, telling you you’ll never find another job, but they can help – if you hand over £7,000 for their personal development course! 

Another one promises “a guaranteed job in IT”.  A pretty bold promise – but of course it turns out they merely want to try and sell you £12K of useless training, and the guarantee involves giving you back a couple of grand from what you spent on the training. 

At work recently, us and a few of our clients recieved unsolicited phone calls from companies claiming they can get us on the front page of Google.  Intregued I looked into it further, turns out they set up a google adwords campaign for you, with them taking a healthy cut of your budget (you can easily set up a google adwords campaign yourself and put 100% of your budget into the adverts, not to some dodgy middlemen). 

Don’t get me started on advertising agencies.  All these old blokes on BBC 4 laughing about selling people Musk and Tweed perfumes in the 1970s to easily lead women, even though they stunk, shows, if anyone was in any doubt, about the lack of sincerity that goes into advertising. 

I could go on all day, but I wonder if all these kind of companies who do nothing for humanity other than leech off it, were closed down, how much of our service industry would be left. 

And what kind of nation it’s turning us into, when so many employees ignore the immoral nature of their work and get lured by promises of expensive bribes. 

On a brighter note though, Happy New Year!

In these days of economic turmoil, it’s important that we don’t just bury our heads in the sand and hope it will all just pass, on the basis that previous downturns have passed.  Even competent governments can only make policies – it’s up to all of us to make them work.  For example, supposing the way out of the problems is for us all to go out and spend – the government can cut taxes and give us incentives to spend, but they can’t make us go out and spend.  Likewise if the solution is to stop spending, they can raise taxes and ask the Bank of England nicely to raise interest rates, but they can’t easily stop us from spending recklessly all together. 

At the same time, it’s important not to get too carried away and blame everything on the credit crunch. 

The media have a tendency to run in waves.  They report a story from a particular angle until everyone couldn’t care less, then they find a surprising different angle to take. 

At the moment, it’s all doom and gloom, with the credit crunch at it’s core. 

A couple of weeks ago on 6 Music I heard a news bulletin that proclaimed Abbey, Alliance and Leicester and Bradford & Bingley were all cutting back large numbers of staff. 

To the average man in the street, this sounds like 3 well known banks are all in trouble. 

However, what they didn’t mention is that all 3 banks are owned by the Spanish based Santander banking group who bought Abbey a couple of years ago, Alliance and Leicester this year (iirc) and Bradford and Bingley retail quite recently. 

The main reason of course why companies buy out their competitors like this is to make the merged business more efficient by cutting out duplication and selling off excess assets. 

So even if we were in the middle of a “boom”, they would have more than likely been making these jobs cuts – yet they were clearly trying to lead the listener to believe that this was yet more evidence of the credit crunch. 

When it comes down to it, none of the high street retailers that have gone bust recently have been a major surprise.  Woolworths “budget bits and bobs” format has been adopted by people like Wilkinson who do it cheaper and better.  Photo labs such as Max Spielmann / Klik photopoint have been living on borrowed time from the moment that non-tech savvy grandparents started to buy digital cameras.  MFI, well they lasted much longer than most of their furniture! 

Zavvi?  Until file sharing can be stopped (if indeed it can) then it’s only a matter of time before all the remaining music and DVD retailer go under. 

These closures were perhaps speeded up by the Credit Crunch (TM) - but it’s only brought forward the effect of changing markets. 

John Lewis or Tesco going bust, now that would be scary news!

I’ve been a bit tardy on the old blog lately. 

When my better half was rehearsing for Wallasey Operatic’s production of Oliver I had plenty spare time in the evenings for pontificating (I love a good bit of pontification) over issues in the news on my blog. 

Blogging was one of these things I came to quite late.  Back in the early days, I thought it was just another one of those passing fads that would disappear after the initial buzz had died down. 

Many of those who waxed-lyrical about the blog in it’s early days, are now proclaiming it’s death, but personally I believe it’s true possibilities are only now starting to be tapped. 

