And, tucked away in the middle of Cameron's speech today, was a little nugget of gold.
"So we will say to churches, to voluntary bodies, to private companies, to private schools come into the state sector, find the parents and the children who have a simple regulatory regime, per capita funding and we can have those new schools so we can really drive up standards"
Per-capita funding. That vital old policy, under a much less scary-sounding new name. Clever boy.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
The beauty of independence
One of the best things that the splurging of money on education in recent years has done is that it has blown away any pretence that the system’s faults are due to a lack of money.
After a decade of increasing budgets, educating a child to the age of sixteen costs the state £45,000. More than a fifth of them leave school illiterate. No one would voluntarily spend that kind of money on an education so grotesquely useless that it could not even teach a child to read and write. No one, except the Department of Education.
Those who pretend that this is the best that can possibly be expected for this sort of outlay are a mixture of hardened ideologues and professional apologists. There are those who are too narrow-minded to accept any model other than the council-run comprehensive, and those whose fingers wouldn’t be able to pull so much out of any other kind of pie.
Around the comprehensive model, a whole apparatus has grown. Teaching unions, academic educationalists, LEAs and education journalists all rely on this form of state education. They rely on taxes funding council quangos hiring teachers trained by idiots and all reported on by journalists who really ought to be doing something more useful. None of these are necessary to provide a good education.
All of them blame every imaginable devil in the works, every saboteur that they can invent, for the dismal performance of the system they prop up. They blame a handful of public schools for shattering the theoretical perfection of comps. They continue to rail against grammar schools. And inevitably, they call for yet more money.
Let’s take a classroom of twenty-five pupils for an example of why they are so spectacularly wrong. Most comprehensives can only dream of such small classes, and many of their apologists blame thirty-plus classes for the system’s woeful performance.
A class of twenty-five pupils costs the taxpayer about £4,100 each, or more than £100,000 for the class. If you had to arrange an education for this class, and you were given the £100,000 it costs, what sort of education could you afford? You could hire a first-rate teacher for £50,000 a year. Hiring or building space in which to set up a classroom? If you get a mortgage to cover the cost of a small, £4m new school, it works out at about £20,000 per annum per classroom. Put aside a generous sum - say, £10,000 - to cover overheads, admin and nonsense. That leaves £20,000 spare, every year, for books, travel, food, sports, or whatever the school fancies.
You could buy each child a new MacBook in the first year alone. Or you could pay for free lunches every day: not, perhaps, of caviar, but not of catering slop either. I could cook a damn good lunch for thee quid a head. Or you could buy them an instant library of twenty thousand books from your local Barnardo’s bookshops.
Keener on sports? Buy them each a lightweight, all-aluminium Cannondale mountain bike, perhaps. Or you could buy enough professional gym equipment to easily work the flab off twenty-five schoolchildren. Fancy a small fleet of sailing dinghies? A year’s ‘extras’ budget will get you five. Or you could abandon the fripperies, and instead cut each class to twenty pupils.
There is no desperate shortage of money. With only the sum already spent on education, this country could afford schools run according to this kind of budget. A very well-paid teacher in front of a fairly small class, with some money left over for extras. If you put twenty children through a class like this for eleven years, I bet you wouldn’t end up with four or five of them illiterate.
It might sound like some Utopian dream, to run the nations schools on these sorts of lines. But there’s absolutely no reason why it should be. We already spend this kind of money on education. All that’s needed is to devise a system in which money is spent by competent people who have an interest in creating great schools. That means getting the state out of the way.
Declare each school to be an independent trust, and fund them on a straight per-pupil basis. That funding should be fully transferable, able to be spent at any registered school, and it should all go direct to that school. You decide to send your child to Bogsville Academy, and his four grand goes straight into their account. And if anyone thinks they can do better, they should – subject to a few obvious checks – be allowed to set up and register their own.
Nationalising schools was about as good for education as British Leyland was for motoring. Government – any government - has a special talent for reverse alchemy; the art of turning fabulous raw materials into worthless dross. It beggars belief that one could spend upwards of four thousand pounds a year on education, for at least eleven years, and still have a one-in-five chance of being illiterate at the end of it. To create a system that does so routinely takes a truly spectacular talent for uselessness.
Schools need to be accountable to those who care most about getting a great education out of them. The government doesn’t care in the slightest if little Johnny is being bullied to death, if his teacher is incompetent, or if his school is so chaotic that he doesn’t stand a chance of learning anything. All it cares about is looking good enough to win reelection, and since the easiest way to do that is to boast about the amount spent and to then rig the statistics, little Johnny’s education is expendable.
Citizens are quite capable of deciding what is a good school, and what kind of education we would like to buy. Every day, we prove ourselves capable of choosing everything from baked beans to cars, through experience, word of mouth, and expert advice. Every day, we buy things that are much better than in the days when we could only choose between two or three products of the State. Will it be the Austin Allegro or the Morris Marina for you, Sir?
The simple-minded ask how we’ll ration places at the good schools, and decide who’s relegated to the sinks. Unable to escape the straits of twentieth-century statism, they can barely imagine the mechanism that destroys bad schooling – if only we demand it.
We don’t have some immutable ratio of good and bad schools, any more than there’s a fixed number of ‘good butchers’ and ‘bad butchers’. A butcher who can’t provide what his customers want risks going bankrupt, and if his absence leaves a town wanting more meat, then someone more talented and more responsive will take over his business instead. A particularly successful butcher often takes over his inferior rivals, and run them according to his more successful model.
This pressure and this mechanism, ensures that quality goes up and customers get happier, so long as they demand the best and are willing to go elsewhere – or set up their own – if they don’t get it. So long as parents are willing to exercise this power, it will work just as well for schools.
Getting rid of state control has other advantages. No one goes into teaching at a council comprehensive unless they’re willing to be the servant of a bunch of second-rate wannabe politicians. No other serious profession has to accept this submissive rank, to be under the control of people who by rights should be sitting in a corner of their classroom, sporting a pointy hat. Teachers should belong to free and proud schools, not to councils. It would do wonders for the esteem of the profession.
It’s no coincidence that teaching lost most of its status in the period when the state swept in, and the profession started to be swallowed by local bureaucracy. Clever graduates who wouldn’t dream of being shunted off to some Godforsaken dump to be abused by small teenagers might well be induced to teach at a privately run school, where the job is more about teaching and less about surviving.
It’s clear what needs to be done if we’ve had enough of our embarrassing education system. It is equally clear that there is a strong lobby with interests in maintaining the status quo. Under a fragmented, enterprising system of schooling, no teaching union will have the ear of government again. There will be no directives coming from the Department for Balls, alerting schools to the fact that bullying is not nice. Teacher-training colleges would have to provide training that schools valued, or no one would bother going. An entire apparatus faces extinction, if schools are set free.
In other words, the educational establishment is what stands in the way of better education. Delicious.
After a decade of increasing budgets, educating a child to the age of sixteen costs the state £45,000. More than a fifth of them leave school illiterate. No one would voluntarily spend that kind of money on an education so grotesquely useless that it could not even teach a child to read and write. No one, except the Department of Education.
Those who pretend that this is the best that can possibly be expected for this sort of outlay are a mixture of hardened ideologues and professional apologists. There are those who are too narrow-minded to accept any model other than the council-run comprehensive, and those whose fingers wouldn’t be able to pull so much out of any other kind of pie.
Around the comprehensive model, a whole apparatus has grown. Teaching unions, academic educationalists, LEAs and education journalists all rely on this form of state education. They rely on taxes funding council quangos hiring teachers trained by idiots and all reported on by journalists who really ought to be doing something more useful. None of these are necessary to provide a good education.
All of them blame every imaginable devil in the works, every saboteur that they can invent, for the dismal performance of the system they prop up. They blame a handful of public schools for shattering the theoretical perfection of comps. They continue to rail against grammar schools. And inevitably, they call for yet more money.
Let’s take a classroom of twenty-five pupils for an example of why they are so spectacularly wrong. Most comprehensives can only dream of such small classes, and many of their apologists blame thirty-plus classes for the system’s woeful performance.
