MISFIT
R Arts
eading my Sunday paper I came across a plaint by a Mr. Harris, a troubadour from the antipodes, that the government were not doing enough to support the animation industry. As I exploded about more money going to the NHS to little effect,
Mrs. Misfit looked up from her coffee and told me that I had got it wrong about animation. Re-animation is what they do when your heart stops. So what was animation? That, the source of all wisdom informed me, is films like Mickey Mouse when drawings are bought to life by clever camera techniques. I exploded again. Why do my taxes go to support the Disney Corporation?
No, dear, the English animation industry. Who are? Well, Wallace and Grommet, Shaun the Sheep. Bob the Builder, Thomas the Tank Engine, and so on. Surely characters loved by all and needing no support? Mrs. Misfit. had no answer to this, but I had
because I know something about those persons, having spent a little time dealing in character merchandise which involved putting popular characters on to boots, sandals, slippers and so on. I have been a tourist in that world, met the Fat Controller, stroked Postman Pat’s black and white cat. Never shorn Shaun, though. Don’t tell me the animation industry needs
I hear cries of “Philistine! Boor!” “If not by the Community, how are the
arts to be financed?” Well, there is an answer. If people want art, then they can vote for their chosen artwork with their cash, like they do in our world where someone who buys shoes from, say, Next, in effect gives them a vote, which does not go to M & S or Primark or Harrods or whoever. As indeed they do when it comes to the arts. Tickets for the late Michael Jackson series of concerts at the O2, which were not cheap, sold out within minutes. Films like Avatar coin money. It isn’t just the High Arts that get preferential treatment. Certain
industries do as well. Governments fall over each other to bribe car factories to come to their country, they even devise scrappage schemes to keep the car factories open.
What I want to know is, where were the bribes to bring shoe factories to Britain? Why was there no scrappage scheme for shoes? Take your old shoes in and get a tenner off your new pair. No chance. Our manufacturing industry was allowed to fade away.
money. If they do, what have they done with all the dosh I have handed them? From where I am sitting they seem to be doing very nicely. I also read in the public prints about the film industry. It appears they get
some tax concession which might get removed. If it is, then film making in this country will go down the tubes, or so they say. And again, some character proposes a giant horse in Kent to welcome
visitors to these isles coming from the Continent. Not with his own money or that of his friends and relatives but local authority money. In other words the money they take off residents, retailers and other enterprises in Kent in the form of Council Tax and Business Rates. Will it help sell shoes? Will it increase the sum of human happiness as much as a nice new pair of shoes? I think we know the answer to both these questions. If whoever it wants to put up a giant horse, or for that matter an angel on
the road to the North, why does he expect the State to pay for it? Why does he not go to his bank manager like we have to do? We know the answer to that – he would be given short shrift as his projected balance sheet would show high expenditure and zero income. So how is this worthy project to be financed? Our sculptor could get a job
in a shoe shop and put by some of his wages every month until he had got enough to start on his horse, say the front leg, until he is able over the years, and it would be many years at retail wages, to gradually complete the project. Another suggestion: he could put an ad. in the paper asking people to send in their contributions to the great horse fund, in return for having their names recorded for posterity on a plaque at the base of the horse. He could go further and form a limited company and sell shares in the project, if anyone was brave enough to buy them.
10 • FOOTWEAR TODAY • JUNE/JULY 2010 What I want to know is, where were the bribes to bring shoe factories to
Britain? Why was there no scrappage scheme for shoes? Take your old shoes in and get a tenner off your new pair. No chance. Our manufacturing industry was allowed to fade away. Shoe manufacturing in this country, with a few notable exceptions mainly
at the top end of the market, was allowed to go to the wall. There was a time when a shoe factory closed almost every week, followed by the firms who supplied those factories – the component suppliers, the leather merchants, even the people who made needles and thread, let alone machinery. A very good example that. The British United Shoe Machinery Company,
once the largest employer in Leicester and a major player internationally, pretty well the leading shoe machinery company in the world, was allowed to die. Without a local customer base it fought a losing battle and finally collapsed in 1999. Our new government talks of relying less on the City of London and the
service economy and going back to making things. Do they know what they are talking about? Making things in the modern world is a complicated business. You need a skilled workforce, and more important than both, you have to have the supporting infrastructure, the people who make leather, insoles, sole units, knives, stiffeners, shanks, etc., as well as the machines and people to service them, and they have to compete with countries with much lower labour costs. But it’s all right. The Ministry for Business, Information and Skills will just
sow the seeds, get out their watering can and the factories will spring up again. Just like that.
www.footweartoday.co.uk
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