Why?  Well I’ve just put a blog online at work: http://www.hipview.co.uk/blog/ 

Before you get too excited though, HipView isn’t some kinky specialist site where you can view pictures of people’s hips (hmmm. that might not be a bad idea actually), no, it’s a company where you can buy Home Information Packs and view them online. 

Whilst reading about the home information pack industry might not be everyone’s idea of a gripping read, for those in the industry (and people interested in the property industry in general) it’s a useful way of sharing ideas and it shows just how far blogs are reaching – they are no longer just the domain of geeks and armchair politicians. 

In days gone by, companies could only communicate to the world through glossy sales brochures full of hyperbole, but blogs give companies an opportunity to talk candidly about what is going on both within the company, and the industry in general, on a daily basis in a way that simply wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. 

In an age where the media are becoming increasingly powerful in the control of flow of information, it’s good that ordinary people (and companies) can put their side of the story. 

btw Don’t forget the Bards of New Brighton next Monday 8th at the Magazine, New Brighton.

The next meeting of the Bards of New Brighton is Monday 8th so I’d better get cracking as I prefer not to read the same poem twice. 

This is the 1st for this month’s meeting:

Borrowed Time

2.5% off everything!
Go forth and Spend, Spend Spend!
Max out that Credit Card
Like the limit increases will never end

Isn’t it funny
The government is borrowing money
To encourage us to borrow money
Fuelling our greed
For imported consumer goods
We can’t afford
and don’t need

Of course I refer to the 2.5% VAT cut.  There are several problems with it as far as I can see:

Lack of Notice

One of the great things about living in London is that at parties you almost always meet someone with an interesting job.  In 1999 I met a girl who was in Tory Blair’s think-tank that was dealing with the millennium bug.  Strangely, she didn’t have any background in IT and had bought the hysteria hook line and sinker.  I managed to calm her down for example by pointing out that credit cards with year 2000 expiry dates had started appearing in 1997.  The banks simply wrote to all their customers urging them to test their billing systems 6 months before, and as far as I’m aware there were no cases of year 2000 expiry cards being rejected.  After all, people had known about it for quite a while and so it was only really old software that was likely to cause problems, and businesses aren’t stupid – if they depend on software for their business then they will make sure it is tested in plenty of time. 

Of course the hysteria about the millenium bug was a good thing in a way, nobody could be in any doubt that there was a potential issue. 

But whilst people had plenty time to prepare for the millennium bug, we were given about a couple of weeks to deal with the VAT change.  The number of times I’ve developed systems for people who have said “Don’t worry, VAT won’t change, and if it does we’ll have plenty of notice to deal with it then” is quite chilling. 

Here we are at a time when businesses in practically every sector are struggling, and here the government is springing the expense and hassle of getting people to check and possibly modify their systems – often at high consultant rates if they don’t have an internal IT department. 

Will it really make people spend?

Of course businesses won’t be too worried about spending a few quid on IT if it makes customers more likely to spend more money.  But will it? 

Our next major purchase is likely to be a Samsung American Style Fridge.  (Ah in the days before having kids, it would have been the 63″ Samsung TV on the next stand…).  They are already reduced from £650 to £500 – but it’s still a bit pricey for something that would be convenient, but we don’t really need. 

We are therefore watching the sales – if it comes down to £400 I’ll snap one up right away.  £450 I’d give it serious thought.  But even if Currys pass on the 2.5% discount, a price tag of £487.50 won’t make me rush out to buy one. 

My eldest daughter wants a guitar, and I’ve been watching one on Ebuyer that was reduced from £60 to £44.  When I heard about the VAT reduction I thought I might as well wait.  Sure enough, they sent out an email on Friday to say that everything was down in price.  Only it’s gone up to £46.  And everything else I was looking at has increased in price too.  Either they’ve made a mistake in the rush to get the change put through, or they are hoping the confusion will let them get away with putting their prices up whilst telling everyone they’ve gone down. 

Will it help the economy? 