A class of twenty-five pupils costs the taxpayer about £4,100 each, or more than £100,000 for the class. If you had to arrange an education for this class, and you were given the £100,000 it costs, what sort of education could you afford? You could hire a first-rate teacher for £50,000 a year. Hiring or building space in which to set up a classroom? If you get a mortgage to cover the cost of a small, £4m new school, it works out at about £20,000 per annum per classroom. Put aside a generous sum - say, £10,000 - to cover overheads, admin and nonsense. That leaves £20,000 spare, every year, for books, travel, food, sports, or whatever the school fancies.
You could buy each child a new MacBook in the first year alone. Or you could pay for free lunches every day: not, perhaps, of caviar, but not of catering slop either. I could cook a damn good lunch for thee quid a head. Or you could buy them an instant library of twenty thousand books from your local Barnardo’s bookshops.
Keener on sports? Buy them each a lightweight, all-aluminium Cannondale mountain bike, perhaps. Or you could buy enough professional gym equipment to easily work the flab off twenty-five schoolchildren. Fancy a small fleet of sailing dinghies? A year’s ‘extras’ budget will get you five. Or you could abandon the fripperies, and instead cut each class to twenty pupils.
There is no desperate shortage of money. With only the sum already spent on education, this country could afford schools run according to this kind of budget. A very well-paid teacher in front of a fairly small class, with some money left over for extras. If you put twenty children through a class like this for eleven years, I bet you wouldn’t end up with four or five of them illiterate.
It might sound like some Utopian dream, to run the nations schools on these sorts of lines. But there’s absolutely no reason why it should be. We already spend this kind of money on education. All that’s needed is to devise a system in which money is spent by competent people who have an interest in creating great schools. That means getting the state out of the way.
Declare each school to be an independent trust, and fund them on a straight per-pupil basis. That funding should be fully transferable, able to be spent at any registered school, and it should all go direct to that school. You decide to send your child to Bogsville Academy, and his four grand goes straight into their account. And if anyone thinks they can do better, they should – subject to a few obvious checks – be allowed to set up and register their own.
Nationalising schools was about as good for education as British Leyland was for motoring. Government – any government - has a special talent for reverse alchemy; the art of turning fabulous raw materials into worthless dross. It beggars belief that one could spend upwards of four thousand pounds a year on education, for at least eleven years, and still have a one-in-five chance of being illiterate at the end of it. To create a system that does so routinely takes a truly spectacular talent for uselessness.
Schools need to be accountable to those who care most about getting a great education out of them. The government doesn’t care in the slightest if little Johnny is being bullied to death, if his teacher is incompetent, or if his school is so chaotic that he doesn’t stand a chance of learning anything. All it cares about is looking good enough to win reelection, and since the easiest way to do that is to boast about the amount spent and to then rig the statistics, little Johnny’s education is expendable.
Citizens are quite capable of deciding what is a good school, and what kind of education we would like to buy. Every day, we prove ourselves capable of choosing everything from baked beans to cars, through experience, word of mouth, and expert advice. Every day, we buy things that are much better than in the days when we could only choose between two or three products of the State. Will it be the Austin Allegro or the Morris Marina for you, Sir?
The simple-minded ask how we’ll ration places at the good schools, and decide who’s relegated to the sinks. Unable to escape the straits of twentieth-century statism, they can barely imagine the mechanism that destroys bad schooling – if only we demand it.
We don’t have some immutable ratio of good and bad schools, any more than there’s a fixed number of ‘good butchers’ and ‘bad butchers’. A butcher who can’t provide what his customers want risks going bankrupt, and if his absence leaves a town wanting more meat, then someone more talented and more responsive will take over his business instead. A particularly successful butcher often takes over his inferior rivals, and run them according to his more successful model.
This pressure and this mechanism, ensures that quality goes up and customers get happier, so long as they demand the best and are willing to go elsewhere – or set up their own – if they don’t get it. So long as parents are willing to exercise this power, it will work just as well for schools.
Getting rid of state control has other advantages. No one goes into teaching at a council comprehensive unless they’re willing to be the servant of a bunch of second-rate wannabe politicians. No other serious profession has to accept this submissive rank, to be under the control of people who by rights should be sitting in a corner of their classroom, sporting a pointy hat. Teachers should belong to free and proud schools, not to councils. It would do wonders for the esteem of the profession.
It’s no coincidence that teaching lost most of its status in the period when the state swept in, and the profession started to be swallowed by local bureaucracy. Clever graduates who wouldn’t dream of being shunted off to some Godforsaken dump to be abused by small teenagers might well be induced to teach at a privately run school, where the job is more about teaching and less about surviving.
It’s clear what needs to be done if we’ve had enough of our embarrassing education system. It is equally clear that there is a strong lobby with interests in maintaining the status quo. Under a fragmented, enterprising system of schooling, no teaching union will have the ear of government again. There will be no directives coming from the Department for Balls, alerting schools to the fact that bullying is not nice. Teacher-training colleges would have to provide training that schools valued, or no one would bother going. An entire apparatus faces extinction, if schools are set free.
In other words, the educational establishment is what stands in the way of better education. Delicious.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Scotland in harness
Politics works like a cart drawn by a number of antagonistic, independent-minded horses. Two or three are usually hitched to our cart of state, each wanting to pull along a different line. The direction the cart goes might be wobbly, but it usually ends up as a rough middle way between the course that each would take if it were hitched up alone.
If you like to whip your metaphors beyond exhaustion, you can have all kinds of fun with this. A one-party state is a cart drawn by one horse, with the rival horses hiding behind hedges and covertly lobbing stones at the beast, trying to upset its progress. Russian politics will soon be a harness of half-a-dozen ponies trotting along neatly, taking orders from the retired carthorse striding alongside. France’s horses are happy to accept extra-large nose bags, in exchange for altering their line a little; perhaps so as not to annoy some small animal en route. Italian politics involves horse’s heads, but only in the non-metaphorical sense.
Here in Scotland, we have our own version. We have two horses, one of which wants to take a particular course, towards its own vision of how the country should be run. Meanwhile, the other horse is sitting down on the tarmac demanding to be hitched to a different cart.
As the physicists amongst you will have noticed, this causes certain problems. For normal politics to work, for politicians to be able to debate commonplace issues like health, education and transport, the constitutional questions must be settled. What the basic framework of a state is, and where its borders lie, matters far more than any policy on schools or hospitals. Until these questions are broadly agreed across the political class, normal politics will take a back seat.
No one can play a game without knowing what the rules are. If the two sides disagree about what the rules should be and try to make it up as they go along, you can be sure that most of their time will be spent arguing about them.
The SNP and Labour are the only two contenders for power, and only one of them wants to work inside the current framework. The other finds little real ideological difference between it and its rival, only its commitment to tear up the current rules. Scottish politics is a carve-up between an unreflective centre-left party that believes in independence and an unthinking centre-left party that believes in unionism.
In post-devolution Scotland, we’ve managed to invert the usual model of politics. Usually, a country is governed by a political system where the rules are fixed, but the policies swing between two visions. Whereas Scotland’s main parties are agreed on their policies, and instead tug the constitution to and fro. It is a ludicrous way of doing things. It is as if UKIP were always the large minority party at Westminster, unable to win independence from the EU, but not interested in much else.
Nothing can be done while the Scottish question remains unsettled. Politics up here is not a left-right battle, nor a Millian tug between progress and reaction. Constitutional matters are the big battleground, and the battles of ideology are reduced to nothing but piddling little disputes over banning airguns and happy hours. The elephant in the room will need to be kicked out before there’s any space for the parties to spread out.
Scotland can’t afford this wrangling and indecision. We have swathes of the country stuck in a rotting world of twentieth-century socialism, unable to move on. Welfarism has turned parts of the country into deserts of opportunity. The Scottish education system used to be something we prided ourselves on. Now, it is only the deluded who think so.
Amongst the political class, there's no desire to think outside the old consensus of soft leftism. There are no new ideas, not even any curiosity about different ways of doing things. We trudge on, obsessed with the constitutional question, trying to solve deep-rooted social problems by passing ever more prohibitions, more directives, more initiatives, and failing to see that the levers of power are clanking freely in mid-air.
