Tories, allotments and the war on public space

Wandering around my home town of Brighton, as I pass allotments I have often reflected that many of them are on what would pass for prime development land. Rather in the spirit of John Betjeman in the 1960s, who, when spotting a pretty country church would adopt the persona of a Northern town planner and mutter “We’re ‘avin that down”, I find myself in the age of Government by estate agent imagining how that land could contribute to the city’s stock of luxury apartments with sea views.

Even though the one of the biggest bloody noses the ruling Tory party got in Brighton in recent years was over its proposal to build a 600-space park and ride facility on the allotments in my home suburb of Patcham, I felt the time would not be long in coming before the estate agent’s dream and my nightmare would come true.

And so it has proved.

The Independent reports today that allotment holders are mounting a campaign against a Coalition proposal to remove the statutory obligation for councils to provide allotments – a law that dates back more than a hundred years. The proposal is justified by Eric Pickles’ department as a measure to remove red tape.

Such comments are of course highly ideological. For Pickles, “red tape” is anything that stands in the way of unchecked commercial development and which allows local people a voice in how their environment is managed. Looking at councils like Brighton and Hove – whose basic tenet of planning policy appears to be to turn the city into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sainsbury and Tesco – the outcome is all too clear. If the provision of allotments becomes a policy decision, councils being shafted by Con Dem cuts will see the sale of allotment land as a nice little earner.

But there’s something bigger at work here. This proposal seems to me to be part of a much wider ideological war to secure the privatisation of public space; whether it is rhetoric about bossy bollards and a determination to keep the streets for the private car, or restriction on the right to demonstrate or protest, or the proposal to sell off our forests, or Westminster Council’s criminalisation of homelessness, the Tories (and of course by extension their Liberal Democrat useful idiots). What we are seeing, it seems to me, is a modern reincarnation of land enclosures or the Highland Clearances; a belief that there is no such thing as space that the public enjoys by right, and that whatever we do in the open is by leave of our economic and social superiors.

I expect that the Tories will back down over allotments. The backlash will be huge, and much of it will be from the Middle England that the Tories and Lib Dems like to claim as their own. But there’s a bigger war here, one in which a lot of ground has already been ceded, quite a lot of it by Labour.

A rubbish proposal

More rubbish from the Coalition of the Clueless.  According to the BBC, the Government is about to announce the removal of local authority powers to issue fixed penalties to people who break the rules about refuse collection.  Only the most serious cases of fly-tipping will continue to attract sanctions.

Rubbish, it seems, is a big issue in Middle England.  The Daily Mail, the coalition’s spiritual guide, is full of stories about town hall bureaucrats who have the effrontery to require rubbish to be sorted, recycled, managed carefully.  The coalition promised action and that, apparently, is what we have got.  Dealing with waste is of course a serious issue – we as a society are running out of landfill and have an appalling recycling record, but nobody’s addressing that.

In my view, though, it provides an important insight into the Tory psyche.  Tories have problems with public space; fundamentally they don’t believe in it.  So we have rhetoric about bossy bollards restricting the right of the free-born English 4×4 driver to put his behemoth wherever he likes, and now about the right of householders not to sort their rubbish, or to put perishables out in inappropriate container.  Rats, urban foxes and, where I live in Brighton, giant feral herring gulls can be ignored; rubbish strewn across pavements because somebody doesn’t use their wheelie bin or puts bags out two days before the collection date is a far more trivial matter than the inalienable right of the individual to treat their refuse as they see fit, without interference from town hall gauleiters, as the Daily Mail would put it.

But it ought to be obvious that how humans dispose of their waste is a public issue.  Collective provision has been the norm throughout history; the issues of public health are obvious and even at the height of the age of laissez-faire, London’s sewers were provided as a public good.  One person’s inconsiderate rubbish disposal is the community’s rat infestation or public health problem.  It ought to be obvious – and in grown-up countries like Germany, where the duty of citizens to manage waste properly is accepted and enforced – it is obvious.  It’s only in Britain, where the coalition channels an increasingly infantile view of public space as the playground of the individual, that the sort of nonsense Caroline Spelman appears poised to announce would be tolerated.