The economy is a complicated beast with lots of variables. 

A couple of months ago Phil Redmond justified the cost of La Machine by saying that if everyone who comes to Liverpool buys a bottle of water here then it’s cost will be justified. 

It’s a good sound-bite, and is a good argument unless you scratch the surface. 

If someone buys a bottle of water from Tesco, does it benefit Liverpool’s economy?  The Hertfordshire based company will make a profit, but the girl on the checkout, the guy who stacks the shelves, the guy who stands on the door and whacks the scallys, the guy who follows instructions from head office don’t typically get bonuses just because the shop is doing well one day.  Someone may get an extra shift out of it, but that’s about it. 

Indeed most of the shops, hotels, pubs, transport companies, etc in Liverpool are owned by companies far from Merseyside.  Anything that encourages tourism in the long term will of course make jobs more secure, but whether tourism in Liverpool next year is increased, bearing in mind there won’t be anything special going on, remains to be seen. 

Likewise, if I go out and buy my Samsung Fridge – it’s made in Korea by a Korean firm (lets face it, to buy British these days you’d need to invent a time-machine first).  Whilst it will help the employees of the retailer, the logistics people, the people who run the warehouses, etc, I’d guesstimate about half of what I spend will go directly out of the country. 

Bearing in mind I will be whacking it on to my credit card (well you didn’t really think I had £400+ burning a hole in my back pocket did you?) and the bank will potentially borrow the money I spend from an overseas bank, and the government are borrowing money (again probably from overseas) to make up the shortfall in the VAT, is it really the answer to the underlying problems in our economy?

It looks like the downturn in the economy is now official – the BBC website have designed a logo for it. 

The questions on most people’s minds are: how long will it last? and, how bad will it get?

Many economists and analysts try to come up with an answer by looking at past recessions and looking for similarities to current circumstances.  However, there are so many variables involved in the economy that it is impossible to make predictions with any reasonable accuracy, indeed as the financial services disclaimer says – past results are not necessarily a guide to future performance. 

I prefer to ask the question – WHAT will drive Britain’s economic recovery? 

Will we let house prices spiral out of control again to help property investors, those inheriting / downsizing / stepping off the property ladder, and those who want to use their house as a piggy bank by constantly borrowing against it’s equity? 

Or will we lower interest rates and increase credit limits so that people can go out and splurge on imported goods that they can’t afford and don’t need, but will help keep retail and logistics workers in a job? 

Will we sell off some of Britain’s assets to help balance the books?  In the past couple of decades we’ve been having quite a fire sale – everything must go!  Utilities, Railways, Bus Companies, Airports, Corporations, Gold Reserves, Football Clubs, even the majority of sales of houses in London costing over £4 Million have been sold to overseas investors, whilst purchases of overseas assets by British firms have been notably thin on the ground.  Still, we could maybe pop the crown jewels on ebay, that would bring in a few quid to keep us going a bit longer :-/

Or we could just turn a blind eye whilst people in the city gamble recklessly with all our futures for their own short-term gain. 

Well, as far as I can see, that’s pretty much what underpinned the last “boom”. 

It’s unbelievable that Gordon is considering borrowing yet MORE money to finance tax cuts, in the hope that with this windfall we will all go out and spend, spend, spend to give a boost to the service sector. 

Borrowing is risky enough when you expect a windfall in the future.  e.g. taking out a student loan in the hope that you will be earning megabucks once you’ve got your degree. 

But Gordon’s idea seems to be pure panic and blind hope! 

The fundamental issue I see with the British economy is this:

If you manufacture cars, you can (in theory at least) ship them all over the world, earning overseas income to help pay for the goods that we as a nation import. 

But if you sell cars, you won’t find many people coming from overseas to purchase their new car here (even putting cost and steering wheel issues aside). 

So whilst the individual may not care whether they work on a production line or a car showroom just so long as they are getting paid, all selling cars does is move money around the country, with some syphoned off to pay for the imported car (or components if if was built here for the profit of an overseas firm). 