There is no appetite in the country for any shift away from the mushy socialism that 80% of the Parliament backs, not while the constitutional question hangs over it all. Scottish politics is stagnant, unwilling to decide firmly whether it wants independence or not, and until it does, unable to move on from it. But the great obstacle is that independence can count on the unyielding support of about 30% of the population, just as it has for decades, which guarantees both that the SNP will remain a major party and that it won’t win a referendum.
Unless we decide, and both sides accept the constitution, there’s no chance of any other kind of progress. The two parties crowd together on policy, sticking close to the populist consensus, so as to save ammunition for the big struggle. It’s an endurance contest, the two sides trying to wear each other down until one gives in. It is a waste of time that we really don’t have.
Scotland produces many talented, clever, interesting people who can do great things, as a quick look around London will tell you. Until we figure out what we want to be as a country, we'll stay squabbling in the middle of the road.
If you like to whip your metaphors beyond exhaustion, you can have all kinds of fun with this. A one-party state is a cart drawn by one horse, with the rival horses hiding behind hedges and covertly lobbing stones at the beast, trying to upset its progress. Russian politics will soon be a harness of half-a-dozen ponies trotting along neatly, taking orders from the retired carthorse striding alongside. France’s horses are happy to accept extra-large nose bags, in exchange for altering their line a little; perhaps so as not to annoy some small animal en route. Italian politics involves horse’s heads, but only in the non-metaphorical sense.
Here in Scotland, we have our own version. We have two horses, one of which wants to take a particular course, towards its own vision of how the country should be run. Meanwhile, the other horse is sitting down on the tarmac demanding to be hitched to a different cart.
As the physicists amongst you will have noticed, this causes certain problems. For normal politics to work, for politicians to be able to debate commonplace issues like health, education and transport, the constitutional questions must be settled. What the basic framework of a state is, and where its borders lie, matters far more than any policy on schools or hospitals. Until these questions are broadly agreed across the political class, normal politics will take a back seat.
No one can play a game without knowing what the rules are. If the two sides disagree about what the rules should be and try to make it up as they go along, you can be sure that most of their time will be spent arguing about them.
The SNP and Labour are the only two contenders for power, and only one of them wants to work inside the current framework. The other finds little real ideological difference between it and its rival, only its commitment to tear up the current rules. Scottish politics is a carve-up between an unreflective centre-left party that believes in independence and an unthinking centre-left party that believes in unionism.
In post-devolution Scotland, we’ve managed to invert the usual model of politics. Usually, a country is governed by a political system where the rules are fixed, but the policies swing between two visions. Whereas Scotland’s main parties are agreed on their policies, and instead tug the constitution to and fro. It is a ludicrous way of doing things. It is as if UKIP were always the large minority party at Westminster, unable to win independence from the EU, but not interested in much else.
Nothing can be done while the Scottish question remains unsettled. Politics up here is not a left-right battle, nor a Millian tug between progress and reaction. Constitutional matters are the big battleground, and the battles of ideology are reduced to nothing but piddling little disputes over banning airguns and happy hours. The elephant in the room will need to be kicked out before there’s any space for the parties to spread out.
Scotland can’t afford this wrangling and indecision. We have swathes of the country stuck in a rotting world of twentieth-century socialism, unable to move on. Welfarism has turned parts of the country into deserts of opportunity. The Scottish education system used to be something we prided ourselves on. Now, it is only the deluded who think so.
Amongst the political class, there's no desire to think outside the old consensus of soft leftism. There are no new ideas, not even any curiosity about different ways of doing things. We trudge on, obsessed with the constitutional question, trying to solve deep-rooted social problems by passing ever more prohibitions, more directives, more initiatives, and failing to see that the levers of power are clanking freely in mid-air.
There is no appetite in the country for any shift away from the mushy socialism that 80% of the Parliament backs, not while the constitutional question hangs over it all. Scottish politics is stagnant, unwilling to decide firmly whether it wants independence or not, and until it does, unable to move on from it. But the great obstacle is that independence can count on the unyielding support of about 30% of the population, just as it has for decades, which guarantees both that the SNP will remain a major party and that it won’t win a referendum.
Unless we decide, and both sides accept the constitution, there’s no chance of any other kind of progress. The two parties crowd together on policy, sticking close to the populist consensus, so as to save ammunition for the big struggle. It’s an endurance contest, the two sides trying to wear each other down until one gives in. It is a waste of time that we really don’t have.
Scotland produces many talented, clever, interesting people who can do great things, as a quick look around London will tell you. Until we figure out what we want to be as a country, we'll stay squabbling in the middle of the road.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The Patriot Game
As we glide towards the next full-blown campaign for US President, we can expect the partisanship to drift westwards across the Atlantic. Once the no-hopers start to drop out, British pundits will start to pick their favourites and snarl it out at one another - almost as if Clinton, Obama and Giuliani were fighting for votes in the West Midlands, rather than the Mid-West.
The Right gets particularly excited about this. For many, America has become an icon of all that is good in the world, the last bastion of civilised values in Christendom. Most pick their favoured candidates on the basis of they think what America needs, whether it’s a more eloquent figurehead, a slashing of the pork-laden federal government, a new drive for educational reform or a refocusing of the battle against Islamism.
The problem is that the ideologues engage in the presidential race from the wrong shore of the Atlantic. British right-wingers pick from the menu of Republican candidates according to which they think would be the best for America. Few would think any differently about Presidential politics if they weren’t a British subject at all, but loyal to the Stars and Stripes.
George Orwell once noted how an ideologues will often transfer his nationalism to a foreign symbol of his beliefs. In Orwell's day, intellectuals played at being African or Russian patriots, showing off their anti-imperialism or their solidarity with the workers’ state. Throughout the Cold War, many Soviet sympathisers here became outright Russophiles, and even now, with Russia governed by gangster capitalism, the old fellow-travellers still argue for Putin and Mother Russia as fervently as they did thirty years ago.
Now, the ideologues of the Right feel much the same way about their champion that the hard Left felt about theirs. “The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organisation, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort” wrote Orwell. ‘Anti-American’ being the customary one today.
The modern Right forgets that we are not American, and what is good for one country is not necessarily good for its allies. The history of the last few years is enough to show that.
For a proper anti-America leftie, there has been no better advert for the cause than George Bush. Under his watch, America has become so associated with stupidity, arrogance and incompetence that a distaste for our Stateside cousins has become de rigeur in the circles that consider themselves polite. As Bush enters the closing straights, everyone is edging away from the 43rd President of the United States like from a mad, rambling bore at a party.
As far as the US is concerned, it has had few stauncher allies than Tony Blair. From the days after September 11th when NATO, under pressure from the UK, invoked its mutual-defence obligations for the first time, through six years of solidarity over Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain and America were barely separable. In all the areas that Washington foreign policy makers care about, Blair was keen to hitch Britain to the American position, occasionally pulling in a particular direction, but otherwise happy to roll alongside its ally.
Thing is, even though Tony Blair became the preferred choice of even the most right-wing Republicans, none of his friends in Washington would ever have wanted him to have power in their country. A man who supports higher taxes, gay marriage, nationalised medicine…? In a Presidential race he’d have been a comedy act in the first stage, someone to briefly raise the hopes of liberal Democrats, and to soon drop out.
But of course, those friends of Tony’s understood that all that is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how ideologically pure your allies are, or how they’d get along with your party rank-and-file. What matters, if you value an alliance, is to find presidents and prime ministers who strengthen and enhance that alliance.
Over here, the pro-American Right should think carefully about this. If its columnists and pundits want to do a little good, they should be figuring out which of the candidates would help the alliance recover from the humiliation of the Bush years.
Atlanticists on this side of the pond don’t need another Republican he-man like Rudy Giuliani. Whatever his merits might be for America, and however civilizing it will be for the Republicans to be led into battle by a man who once lived with two gay men and a Chihuahua, a President Giuliani would look like more of the same.
We Atlanticists need an alliance that’s again a source of pride, not of embarrassment. A president who can remind us that America is the offspring of Enlightenment Europe, not simply a weird backwater, filled with dim hicks and tub-thumping religious nutters. We need a president who’s recognisably one of us, not some kind of semi-alien being from a very definitely foreign country.
