Preston, where they’ve gone all local and town hall driven, is quite the fashion in left wing circles these days. We’re not entirely convinced by municipal socialism ourselves even as we agree that it’s likely to be vastly better than any national application of the same ideas. In a review of a book about it The Guardian tells us that:

In all of which the fundamental question is, does it work? Does the patent good sense of the idea get befouled by unintended consequences and unexpected pitfalls? If the Cleveland and Mondragon experiments are so great, why are they not more widely applied? Because of the hostility of financial elites or for more basic reasons?

Here, Paint Your Town Red could do more. It tells us that “in the past five years, Preston council and its partners have almost tripled their spending in the local economy, from £38m to £111m”. Good, but there’s limited detail as to how it has played out across the city. There’s a shortage of voices from satisfied citizens, as opposed to the officials and businesses most likely to approve of the model. Criticisms – that it could lead to a sort of local protectionism, for example – are rather vaguely addressed, and the source of these critiques not identified by name.

Too often, there is a tone of wishful thinking and special pleading, of talking up initiatives that in some cases seem tentative and insubstantial.

Quite so.

Like everyone else we have our moral certainties, our visions of the good world to come. We are, however, hard core pragmatists. If something works to make the folks in general out there - out here- better off then we’re generally for it. If it doesn’t then we’re not. Thus the hard test of any economic polity is whether it achieves this task. Does the Preston model do so? We don’t know yet, do we?

This is also one of the reasons that we’re so keen upon markets. Because it is only when many things are tried, each having to face that hard test, that we find out which of them do achieve that laudable goal.

Another way of putting this is that we’re absolutely fine with what Preston is trying. On the grounds that experiments are desirable because we gain knowledge from them. This does though come with a significant proviso - those experiments which turn out not to work do need to be replaced with other attempts to get things right, don’t they?