Of course some services can be exported, IT and Financial Services for example.  However, there was a big wave of offshore IT outsourcing about 5 years ago – all these programmers have 5 years of experience now, and are still only earning peanuts, so it’s practically impossible for high wage economies to compete.  And financial services, well I don’t think the rest of the world is too impressed with British and American financial conjuring tricks anymore (Ooh, arr, watch whilst before your very eyes I turn this sub-prime mortgage into pure gold!  That is, the gold watch I’m going to buy with the commission I make!)

In Britain, like many developed nations we’ve been moving wealth creating jobs offshore to countries where wages are low. 

The key problem is that the people who do the jobs, aren’t paid enough to purchase the goods they make.  Only the factory owners can afford them, and so they depend on developed nations to buy the goods (and services) they make. 

For example, according to a recent article on the BBC website, in January there were over 3,000 toy factories in China, by the end of August the global downturn meant that more than half of them had closed down. 

Henry Ford had his head screwed on.  He realised that by paying his workers more than the going rate, it would push up wages generally, and that was the only way people could afford to buy his luxury product. 

We seem to be in a situation now where we’ve taken a lot of the wealth creation out of developed nations, but instead of developing nations benefiting from this windfall of jobs and opportunities, we’ve no money to buy what they make! 

I’m sure things will pick up again – after all the media has a big part to play. 

When they reported, what felt like on a daily basis, record house price rises, people who weren’t in a hurry to buy their first home were panicked by the constant reminders that house prices were rising faster than they could possibly save, making them stretch themselves to the limit to get on the property ladder – making the situation even worse by increasing demand and therefore prices even further. 

Now that they report daily on doom and gloom of job cuts, firms failing, banks being bailed out, people who have no real reason to fear for their job security become cautious and stop spending, which makes the situation worse. 

But the media works in trends.  Once people get fed up of the current news trend, they try and find stories from the other perspective.  So when people get fed up of reading about doom and gloom and stop buying papers, they will start to find some good news stories, and things will start to move again. 

But unless the underlying issues are resolved in the World economy, and particularly the British economy (at least other countries in the EU for example still own their infrastructure and have firms to raise their economy when things ease) then sadly I think it could be a long time before genuine economic good times return.

I hate modern celebrity culture. 

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people who have real talent being recognised.  Hitchcock for example truly was a master in his field. 

What I have a problem with is people who typically have very little talent, but you see them everywhere because they are commerically successful. 

Particularly annoying are people who find fame having been in some crap reality TV program. 

But what annoys me even more than over zealous celebration of questionable talent, is the increasing level of celebrity bashing. 

Take Amy Winehouse for example.  I thought Frank was a fantastic album, the follow up wasn’t quite as exciting but still better than a lot of the pap out there. 

Now I’m not going to defend her lifestyle for a moment.  She really needs help to sort herself out. 

But what really annoys me is when people who go binge drinking and taking drugs every weekend, having a pop at her. 

Put in her position with incredible fame and money at such an early age, with no day job or money worries to cause restraint and all the pressures that go with being a) creative and b) famous, I wonder how many of them would take their own advice? 

I’ve no time for Kerry Katona, dodgy albums, dodgy reality shows, dodgy Iceland adverts, dodgy inflated and deflated knockers, but that said she is a human being and one that’s had a lot of personal problems (all made very public). 

GMTV knew exactly what they were doing by putting her on in that state.  All this guff about her turning up late and they didn’t notice, they knew the amount of publicity they would get out of it. 

Ok she’s famous (though for nothing that really deserves fame) and she’s possibly pissed early in the morning.  I wonder if those who judge her, if they’d been through a bankruptcy, their life was in a mess, and had to do an early morning TV interview, if they’d not turn to the bottle themselves. 

Can’t we just ditch this whole crazy notion of celebrity, or at least find some with a bit of talent?

There was quite an interesting item on Newsnight last night about, surprise, the economy. 