We need a President Obama. Regardless of whether you’d vote for him yourself, he is the one candidate who can refresh the way the US looks and sounds. Right now, that’s what the true friends of America need.
The Right gets particularly excited about this. For many, America has become an icon of all that is good in the world, the last bastion of civilised values in Christendom. Most pick their favoured candidates on the basis of they think what America needs, whether it’s a more eloquent figurehead, a slashing of the pork-laden federal government, a new drive for educational reform or a refocusing of the battle against Islamism.
The problem is that the ideologues engage in the presidential race from the wrong shore of the Atlantic. British right-wingers pick from the menu of Republican candidates according to which they think would be the best for America. Few would think any differently about Presidential politics if they weren’t a British subject at all, but loyal to the Stars and Stripes.
George Orwell once noted how an ideologues will often transfer his nationalism to a foreign symbol of his beliefs. In Orwell's day, intellectuals played at being African or Russian patriots, showing off their anti-imperialism or their solidarity with the workers’ state. Throughout the Cold War, many Soviet sympathisers here became outright Russophiles, and even now, with Russia governed by gangster capitalism, the old fellow-travellers still argue for Putin and Mother Russia as fervently as they did thirty years ago.
Now, the ideologues of the Right feel much the same way about their champion that the hard Left felt about theirs. “The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organisation, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort” wrote Orwell. ‘Anti-American’ being the customary one today.
The modern Right forgets that we are not American, and what is good for one country is not necessarily good for its allies. The history of the last few years is enough to show that.
For a proper anti-America leftie, there has been no better advert for the cause than George Bush. Under his watch, America has become so associated with stupidity, arrogance and incompetence that a distaste for our Stateside cousins has become de rigeur in the circles that consider themselves polite. As Bush enters the closing straights, everyone is edging away from the 43rd President of the United States like from a mad, rambling bore at a party.
As far as the US is concerned, it has had few stauncher allies than Tony Blair. From the days after September 11th when NATO, under pressure from the UK, invoked its mutual-defence obligations for the first time, through six years of solidarity over Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain and America were barely separable. In all the areas that Washington foreign policy makers care about, Blair was keen to hitch Britain to the American position, occasionally pulling in a particular direction, but otherwise happy to roll alongside its ally.
Thing is, even though Tony Blair became the preferred choice of even the most right-wing Republicans, none of his friends in Washington would ever have wanted him to have power in their country. A man who supports higher taxes, gay marriage, nationalised medicine…? In a Presidential race he’d have been a comedy act in the first stage, someone to briefly raise the hopes of liberal Democrats, and to soon drop out.
But of course, those friends of Tony’s understood that all that is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how ideologically pure your allies are, or how they’d get along with your party rank-and-file. What matters, if you value an alliance, is to find presidents and prime ministers who strengthen and enhance that alliance.
Over here, the pro-American Right should think carefully about this. If its columnists and pundits want to do a little good, they should be figuring out which of the candidates would help the alliance recover from the humiliation of the Bush years.
Atlanticists on this side of the pond don’t need another Republican he-man like Rudy Giuliani. Whatever his merits might be for America, and however civilizing it will be for the Republicans to be led into battle by a man who once lived with two gay men and a Chihuahua, a President Giuliani would look like more of the same.
We Atlanticists need an alliance that’s again a source of pride, not of embarrassment. A president who can remind us that America is the offspring of Enlightenment Europe, not simply a weird backwater, filled with dim hicks and tub-thumping religious nutters. We need a president who’s recognisably one of us, not some kind of semi-alien being from a very definitely foreign country.
We need a President Obama. Regardless of whether you’d vote for him yourself, he is the one candidate who can refresh the way the US looks and sounds. Right now, that’s what the true friends of America need.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Solving climate change, right after we solve human nature...
A lot of very earnest people have been taking advantage of the silly season this year, filling up a field next to Heathrow, and those gaps in the news schedules usually occupied by missing-cat stories. Dozens of organisations who make up the Camp for Climate Action, ranging from the fanatics to the fuddy-duddies, are united by the battle against aircraft. It’s no surprise to find there a type of earnest youth who’s always been able to find something evil to make a stand against, and some cretinously simple-minded way of ‘solving’ it.
What is surprising is that they’ve been joined by the kind of establishment figures they’d normally hope to hurl abuse at. The Church of England now believes that flying is a sin, which presumably makes it the one sin that they still believe in. Even the National Trust has come in to bat for the sons-of-Swampy. Everyone is now keen to be seen denying themselves the fruits of civilisation, and Ryanair too.
Environmentalism is the last moral code that Western civilisation truly believes in, and questioning the morally certain is always tough. The respect that environmentalists are given is rather like that given to a preacher in a God-fearing society - we might not agree with him, but we can at least be sure that his heart is righteous. It has become difficult to ask questions, even ones that cut to the core of what the green movement aims to do.
No one, to my knowledge, has pointed out that if the usual cause and remedy for climate change are correct, it will not just require us to trim our energy use. If global warming is indeed caused by the release of the carbon dioxide that was trapped, millions of years ago, as fossil fuels, it would seem to follow that it is not enough simply to burn coal, oil and gas at a much slower rate. It should not matter how long the release takes - the previously trapped gas ends up in the atmosphere permanently. Burning all the fossil fuels we have, regardless of whether we do so in a big splurge or in a long dribble, will have the same effect on the planet.
Ultimately, then, the solution to global warming is for the world to agree to leave vast reserves of fossil fuels buried underground, permanently. If the climate-change thesis is correct, and if we don’t leave this fuel unused, we’re in trouble.
But the problem here is obvious. This vast feat of self-denial will require a saintliness that man has never yet achieved. It requires everyone, everywhere, to forget about the kind of lifestyle that burning fossil fuels allows. Under the soil lies the greatest source of free power that mankind has ever found. It’s so vital to the way we live that even a wind turbine, that icon of environmentalism, requires great dollops of fossil fuels to build. If we had to build the whole thing - from extracting and refining the aluminium to hauling the finished turbine across country to its site - without the use of coal, oil, and gas, we might not think the power it generates worthwhile.
With our reserves locked in the ground, with the wellheads blocked and the mines blown up, mankind faces the kind of temptation that it’s never been able to resist. Denied the use of coal, oil or gas, mankind is reduced to using manpower, animal power, and whatever renewable sources it’s worth building, given the valuable energy that goes into building them, and the power they generate. It’ll be a tough lifestyle, made all the more painful by the knowledge that if we just opened up one of those mine shafts, there’d be all that power right on tap…
Still, everyone must resist, or the deal crumbles. Every people, every government, in every corner of the world, must resist the temptation to start using again, or no one else will. And if persuading peoples to renounce fossil fuels is tough, just try asking states to chuck away their own defences - ‘for the sake of the planet’.
For more than a century, a nation’s military power has ridden on the back of its industrial power. It is not so much its stomach that a modern army marches on, but its fuel tanks. Building and maintaining mechanized armies - to say nothing of air forces and navies - takes huge amounts of energy, most of which can only come from fossil fuels. Coal, oil and gas are the spinach on which nations grow strong. But if the deal’s going to work, states must abandon the instincts that they’ve shown since the dawn of time. They must all slash their militaries, relying only on carbon-free technologies to power their defences, and trust that every other country will keep the bargain.
Which country would be willing to scrap every warship that wasn’t solar-powered? Every tank that didn’t run on biodiesel, and that couldn’t be maintained by a wainwright’s shop? Every fighter aircraft that isn’t powered by rubber bands? Would all countries agree to disarm itself of every military invention of the last century-and-a-half, and go back to defending themselves with horse-drawn cannon, foot-soldiers and square-rigged men o’ war? And would they trust that no country would hang onto a few jet fighters and a guided-missile destroyer or two, and suddenly be able to rout any of its neighbours?
It is impossible to imagine. Anyone who thinks that the nations and peoples of the world would come together and agree in confidence to put the world’s great energy supplies beyond use is delusional. Two little stories from recent weeks illustrate just how crazy the idea is.
