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A fascinating set of statistics highlights the failure of the economic model this country has followed from New Labour to the coalition and Old Tory: parts of Britain now earn less than some of the most economically bereft areas of Europe.

In Cornwall, average earnings are 36% lower than the European average of £20,750pa. The average annual wage is a startling £14,300. A map of Britain shows West Wales and the valleys, Northern Ireland and vast swathes of the north similarly languishing up to 36% behind that average European benchmark.

That map suggests that two economic models work well for Britain – or, in one case, for parts of Britain.

The first is the Tories’ to-hell-with-the-hindmost let’s-look-after-the-wealthy brand of capitalism. It condemns large areas to penury, as we have seen, but what does that matter when the south east and home counties remain prosperous? There are enough votes there to keep the corrupt and venal in power, especially if Scotland achieves David Cameron’s dream and votes for independence, taking the UK’s social conscience with it and abandoning the rest of us to the tender mercies of the extreme right wing.

The other economic model that works for Britain? For you fans of left-wing socially inclusive politics, it’s Scotland. Unlike the Tories’ England, this model does not involve abandoning parts of the country – none of Scotland falls significantly below the European average earnings, apart from the Highlands and Islands, which are 20% lower, the same as Devon.

Bearing in mind the fate of Cornwall at 36% lower than average earnings, here’s how we now compare to the rest of Europe after our decades of unrestrained free-market capitalism: we are beaten by Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Greece and Portugal, among many others.

Only seven areas of Britain earn more than the European average –  inner London; north-eastern Scotland; Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire; Cheshire; Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Bristol and Bath; Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire; Surrey, East and West Sussex.

Those few haul the national figure above the European average. Every other part of Britain, all 24 areas, earns less than the European average. Britain is no longer even in the top 10 wealthiest countries in Europe.

So, as you listen to Cameron and Osborne lecturing you about how well they’re doing, please remember exactly where Britain now stands.

Pave paradise?

While we’re talking about a government that looks after its wealthy friends, we must note that Osborne’s aide Lord Wolfson has said developers should be free to build houses on protected countryside.

This is typical of the short-termism of the right, and New Labour’s version of the right: only house-building can solve our ills, and while doing so enrich the rich further. The only way to achieve this is to remove all controls, thereby putting the fate of our green and pleasant land in the hands of the sort of venal Philistine to whom the only thing that’s pleasant and green is a dollar bill.

This theory is what we left-wing economists call “total bollocks”: only a command economy answer can achieve jobs in construction and the sort of low-cost housing that’s needed, as opposed to more execrable Barratt’s executive four-beds.

This means protecting the countryside by establishing a national land bank of brownfield sites. I can show you two dozen in Cornwall without even stopping to think – shocking former industrial zones that could be improved by housing, as opposed to countryside that would be desecrated by it. It also means developing our cities so they are attractive and affordable places to live, thus easing pressure on the countryside.

Both would require developers accepting less profit, of course, which is why the vile Osborne wouldn’t dream of such things. Doing the right thing would help people and protect the countryside we all love; but it wouldn’t make enough money.

Dog gone

I am pleased to report that the dachshund has departed. My father’s mutt is back on my father’s sofa after two weeks of living a dog’s life; it is now, once more, a pampered pet.

I have to say the little dachshund adapted pretty well to the life for which a dog was intended: two square meals a day of dog food, as opposed to an endless chain of titbits from the humans’ table; chasing the horses and cows with my collie; mousing and ratting with Captain Pusstasticus. I’ve seen few things as funny as a dachshund facing down a Galloway bullock, or pursuing a ginger tomcat the size of a Shetland pony.

Picture this

Finally this week, you might remember that a couple of weeks ago I mentioned a photograph taken by good Captain Kay many years ago. I wrote:

I find graveyards are much more about the living than the dead. There is more genuine, uplifting drama and emotion to be found in these places than in a single second of the hateful EastEnders.

I discussed this with the good Captain Kay, long my spiritual guru, as you know, and a fellow follower of the malevolent deity that rules our misfortunes on this rock, the Coconut-Eating Crab.

Some years ago the Captain (a photojournalist by trade, for those of you who have forgotten) took a stunning black-and-white photograph in a South Devon churchyard, empty but for an absorbed, headscarfed woman, on her knees, tending a grave beneath a heavy, grey wind-blown sky.

Everybody said to the Captain: “What a miserable picture!” He said to me just now: “I could never understand that. To me, it was a photograph about life, not death, about faithfulness, even love. I thought it was rather lovely.”

I did too, and I’ve reminded him that he is to leave the print to me in his will if he is called to the Crab before me.

The Captain has now sent the picture, so you can decide for yourself.

But before you do, here is a very remarkable and rather eerie thing. I knew that the photograph was taken in Bigbury churchyard in South Devon, the village of my birth, the church in which I sang in the choir as a small boy. When he took it, the Captain knew nothing of my link to the place. And here’s the thing: the grave the woman is tending is the grave of my maternal grandparents. Today, there is a newer grave next to it, that of my mother.

I have no idea who the woman is; my late maiden Aunt Lizzie, I suspect.

But given the decades of friendship between the Captain and I, isn’t this photo a strange coincidence?