They were talking about the recently expanding economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China, commonly abbreviated to BRIC. 

Hold on, that sounds like Brick, so in a stroke of genius they had 4 bricks each with one of the countries names on, surrounded by other bricks. 

There was a mad theory until recently that these countries had already decoupled from the west, in other words their growing middle class was sufficient to create demand for their own goods, and no longer needed to rely on the west (this was a mad theory because for every 1 factory owner there are often hundreds of factory floor workers who get paid a pittance and cannot afford to buy the goods they create, one of the fundamental flaws in the current global economy in my opinion). 

Anyway, to illustrate decoupling they pulled away all the bricks around these 4 whilst they remained in place. 

Then they pointed out that these countries hadn’t really decoupled, and illustrated it by the remaining bricks falling over. 

Are today’s viewers really so stupid that they need this kind of visual clue to such simple concepts, and gimmicks to keep their attention?  I mean i can understand it on ITV, with all these wavy lines behind the presenters and celebrity ranking higher than anything of real importance.  But Newsnight is supposed to be a serious flagship news program. 

If it’s viewers really are that dumb then no wonder the global economy is in the mess it’s in!  Whatever happened to the intellectuals?

All of us are consumers, we buy stuff out of shops, and we want everything as cheaply as possible. 

But in order to be consumers, we need to get money from somewhere, be it as an employee, benefits or a pension. 

So whilst fierce competition is good for us on one hand as consumers, with companies fighting each other to give the lowest price (or the illusion of the lowest price), it’s not so good if you lose your job because your employers have been forced out of business by a rival with deeper pockets selling at a loss to put the competition out of business. 

And once they have the market to themselves, they will likely increase prices which is bad for everyone. 

Even strangers in another part of the country losing their jobs can effect us, because they would have been potential customers for whatever keeps you in a job, and paid National Insurance which pays people’s benefits and pensions.  One or two might not make much difference, but when there are a lot, it has a knock-on effect. 

Profiteering is bad, and companies need healthy competition to stamp it out.  But equally, companies being squeezed until they make a loss, is bad for everyone.  Like most things, there is a happy medium.

Even when we were all blissfully unaware of the problems at the Northern Rock, and the Credit Crunch tm was still in the future, I noticed that people seem to be going out less than ever. 

It could be partly because I’m getting older and people I know, like me are having families or at least preparing themselves financially. 

But a decade ago, I’m sure that pubs were much busier than they were even before the smoking ban. 

Economically it makes sense to buy cheap supermaket booze and watch Sky Sports or X-Factor at home where you can smoke yourself silly and fall into bed when you’ve had enough, but where’s the atmosphere?  Where’s the fun?  What’s the point? 

There’s nothing like going to the pub and talking absolute crap with some complete stranger whose become your best friend for the night! 

But sadly, in the last decade or so pubs themselves have declined in atmosphere, as they are increasingly owned by chains who stamp out any kind of individuality or interest, replacing it with clean, tasteful, nice and …. dull.  The less people that go to a pub, the less atmosphere it has, and so the spiral goes on. 

Aside from pubs, I know a few people who refuse to use public transport, fearing that it is full of yobbos.  Fingers crossed I haven’t seen any incidents at first hand, and lets face it, driving your car is not without it’s dangers. 

Far from people shopping locally and getting to know their local shop keepers personally as they did in eras gone by, many of us lead such busy lives that we get our shopping delivered, where the conversation typically consists of “We’ve run out of yogurt, but we’ve substituted it for some milk a month past it’s sell by date we found at the back of the van”. 

People don’t even go to the video library to rent films anymore, between dozens of Sky Movies channels and dodgy downloads. 

Thank goodness for people like Steve Regan who runs the Bards of New Brighton poetry group, and The Scouse House in Birkenhead who run a wide range of poetry, comedy, musical and debating nights.  The create a much needed social atmosphere where you can go along and meet some real characters, and enjoy some real talent. 

Lets hope in this time of doom and gloom, that people come together and reconnect.