Not long before the Camp for Climate Action ambled into the fields of Heathrow, a Russian submarine planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole, igniting a frantic rush to lay claim to the Arctic, the source of untapped riches of oil and gas. The rush isn’t to see who can best secure the oil against the ravages of mankind, but a race to get the stuff out and shipped off to their refineries.
It was not just Russia that wants that oil. Those well-known anti-ecological bastards, the Danes, started jumping up and down demanding a chunk. As did the renowned planet-destroying psychopaths, the Canadians. These are nations who profess to be at the heart of efforts to stem climate change. Given the opportunity, they chase oil as thirstily as anyone. And this really should have told the green movement what it’s up against.
Last week, protesters in Burma went onto the streets to denounce a 100% rise in the price of fuel. That’s a mere 100% rise, not, as we seem to need, a complete ban on burning the stuff. Protesters far more courageous, and certainly more desperate than the crusties at Heathrow, were willing to face the murderous security forces of one of the world’s worst tyrannies in an attempt to get fuel at a reasonable cost. That is how much people want to burn fossil fuels. That is the attitude of 99% of the planet. That is what the Monbiotites are facing.
Short of a worldwide green totalitarianism, there is precisely zero chance of humanity leaving the rest of the oil where it is. And even then, it’s pretty doubtful. We're all willing to make sacrifices that give us a righteous glow, so long as they don’t intrude too much on our basic lifestyle. Rich, urban liberals might be willing to have an electric car as part of their fleet, just to use for popping down to the supermarket. Suggest that they do what the planet apparantly needs from us all, to refuse any form of transport that isn’t powered by, built, or maintained with the aid of fossil fuels, and you’ll find few takers.
The green movement believes that it is possible for mankind to renounce the world’s best source of energy, and that out of the six million of us, not one will cheat, not one government will turn a blind eye, not one oil-rich area will secede, and stick two fingers to the ban. It believes that humans are capable of making unimaginable sacrifices in their standards of living, for the good of the planet, and that our species laughs in the face of temptation. It believes that human nature is intrinsically good and rational, and able to free itself from its greedy passions. It is wrong, in the most spectacular and ignorant fashion imaginable.
So long as we can dig up energy out of the ground, someone will use it. We will do so until we find something better, something that moves us around, keeps us warm, and helps us make all those goodies that we want. All the slideshows in the world won’t change that crucial basic fact.
This is the problem that the green movement is refusing to face. There is no way that humans will renounce the stuff that makes their lives easier and more comfortable, nor their governments what makes them more powerful. Our two chances are 1) to hope that the greens are wrong, or at least exaggerating, or 2) to discover a new source of energy that is at least as powerful and convenient as fossil fuels, that would let us abandon the oil fields without temptation.
Who knows if we’ll succeed? But whatever happens, the green movement will be an irrelevance. It will be inventors, not art-school greens on a moralistic ego trip, who find the next great source of power, if there is one. Trying to stop climate change by recycling, or banning standby buttons, is like a fat man trying to lose weight by cutting his toenails. It’s all or nothing. And since ‘all’ is impossible, that makes our current preoccupations with ‘green living’ look rather fatuous.
What is surprising is that they’ve been joined by the kind of establishment figures they’d normally hope to hurl abuse at. The Church of England now believes that flying is a sin, which presumably makes it the one sin that they still believe in. Even the National Trust has come in to bat for the sons-of-Swampy. Everyone is now keen to be seen denying themselves the fruits of civilisation, and Ryanair too.
Environmentalism is the last moral code that Western civilisation truly believes in, and questioning the morally certain is always tough. The respect that environmentalists are given is rather like that given to a preacher in a God-fearing society - we might not agree with him, but we can at least be sure that his heart is righteous. It has become difficult to ask questions, even ones that cut to the core of what the green movement aims to do.
No one, to my knowledge, has pointed out that if the usual cause and remedy for climate change are correct, it will not just require us to trim our energy use. If global warming is indeed caused by the release of the carbon dioxide that was trapped, millions of years ago, as fossil fuels, it would seem to follow that it is not enough simply to burn coal, oil and gas at a much slower rate. It should not matter how long the release takes - the previously trapped gas ends up in the atmosphere permanently. Burning all the fossil fuels we have, regardless of whether we do so in a big splurge or in a long dribble, will have the same effect on the planet.
Ultimately, then, the solution to global warming is for the world to agree to leave vast reserves of fossil fuels buried underground, permanently. If the climate-change thesis is correct, and if we don’t leave this fuel unused, we’re in trouble.
But the problem here is obvious. This vast feat of self-denial will require a saintliness that man has never yet achieved. It requires everyone, everywhere, to forget about the kind of lifestyle that burning fossil fuels allows. Under the soil lies the greatest source of free power that mankind has ever found. It’s so vital to the way we live that even a wind turbine, that icon of environmentalism, requires great dollops of fossil fuels to build. If we had to build the whole thing - from extracting and refining the aluminium to hauling the finished turbine across country to its site - without the use of coal, oil, and gas, we might not think the power it generates worthwhile.
With our reserves locked in the ground, with the wellheads blocked and the mines blown up, mankind faces the kind of temptation that it’s never been able to resist. Denied the use of coal, oil or gas, mankind is reduced to using manpower, animal power, and whatever renewable sources it’s worth building, given the valuable energy that goes into building them, and the power they generate. It’ll be a tough lifestyle, made all the more painful by the knowledge that if we just opened up one of those mine shafts, there’d be all that power right on tap…
Still, everyone must resist, or the deal crumbles. Every people, every government, in every corner of the world, must resist the temptation to start using again, or no one else will. And if persuading peoples to renounce fossil fuels is tough, just try asking states to chuck away their own defences - ‘for the sake of the planet’.
For more than a century, a nation’s military power has ridden on the back of its industrial power. It is not so much its stomach that a modern army marches on, but its fuel tanks. Building and maintaining mechanized armies - to say nothing of air forces and navies - takes huge amounts of energy, most of which can only come from fossil fuels. Coal, oil and gas are the spinach on which nations grow strong. But if the deal’s going to work, states must abandon the instincts that they’ve shown since the dawn of time. They must all slash their militaries, relying only on carbon-free technologies to power their defences, and trust that every other country will keep the bargain.
Which country would be willing to scrap every warship that wasn’t solar-powered? Every tank that didn’t run on biodiesel, and that couldn’t be maintained by a wainwright’s shop? Every fighter aircraft that isn’t powered by rubber bands? Would all countries agree to disarm itself of every military invention of the last century-and-a-half, and go back to defending themselves with horse-drawn cannon, foot-soldiers and square-rigged men o’ war? And would they trust that no country would hang onto a few jet fighters and a guided-missile destroyer or two, and suddenly be able to rout any of its neighbours?
It is impossible to imagine. Anyone who thinks that the nations and peoples of the world would come together and agree in confidence to put the world’s great energy supplies beyond use is delusional. Two little stories from recent weeks illustrate just how crazy the idea is.
Not long before the Camp for Climate Action ambled into the fields of Heathrow, a Russian submarine planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole, igniting a frantic rush to lay claim to the Arctic, the source of untapped riches of oil and gas. The rush isn’t to see who can best secure the oil against the ravages of mankind, but a race to get the stuff out and shipped off to their refineries.
It was not just Russia that wants that oil. Those well-known anti-ecological bastards, the Danes, started jumping up and down demanding a chunk. As did the renowned planet-destroying psychopaths, the Canadians. These are nations who profess to be at the heart of efforts to stem climate change. Given the opportunity, they chase oil as thirstily as anyone. And this really should have told the green movement what it’s up against.
Last week, protesters in Burma went onto the streets to denounce a 100% rise in the price of fuel. That’s a mere 100% rise, not, as we seem to need, a complete ban on burning the stuff. Protesters far more courageous, and certainly more desperate than the crusties at Heathrow, were willing to face the murderous security forces of one of the world’s worst tyrannies in an attempt to get fuel at a reasonable cost. That is how much people want to burn fossil fuels. That is the attitude of 99% of the planet. That is what the Monbiotites are facing.
