Northern Ireland builds a Potemkin village to look good for the G8

A teachable moment in austerity.

Enniskillen in Country Fermanagh. Photograph: Getty Images

Northern Ireland is in a tricky situation. It's hosting the G8 summit in the luxury Lough Erne resort in three weeks time, in the midst of an economic slump which has rendered much of the nearby community of Fermanagh a ghost town. That's not the sort of thing which any nation wants to deal with; it's embarrassing enough when the neighbours pop over and you've forgotten to do the hoovering, let alone when you don't have a fully functioning economy in your rural outskirts. And while George Osborne isn't exactly hiding the fact that the UK is in dire economic straits, the chancellor still wants to put on a brave face in front of Vladimir Putin. So what do you do? Build a potemkin village, of course! The Irish Times reports:

Just a few weeks ago, Flanagan’s – a former butcher’s and vegetable shop in the neat village – was cleaned and repainted with bespoke images of a thriving business placed in the windows. Any G8 delegate passing on the way to discuss global capitalism would easily be fooled into thinking that all is well with the free-market system in Fermanagh. But, the facts are different…

The butcher’s business has been replaced by a picture of a butcher’s business. Across the road is a similar tale. A small business premises has been made to look like an office supplies store. It used to be a pharmacy, now relocated on the village main street.

Hopefully, the Chancellor does, in fact, know that the economy in rural Northern Ireland is suffering somewhat. It's his job, after all. So the Potemkin village is just for the sake of appearances in front of the neighbours. Still, while he's out there, he could learn a thing or two from the Northern Irish Departments for the Environment and Social Development, like how to justify economic stimulus:

All is paid for by so-called dereliction funding. About £300,000 was made available by the Department of the Environment and the Department for Social Development. A second round of funding is expected… The short-term beneficiaries were local builders and painters who were called in for the spruce-up.

But as Keynesianism goes, this is a pretty poor attempt at it. It suffers from the same false economies that most of the UK's policy does these days. If you're going to spend money with the aim of a) sprucing up a town in preparation for international visitors and b) providing work for local builders and painters, then a far better sort of stimulus would be to increase your initial outlay, to £3m or even £30m, and try to fill those properties with real businesses, rather than pretty pictures of businesses. In the short term, the cost will be more, but there's no substitute for having a thriving local economy, and you'll soon earn the outlay back.

But if Osborne understood that, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.