Proud of past but dismissing healthy future
Nov 17 2010 by Andrew Hebden, The Journal
TYNESIDE-BORN filmmaker Martin Durkin has been criticised before for making "misleading" documentaries, so we should hardly be surprised that his latest effort offered a somewhat distorted view of the North East.
For those who missed Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story, which aired on Channel Four last week, it was a self-styled polemical analysis of the financial crisis – how we got here and how we might solve it.
His assessment of the size of the national debt – at £4.8 trillion, the equivalent of £77,000 for every man, woman and child in Britain – is certainly a startling statistic.
And he makes a compelling argument that serious action needs to be taken to rebalance the economy by cutting back drastically on the size of the public sector, enabling taxes to be slashed and allowing private enterprise to flourish.
All of which was fine – until he took to the streets of Newcastle to demonstrate his point. Repeatedly referring to it as the most depressed region in England, he lamented how the city’s finest buildings, such as those in Grey Street, were now occupied by businesses which could never aspire to build such premises for themselves today.
During a carefully-shot segment filmed on the Quayside, he gazes in awe at the mighty Tyne Bridge, proof of the region’s proud industrial past, before mourning the now derelict shipyards further down the river.
His trip to the North East ends with a visit to the Angel of the North which he laments as an icon of a lost industrial age, before interviewing one local resident who describes Gormley’s statue as an embarrassment to Gateshead.
Not once did the viewer set eyes on the modern marvels of the Tyne, the Millennium Bridge, The Sage Gateshead or the rejuvenated Baltic mill, all of which presumably deserve to be demolished because they were funded in part from the public purse.
Indefensibly, we were also left in the dark about the activity that is now taking place in those former shipyards, such as the construction of giant wind turbine blades, nor did we hear about the pioneering offshore engineering businesses that are now flourishing on the banks of the Tyne.
He is right that successive governments have done little to support the North East’s traditional industries, instead preferring to create jobs in a bulging public sector.
But, even if corporation tax was abolished, it is hard to see how they could have coped with the emerging competition from low-cost economies around the globe.
Durkin may be rightly proud of his home region’s industrial past, but he has also done it a great disservice by apparently writing its future off as a lost cause.
:: Andrew Hebden - The Voice of nebusiness
andrew.hebden@ncjmedia.co.uk