Short of a worldwide green totalitarianism, there is precisely zero chance of humanity leaving the rest of the oil where it is. And even then, it’s pretty doubtful. We're all willing to make sacrifices that give us a righteous glow, so long as they don’t intrude too much on our basic lifestyle. Rich, urban liberals might be willing to have an electric car as part of their fleet, just to use for popping down to the supermarket. Suggest that they do what the planet apparantly needs from us all, to refuse any form of transport that isn’t powered by, built, or maintained with the aid of fossil fuels, and you’ll find few takers.
The green movement believes that it is possible for mankind to renounce the world’s best source of energy, and that out of the six million of us, not one will cheat, not one government will turn a blind eye, not one oil-rich area will secede, and stick two fingers to the ban. It believes that humans are capable of making unimaginable sacrifices in their standards of living, for the good of the planet, and that our species laughs in the face of temptation. It believes that human nature is intrinsically good and rational, and able to free itself from its greedy passions. It is wrong, in the most spectacular and ignorant fashion imaginable.
So long as we can dig up energy out of the ground, someone will use it. We will do so until we find something better, something that moves us around, keeps us warm, and helps us make all those goodies that we want. All the slideshows in the world won’t change that crucial basic fact.
This is the problem that the green movement is refusing to face. There is no way that humans will renounce the stuff that makes their lives easier and more comfortable, nor their governments what makes them more powerful. Our two chances are 1) to hope that the greens are wrong, or at least exaggerating, or 2) to discover a new source of energy that is at least as powerful and convenient as fossil fuels, that would let us abandon the oil fields without temptation.
Who knows if we’ll succeed? But whatever happens, the green movement will be an irrelevance. It will be inventors, not art-school greens on a moralistic ego trip, who find the next great source of power, if there is one. Trying to stop climate change by recycling, or banning standby buttons, is like a fat man trying to lose weight by cutting his toenails. It’s all or nothing. And since ‘all’ is impossible, that makes our current preoccupations with ‘green living’ look rather fatuous.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Could we build a new New Town?
For the first time in decades, housing policy is shooting up the political agenda. Gordon Brown is planning ‘eco-towns’ - or Broon’s Toons, as they’d doubtless be known if the thought wasn’t so utterly depressing - with 100,000 new houses on surplus government land, and 250,000 more on top of the 2.75m target of houses to be built by 2020.
Brown’s announcement concentrated entirely on raw numbers. All that matters, in this great new push for development, this creation of entire new towns and huge new estates, is the number of units that can be thrown up, and the number of people - or sub-units, as they’re probably known - that can be inserted into them.
There is little mention of density, communications, and the practicalities of building ever more in the South East, let alone any kind of vision for how urban living to will evolve in the decades to come. 100,000 houses will be built, simply because housing’s expensive, it was something Tony didn’t do much about, and because it’s a nice round number that’ll sound good in the soundbites.
The Philistinism is astonishing. Yet another giant scheme of housing will be thrown up, with no consideration for anything except sheltering another clump of workers, as efficiently as possible. Each of these estates and towns will be a permanent fixture on the landscape, since unlike the ghastly council tower blocks that are currently being exploded up and down the country, there’s no single landlord that can get rid of the things.
One might be surprised that the country would is happy to cloak itself with architecture that is dreary at best, soul-destroying at worst, and entirely irremovable. We are no longer a nation that is happy shopping at C&A. We now buy more BMW 3-series than we do Ford Mondeos. We love cheap clothing, but it has to be stylish, cheap clothing. Even staid old Marks & Spencer was only truly revived when Myleene Klass didn’t look out of place bouncing around in its adverts.
Design is everything to Britain in the 21st century. Yet the man who wears nothing less than Hugo Boss and loves his Audi TT is quite happy to drive home to a house than could have been stamped out on a British Housing production line. Property is the one great exception to our design obsession.
What on earth could make us so willing to accept second best, in the one purchase that matters most? Why do we not even question the grotesquely utilitarian plans of housing ministers, given that the state has proved it can commission and build delicious buildings - though admittedly, only when they’re for the use of MPs or officials.
Partly, there’s a lingering fear that contemporary architecture is inevitably cold, unliveable, and inhuman; built according to the Le Corbusier fantasy that if one designs an inhumanly rational, planned city, one can expect their inhabitants to turn into Homo Rationalius, content to follow the architect’s plan for how they should live their lives. Some architects revelled in this Godlike position, but citizens bristle at being managed in this way. We might like to worship designers, but we’d rather have a say in the matter.
But mainly, I suspect, because we have grown used to the idea that modern building is inevitably boring and derivative, and that anyone who values style will either commission and build their own design, or buy something that was built a century or two ago. After a century that built houses of ever-increasing blandness, we haven’t the guts to reject a freshly built housing estate of brand-new wynds and lanes, a plague of modern suburban boxes built onto a streetscape from the Middle Ages. We no longer believe that we still can build something great if we want to.
Individual buildings we can do fine. It’s the art of designing cities, or districts at least, that we’ve lost. This is the hangover from those disastrous attempts of the Sixties and Seventies to invent bold new ways of living, rather than designing cities to suit the way people like to live.
Under the current system of planning, development has become the preserve of a handful of professional developers, who are the only ones with the muscle to confront the planning system and win. A virtual cartel of firms who build much the same kind of houses is not going to experiment, given that suburban boxes sell easily and profitably, and that they care about little else. The problem is that we have a planning system where no one can build on a large scale except these developers, and given the fluctuations of the market, these developers want the safest product they can build. In cities, development is a duopoly of councils and corporate developers.
We can’t and shouldn’t expect the state to step in, to attempt to raise the standard and the beauty of housing by developing themselves, since their record in this field - Millennium Dome, anyone? - is abysmal. Even if they were capable of it, the political incentives simply aren’t there. No one votes for housing unless they desperately need some, and if their need is that desperate, their priority will be for quantity, not beauty.
But there is another model to consider, a Third Way if you like. More than two centuries ago, the nation’s most beautiful housing estate started to go up, on a disused heath to the north of medieval Edinburgh. A young architect, James Craig, drew up the grand plan for the New Town, a geometrical grid of fine squares and broad streets, on the instructions of the town authority. Permission was granted to anyone who wanted to build a house or houses there, so long as they conformed to the overall plan and the new style.
Where necessary, the authorities offered a reward - the first, lonely house to be built on the far side of Edinburgh’s stinking loch earned a £20 bonus. Planning permission - the great headache of modern urban development - was not a problem, since the city itself had drawn up the plans. All a builder had to do was acquire a plot, a builder, and formal permission to build his house there, in accordance with the plan.
A modern version of this scheme could demolish the stranglehold that timid architecture has on this nation. Instead of restricting development to professional developers, a city wanting to build on wasteland or over the rubble of a decrepit estate could bulldoze their site, and invite submissions for a new plan, covering both the layout and the style of housing.
An open competition is an old device for commissioning architecture, and it would be an ideal way for a city to decide on a plan. And since those wanting to build to this plan would get their planning permission automatically, thus cutting out a hazardous and expensive part of building, the standards demanded in the scheme can afford to be high.
It is then up to individuals, developers, and housing associations to acquire a plot and design a house or a block that fits the grand design, to coin a phrase. By breaking the need for full, start-to-finish planning permission, you break the power of the developers, and allow individuals and groups to build their own houses again.
A district designed on these lines could afford to be adventurous and exciting. It has the chance to be a development that adds to the beauty and character of a city, rather than, as so many do, dragging it down further to suburban mediocrity. Unlike most developments, the city could afford to demand the kind of quality and beauty that few individuals would be able to build on their own. Instead of town and cities competing to have new housing dumped elsewhere, we can dream about a day when towns compete to build grander, more innovative, and more beautiful districts than the next town.
All it takes is the belief that we can still do things like this, and that it’s worth doing. The days when we could build mere housing that was stunning enough to stand as a monument to our civilisation doesn’t need to have died, quite yet.
Brown’s announcement concentrated entirely on raw numbers. All that matters, in this great new push for development, this creation of entire new towns and huge new estates, is the number of units that can be thrown up, and the number of people - or sub-units, as they’re probably known - that can be inserted into them.