Con Dem Britain seems increasingly to be about pandering to the inner toddler – about allowing immature people to stick their fingers in their ears, poke out their tongue, and scream “it’s not fair” when required to think about the wider interests of society, while ingesting cheap fizzy sugary rhetoric from the Daily Mail.  Sustainability starts when politicians grow up.

Big Society Blues

The problem for David Cameron is not that the the Big Society is controversial.  Cameron’s bigger problem is that it has become a joke.  It’s taken its place in the long list of initiatives in which British politicians have tried to reconnect with their electorate, and have merely ended up as objects of ridicule.  Remember the Citizen’s Charter?  Or John Major’s Back to Basics campaign, where the appeal to return to traditional values rang out to the accompaniment of Tory Ministers pulling up their trousers and vowing to spend more time with their publicly-forgiving spouses?  Or Eric Pickles declaring war on bossy bollards? Or even the epic idiocy that was the Cones Hotline, now only remembered – if at all – for inspiring one of Steve Bell’s most memorable cartoons?

So why are Britain’s politicians so bad at connecting with their electors?  Why are these initiatives so risible?

It’s partly because the political class is increasingly remote from the population as a whole.  Drawn from an increasingly narrow social, educational and economic elite and made up of people who have never had any occupation other than politics, these are solipsistic initiatives drawn up by people who lack direct experience of the day-to-day life of their electors, and who can only communicate through focus groups and opinion surveys.  The messiness, vicissitudes and sheer humour of daily life never penetrate into the consciousness of the career wonk; the daily routines of work, health, school, childhood and commuting are alien to them.

In the case of the Big Society, there is of course the problem that most of the public think it’s about covering up cuts – with plenty of justification.  It’s a shallow Con-trick, a wheeze for replacing paid professionals with volunteers, and an expression of anti-State ideology.  Moreover, it reeks of the patronising ethos of the public school, in which people who are strong on chapel and team spirit assume the mantle of natural moral leadership.  It’s about all pulling together to create an illusion of unity in a society deeply divided by wealth and class, with cuts in the services that provide the decencies of life for millions widening that division every day.

But it also harks back to a particular British stereotype – that of the wealthy do-gooder, often female with plenty of time on her hands, and a passion for organising others.  It’s the world of Lynda Snell, Hyacinth Bucket and Margo Leadbetter, people who know what’s good for other people better than they do themselves.  Or, from a more left-wing perspective, the assorted Fabians, vegetarians and back-to-nature enthusiasts that Orwell mocks in Coming Up for Air. Such people are stock comic characters, and that this should be so tells us a lot about why people cannot take the Big Society remotely seriously.

But ultimately the thing that distinguishes them is the belief that they have the right to determine who is deserving and who is not.  There is of course a huge tradition of voluntarism that has more popular roots – co-operatives, mutual societies, trade unions, non-conformist religion, the Salvation Army.  But in all of these cases there is a belief in rights and universalism – the question of who might be “deserving” does not arise, and this ethos underpins the concept of universal benefits and state provision to which Cameron is so hostile.  And in all these cases, democratic structures are at the heart of the way they operate.

Cameron seems to think that the Big Society is about new ways in which the political system and electors can connect.  But in its way it’s just another demonstration of how the political class doesn’t get it.

A phoney war and a real conflict

Eric Pickles and Philip Hammond have taken great delight in announcing that, since the Coalition came to power, the war on the motorist has ended. It’s a phrase that has adorned a number of policy announcements in recent months – the withdrawal of the M4 bus lane near Heathrow and now withdrawing planning guidance that restricts the number of parking places to be provided at new developments.

If ever there was a piece of tabloid inanity turned into political myth it’s the war on the motorist. The tabloid story is that the motorist has been turned into a cash cow, hard-working families in their people-carriers being fleeced by profligate NuLabour etc etc.