There is little mention of density, communications, and the practicalities of building ever more in the South East, let alone any kind of vision for how urban living to will evolve in the decades to come. 100,000 houses will be built, simply because housing’s expensive, it was something Tony didn’t do much about, and because it’s a nice round number that’ll sound good in the soundbites.
The Philistinism is astonishing. Yet another giant scheme of housing will be thrown up, with no consideration for anything except sheltering another clump of workers, as efficiently as possible. Each of these estates and towns will be a permanent fixture on the landscape, since unlike the ghastly council tower blocks that are currently being exploded up and down the country, there’s no single landlord that can get rid of the things.
One might be surprised that the country would is happy to cloak itself with architecture that is dreary at best, soul-destroying at worst, and entirely irremovable. We are no longer a nation that is happy shopping at C&A. We now buy more BMW 3-series than we do Ford Mondeos. We love cheap clothing, but it has to be stylish, cheap clothing. Even staid old Marks & Spencer was only truly revived when Myleene Klass didn’t look out of place bouncing around in its adverts.
Design is everything to Britain in the 21st century. Yet the man who wears nothing less than Hugo Boss and loves his Audi TT is quite happy to drive home to a house than could have been stamped out on a British Housing production line. Property is the one great exception to our design obsession.
What on earth could make us so willing to accept second best, in the one purchase that matters most? Why do we not even question the grotesquely utilitarian plans of housing ministers, given that the state has proved it can commission and build delicious buildings - though admittedly, only when they’re for the use of MPs or officials.
Partly, there’s a lingering fear that contemporary architecture is inevitably cold, unliveable, and inhuman; built according to the Le Corbusier fantasy that if one designs an inhumanly rational, planned city, one can expect their inhabitants to turn into Homo Rationalius, content to follow the architect’s plan for how they should live their lives. Some architects revelled in this Godlike position, but citizens bristle at being managed in this way. We might like to worship designers, but we’d rather have a say in the matter.
But mainly, I suspect, because we have grown used to the idea that modern building is inevitably boring and derivative, and that anyone who values style will either commission and build their own design, or buy something that was built a century or two ago. After a century that built houses of ever-increasing blandness, we haven’t the guts to reject a freshly built housing estate of brand-new wynds and lanes, a plague of modern suburban boxes built onto a streetscape from the Middle Ages. We no longer believe that we still can build something great if we want to.
Individual buildings we can do fine. It’s the art of designing cities, or districts at least, that we’ve lost. This is the hangover from those disastrous attempts of the Sixties and Seventies to invent bold new ways of living, rather than designing cities to suit the way people like to live.
Under the current system of planning, development has become the preserve of a handful of professional developers, who are the only ones with the muscle to confront the planning system and win. A virtual cartel of firms who build much the same kind of houses is not going to experiment, given that suburban boxes sell easily and profitably, and that they care about little else. The problem is that we have a planning system where no one can build on a large scale except these developers, and given the fluctuations of the market, these developers want the safest product they can build. In cities, development is a duopoly of councils and corporate developers.
We can’t and shouldn’t expect the state to step in, to attempt to raise the standard and the beauty of housing by developing themselves, since their record in this field - Millennium Dome, anyone? - is abysmal. Even if they were capable of it, the political incentives simply aren’t there. No one votes for housing unless they desperately need some, and if their need is that desperate, their priority will be for quantity, not beauty.
But there is another model to consider, a Third Way if you like. More than two centuries ago, the nation’s most beautiful housing estate started to go up, on a disused heath to the north of medieval Edinburgh. A young architect, James Craig, drew up the grand plan for the New Town, a geometrical grid of fine squares and broad streets, on the instructions of the town authority. Permission was granted to anyone who wanted to build a house or houses there, so long as they conformed to the overall plan and the new style.
Where necessary, the authorities offered a reward - the first, lonely house to be built on the far side of Edinburgh’s stinking loch earned a £20 bonus. Planning permission - the great headache of modern urban development - was not a problem, since the city itself had drawn up the plans. All a builder had to do was acquire a plot, a builder, and formal permission to build his house there, in accordance with the plan.
A modern version of this scheme could demolish the stranglehold that timid architecture has on this nation. Instead of restricting development to professional developers, a city wanting to build on wasteland or over the rubble of a decrepit estate could bulldoze their site, and invite submissions for a new plan, covering both the layout and the style of housing.
An open competition is an old device for commissioning architecture, and it would be an ideal way for a city to decide on a plan. And since those wanting to build to this plan would get their planning permission automatically, thus cutting out a hazardous and expensive part of building, the standards demanded in the scheme can afford to be high.
It is then up to individuals, developers, and housing associations to acquire a plot and design a house or a block that fits the grand design, to coin a phrase. By breaking the need for full, start-to-finish planning permission, you break the power of the developers, and allow individuals and groups to build their own houses again.
A district designed on these lines could afford to be adventurous and exciting. It has the chance to be a development that adds to the beauty and character of a city, rather than, as so many do, dragging it down further to suburban mediocrity. Unlike most developments, the city could afford to demand the kind of quality and beauty that few individuals would be able to build on their own. Instead of town and cities competing to have new housing dumped elsewhere, we can dream about a day when towns compete to build grander, more innovative, and more beautiful districts than the next town.
All it takes is the belief that we can still do things like this, and that it’s worth doing. The days when we could build mere housing that was stunning enough to stand as a monument to our civilisation doesn’t need to have died, quite yet.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Why Broon's Doomed
Gordon Brown’s first week in power seems to have been received well. He and his new Home Secretary have managed to sound responsible and dignified in the face of the world’s most comically useless terrorist attacks. Labour partisans in the commentariat are overjoyed to witness Brown’s ability to move next door and not tread on any banana skins en route. The opposition is being civilised, partly out of the sense of statesmanship necessary in weeks like this, and partly to keep their powder dry.
But despite his good week, the prospects for Brown’s premiership are not good. Even before his frankly rather pathetic debut at PMQs, it was plain that Brown would be the first new Prime Minister for a long time whose opponents would greet him not with venom, but with contempt. Most incoming PMs are met with a healthy mixture of cheers and loathing. On either side there is both hope and anger, but always there’s passion. If a new leader can’t inspire even some sincere hatred, they’re in trouble.
This kind of quiet, indifferent contempt is rare, reserved for those new boys whom the voters already know all about, and don’t think much of. It is the worst of receptions. Matthew Parris, the exceptionally shrewd columnist for The Times, has written of his desire to join those who are accused of underestimating Gordon Brown, and who think that his talents have been wildly oversold. Brilliant at sums, but with no imagination and less courage, goes the Parris line.
For the past decade, Gordon Brown has been portrayed as the grim but brainy force behind the glossy charm of Tony Blair. Allies boast of the great man’s intellectual power, his grasp of detail and his vast reading. We are reminded that Brown is the first truly intellectual Prime Minister since Balfour. No doubt that is true, as far as it goes. But succeeding at the top of politics is not just a matter of IQ, and two factors have already doomed Brown’s spell at the top.
In a modern, media-driven democracy, top politicians are overexposed. Being an active, thrusting politician is synonymous with ‘being on TV all the time’. A politician who’s made it to the top has usually gone through several years of obscurity to all except Westminster-watchers, followed by a period of rising stardom, in which their public profile slowly grows, after which the they break through to the top stratum of politics.
Once they reach this point, politicians are ceaselessly in the public eye. Unlike politicians of previous generations, Westminster’s modern top dogs have a limited lifespan. Constantly gossiped about, analysed and featured in the press, and trailed by camera crews as they visit schools, clean up graffiti and do the other textbook stunts, we can only take so much of them. If the Victorian public had had to watch Gladstone cleaning up dog mess with a cheery grin on his face, he wouldn’t have still been at No. 10 in his eighties.
The life expectancy of a modern top politician is no more than ten to fifteen years, before we are utterly sick of the sight of him. At this point, the nation generally likes to kick them out, despise their memory for a few years, before their slow rehabilitation into loveable old curmudgeons, in the mould of Lord ‘Tub of Lard’ Hattersley.
Even before reaching No. 10, Gordon Brown had used up most of his political lifespan. He has loomed over the political landscape for a decade, a constant presence in the nation’s life. While he’s been much less obviously a media presence than Blair, and his public appearances have been mainly limited to formal events and a few stiff photocalls, his presence in the nation’s consciousness has been no less real.