It’s all complete nonsense. As this piece in the Economist makes clear, for the last few years, even allowing for the increase in fuel prices (which is largely driven by speculators playing the oil market) the real cost of motoring has fallen consistently – while the cost of public transport has in real terms risen. This diagram illustrates the changes:

The point is illustrated further by a Parliamentary Answer given by then Transport Minister Sadiq Khanon 5 February 2010 to Norman Baker MP, now the Coalition’s local transport minister:

Norman Baker: To ask the Minister of State, Department for Transport what estimate he has made of the percentage change in real terms of the cost of travelling by (a) private car, (b) bus, (c) train and (d) domestic aeroplane since (i) 1980 and (ii) 1997. [315796]

Mr. Khan: Between 1980 and 2009 the real cost of motoring, including the purchase of a vehicle, declined by 17 per cent., bus and coach fares increased by 54 per cent. and rail fares increased by 50 per cent. in real terms. These figures are based on the transport components of the Retail Prices Index.

Between 1997 and 2009 the real cost of motoring, including the purchase of a vehicle, declined by 14 per cent., bus and coach fares increased by 24 per cent. and rail fares increased by 13 per cent. in real terms.

The costs of travelling by air are not available from the Retail Prices Index. However, the cost of the average UK one-way air fare, including taxes and charges, covering domestic flights fell by 35 per cent. between 1997 and 2008, the latest date for which figures are available.

It’s clear; the war against motorist is a tabloid fabrication, one that Coalition Ministers are happy to use in order to demonise their predecessors. And this is before taking into account such factors as safety, noise, air pollution, health and community severance.

The privatisation of public space

But this fake war does mask a real and insidious conflict – about public space and what it’s for.

The clue comes in an announcement earlier this year that the Coalition would clamp down on what it regards as unnecessary street signs, bollards and other objects which they claim are destroying the character of English towns. The Government press notice contained a phrase that is an obvious invitation to ridicule: bossy bollards. At one level it’s an absurdity, a silly phrase dreamed up by a spin doctor, an invitation to ridicule.

But, as so often, it’s those little phrases, apparently so meaningless on the surface, that reveal the ideology beneath.

Bollards are about where you can take your car – keeping you out of a pedestrianised street, stopping you from parking on the pavement, or slowing traffic outside a primary school.

In other words, they’re on the boundary between different spaces where different rules apply – the space occupied by the individual, closed off from communal life in his car, behaving according to one set of rules, and the public space of the street where those who do not have vehicles interact, according to another. The bollard is where the individual confronts society, and tells him that his individual space as a driver has a boundary. It constrains his privilege, and arbitrates between different road users, ensuring the more vulnerable are protected.

And that’s the front line of the real conflict – are our urban streets private or public territory? Are they just there for the car, or are they places where the public can come and go freely? What about the third of the population who do not have access to a car? What about the inappropriate use of 4×4 vehicles, whose impact Norman Baker so eloquently described in his days in opposition?

When the coalition talks about ending the war on the motorist, it really means something completely different. It means that cars and their users will continue to enjoy privileged rights on our streets, at the expense of pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users. It is part of a dystopian vision in which families are wafted from home to mall to school to work in their closed environments, free to pollute, to speed, to divide communities, with the rest of us left to exercise the freedom to get out of their way.

Bossy bollards

The Coalition Government has recently declared war on cluttered streets, which it claims are changing the nature of our towns.  Patchwork paving and bossy bollards have been named as the number one enemies of the urban environment.

So I thought the time had come to look more closely at our towns and document this insidious enemy within.

And where better to begin this Odyssey than in the spiritual home of the coalition, Tunbridge Wells.  A town with a variety of street furniture, much of it anti-social.  Here, for example, is a truculent row of bollards outside the Victoria Place Shopping Mall, clearly set to intimidate passers-by:

While others lurk morosely, ready to jeer lewdly at any passing 4×4:

The presence of CCTV is no deterrent.  As we can see here, bollards move in and mob the cameras, jeering and gesticulating:

And it’s not just the bollards of course.  Here, even in Tunbridge Wells, gangs of assorted tribes of street furniture gather on street corners to intimidate the law-abiding:

While here the social problems of binge refuse dumping are all too plain to see.

It’s clear that even in this heartland of all that is decent and sensible in Britain, the street furniture problem is serious and growing.