He has dictated much of domestic policy since 1997. He has steered the government in the direction of a more wide-ranging state, one that looks after and helps raise small children, as well as try to educate them when they’re older. The domestic policies that the government’s most wholeheartedly committed itself to - like tax credits - are Gordon’s. He has loudly taken the credit for virtually everything that’s gone well in this country since 1997. And his sullen, under-the-table bickering with Tony Blair has kept the national’s political journalists amused for just as long.
It is absurd to think that he comes to No. 10 as a fresh talent. He has at most, one full Parliament left before his time is exhausted. No one could, hand on heart, say that they can visualise Gordon Brown still being Prime Minister in ten years’ time. He is already on the way out, whatever he tries to do. His only struggle now is to make it a slow exit.
The second problem for him is that his decade of sulking has already marked him out as a second-rate PM. If you think of the great Prime Ministers, they were all people who took chances when offered, made the most of them, and forced their own success upon the system. Propelling yourself to the top through your own political skill and courage earns respect of the most Machiavellian kind, the kind that gives you the power to mould politics to your agenda.
Whereas those leaders who inherit the job without a fight, perhaps as a reward for long service, as the nominee of a more powerful figure, or because no one could think of anyone better, are always going to make mediocre leaders. They are people like Jim Callaghan, Anthony Eden, and John Major. David Davis, if he had won the Tory race, would have been one.
Inheriting power without a fight, they start at an inevitable disadvantage. They haven’t earned that brutal, wolf-pack sense of respect for a leader who’s proved him or herself to be the strongest, sharpest and most ruthless. Westminster politics is not cuddly. Blair used all the Machiavellian tricks that exist - other than the one about leaving the body of his unpopular lieutenant in two pieces in the piazza - to keep power from slipping away from him. It gives a leader a sense of invincibility, quite necessary if he or she is going to keep dozens of the most ambition and cunning people in the country from besting him.
For all his superficial fluffiness, Cameron did prove himself in his leadership fight, coming from behind and beating the favourite hands-down. Brown, in contrast, was outmanoeuvred in 1994, sold a deal at Granita that proved worthless, and never managed to fight back. He waited nearly ten years, sulking and briefing in the background, until Blair was terminally weakened. Then, last September, he struck, with a timid, half-hearted attempt at a coup. Its success can be measured by the fact that even against a weakened Blair, Brown was forced to wait yet another year to gain his prize.
Brown starts his premiership with his time running out, and weakened by his own timidity. For ten years he has been the prime minister-in-waiting, and he has excelled only at the waiting. His chance to be a great PM evaporated ten years ago, when he rolled over and let Blair win without a fight. In the dog-eat-dog world of Westminster, it’s too late to recover. Only natural, therefore, that even Brown’s enemies should greet him with a contemptuous shrug.
But despite his good week, the prospects for Brown’s premiership are not good. Even before his frankly rather pathetic debut at PMQs, it was plain that Brown would be the first new Prime Minister for a long time whose opponents would greet him not with venom, but with contempt. Most incoming PMs are met with a healthy mixture of cheers and loathing. On either side there is both hope and anger, but always there’s passion. If a new leader can’t inspire even some sincere hatred, they’re in trouble.
This kind of quiet, indifferent contempt is rare, reserved for those new boys whom the voters already know all about, and don’t think much of. It is the worst of receptions. Matthew Parris, the exceptionally shrewd columnist for The Times, has written of his desire to join those who are accused of underestimating Gordon Brown, and who think that his talents have been wildly oversold. Brilliant at sums, but with no imagination and less courage, goes the Parris line.
For the past decade, Gordon Brown has been portrayed as the grim but brainy force behind the glossy charm of Tony Blair. Allies boast of the great man’s intellectual power, his grasp of detail and his vast reading. We are reminded that Brown is the first truly intellectual Prime Minister since Balfour. No doubt that is true, as far as it goes. But succeeding at the top of politics is not just a matter of IQ, and two factors have already doomed Brown’s spell at the top.
In a modern, media-driven democracy, top politicians are overexposed. Being an active, thrusting politician is synonymous with ‘being on TV all the time’. A politician who’s made it to the top has usually gone through several years of obscurity to all except Westminster-watchers, followed by a period of rising stardom, in which their public profile slowly grows, after which the they break through to the top stratum of politics.
Once they reach this point, politicians are ceaselessly in the public eye. Unlike politicians of previous generations, Westminster’s modern top dogs have a limited lifespan. Constantly gossiped about, analysed and featured in the press, and trailed by camera crews as they visit schools, clean up graffiti and do the other textbook stunts, we can only take so much of them. If the Victorian public had had to watch Gladstone cleaning up dog mess with a cheery grin on his face, he wouldn’t have still been at No. 10 in his eighties.
The life expectancy of a modern top politician is no more than ten to fifteen years, before we are utterly sick of the sight of him. At this point, the nation generally likes to kick them out, despise their memory for a few years, before their slow rehabilitation into loveable old curmudgeons, in the mould of Lord ‘Tub of Lard’ Hattersley.
Even before reaching No. 10, Gordon Brown had used up most of his political lifespan. He has loomed over the political landscape for a decade, a constant presence in the nation’s life. While he’s been much less obviously a media presence than Blair, and his public appearances have been mainly limited to formal events and a few stiff photocalls, his presence in the nation’s consciousness has been no less real.
He has dictated much of domestic policy since 1997. He has steered the government in the direction of a more wide-ranging state, one that looks after and helps raise small children, as well as try to educate them when they’re older. The domestic policies that the government’s most wholeheartedly committed itself to - like tax credits - are Gordon’s. He has loudly taken the credit for virtually everything that’s gone well in this country since 1997. And his sullen, under-the-table bickering with Tony Blair has kept the national’s political journalists amused for just as long.
It is absurd to think that he comes to No. 10 as a fresh talent. He has at most, one full Parliament left before his time is exhausted. No one could, hand on heart, say that they can visualise Gordon Brown still being Prime Minister in ten years’ time. He is already on the way out, whatever he tries to do. His only struggle now is to make it a slow exit.
The second problem for him is that his decade of sulking has already marked him out as a second-rate PM. If you think of the great Prime Ministers, they were all people who took chances when offered, made the most of them, and forced their own success upon the system. Propelling yourself to the top through your own political skill and courage earns respect of the most Machiavellian kind, the kind that gives you the power to mould politics to your agenda.
Whereas those leaders who inherit the job without a fight, perhaps as a reward for long service, as the nominee of a more powerful figure, or because no one could think of anyone better, are always going to make mediocre leaders. They are people like Jim Callaghan, Anthony Eden, and John Major. David Davis, if he had won the Tory race, would have been one.
Inheriting power without a fight, they start at an inevitable disadvantage. They haven’t earned that brutal, wolf-pack sense of respect for a leader who’s proved him or herself to be the strongest, sharpest and most ruthless. Westminster politics is not cuddly. Blair used all the Machiavellian tricks that exist - other than the one about leaving the body of his unpopular lieutenant in two pieces in the piazza - to keep power from slipping away from him. It gives a leader a sense of invincibility, quite necessary if he or she is going to keep dozens of the most ambition and cunning people in the country from besting him.
For all his superficial fluffiness, Cameron did prove himself in his leadership fight, coming from behind and beating the favourite hands-down. Brown, in contrast, was outmanoeuvred in 1994, sold a deal at Granita that proved worthless, and never managed to fight back. He waited nearly ten years, sulking and briefing in the background, until Blair was terminally weakened. Then, last September, he struck, with a timid, half-hearted attempt at a coup. Its success can be measured by the fact that even against a weakened Blair, Brown was forced to wait yet another year to gain his prize.
Brown starts his premiership with his time running out, and weakened by his own timidity. For ten years he has been the prime minister-in-waiting, and he has excelled only at the waiting. His chance to be a great PM evaporated ten years ago, when he rolled over and let Blair win without a fight. In the dog-eat-dog world of Westminster, it’s too late to recover. Only natural, therefore, that even Brown’s enemies should greet him with a contemptuous shrug.
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