Monday 29 September 2014

The smoking ban didn't work, did it?


The smoking ban in pubs, the thing - the silver bullet - that would suddenly change the world and stop every one smoking was introduced in 2007. And look folks - it didn't work, there was no accelerated decline in smoking and one-in-five of us still smoke. So we've shut down thousands of pubs, destroying business and creating unemployment to achieve almost nothing at all.

And now because that hasn't worked, the public health fanatics want plain packs for fags. Let me tell you now - it won't work, no even a little bit. And those ban-fans will be back with their next wheeze (which, of course, won't work). Look guys, we're grown ups. We know the risks. We know smoking increases our chances of dying a premature, painful death. Some will make the choice to smoke. It's their choice too, and they should be allowed to make it.

....

Sunday 28 September 2014

Perfecting tyrrany

****

A really striking excerpt from a paper called 'Perfecting Tyranny...' quoted by Don Boudreaux:

Those who have developed a comparative advantage in innovating and implementing state-produced social control via foreign interventions will benefit in the form of higher wages by employing their unique human capital domestically.  Specialists in state-produced social control are able to suggest and implement new techniques and organizational forms of state social control on the domestic population based on their experiences of doing the same to distant populations.  The result is that domestic activities, whether in the public sector or the private sector, are influenced by the experiences and skills gained during the coercive foreign intervention.  As this process unfolds, the distinction between the state-produced social control used abroad and state-produced social control used domestically becomes blurred.

Not sure I entirely agree but it is food for thought in these troubled times.

...

Saturday 27 September 2014

Alan Johnson - nannying fussbucket of the week

****

Alan Johnson the chirpy cockney lefty pundit who used to be a health minister under Tony Blair wants to ban Coca-Cola:

One thing: a single proclamation; a dictat that required no pandering to public opinion or consultation with a focus group. It’s simple. I’d ban Coca-Cola and all its offshoots, lookalikes and variants.

Free from the constraints of good sense, this blokiest of ex-MPs reveals himself as just another health fascist. And it helps that Coca-Cola is a faceless American corporation, one of the dark and sinister groups manipulating our gullibility and corrupting our youth. Now I think Coca-Cola is revolting stuff but millions every day enjoy the pleasure of drinking the foul muck and it's none of my business to be calling for bans or anything of that sort.

Fizzy-pop isn't especially good for us but then neither is that lovely chocolate fudge cake Alan's auntie probably used to make or those wonderful hand-made traditional sweets sold in that lovely old-fashioned shop on the high street. Sweetness - whether from sugar, fruit or honey - is wonderful, a joyful pleasure for young and old alike. Johnson, like all the rest of the health fascists, would have us live in a dull, drab world where nannying doctors dictate where, what and when we all eat.  A world where little brainwashed kids - in Johnson's words - lecture us about our sins:

The result will be an army of happy children marching forward together, eyes bright, teeth gleaming; instead of teaching the world to sing, they will teach it to stop consuming sugar.

If anything should be banned, we should start with ghastly, self-righteous health facsists like Alan Johnson.

....

Cities are cheaper...

****

We sort of knew this I think but it's good to be reminded that the process of growing food in the countryside and transporting it to cities is a very efficient system - indeed that food in cities is cheaper:

This paper uses detailed barcode data on purchase transactions by households in 49 U.S. cities to calculate the first theoretically-founded urban price index. In doing so, we overcome a large number of problems that have plagued spatial price index measurement. We identify two important sources of bias. Heterogeneity bias arises from comparing different goods in different locations, and variety bias arises from not correcting for the fact that some goods are unavailable in some locations. Eliminating heterogeneity bias causes 97 percent of the variance in the price level of food products across cities to disappear relative to a conventional index. Eliminating both biases reverses the common finding that prices tend to be higher in larger cities. Instead, we find that price level for food products falls with city size. 

...

Friday 26 September 2014

Is the EU more Holy Roman Empire than nascent super-state?

****

I've thought something like this for a while:

These attitudes suggest that the EU could be devolving from a nascent super-state to something that increasingly resembles the Holy Roman Empire, a fragmented landscape of small, unimportant states wrapped in a unitary, but ephemeral crepe.

If this is so - and I fear it is, the need for a sustainable reform of EU institutions become imperative. Without this Europe as we know it could well collapse into the sort of bickering autarky that organisations like UKIP and the Front National increasingly present as their preferred future.

We need to begin presenting an internationalist alternative to both petty nationalism (UKIP, SNP, FN, etc.) and to the fortress Europe policies of the EU elite. Only Britain has the desire right now to have that debate and, in the UK, only the Conservative Party dare challenge both those sclerotic EU institutions and isolationist nationalism. And that referendum is essential as the lever to make Europe change.

...

'Of Mycelium and Men' - thoughts on the evolution of fungi...


Steve Manthorp wanted me to call this 'Of Mycelium and Men' and it's such a good title I have shamelessly thieved the idea. The posting is prompted by two things - the announcement of a project to study the evolutionary history of fungi by the US National Science Foundation and my recent reading of Jeff Vandermeer's 'City of Saints and Madmen'.

The research project first - it looks at zygomycetes which are believed to be among the first terrestrial fungi forms and perhaps a critical factor in the development of land plants. Zygomycetes are filamentous molds similar to those we see sometimes on old bread or fruit that is starting to rot. Anyhow, we don't know much about them - Jason Stajich, an associate professor of plant pathology and microbiology at the University of California, Riverside, explains:


"Despite zygomycetes' critical ecological roles and importance to human civilization, they remain understudied and their evolutionary relationships are still not well understood," Stajich said. "This is likely a result of some of the difficulty in culturing many of the species, but also because, in general, too few researchers have been studying them."


The research will examine the symbiotic and parasitic relationships between these early forms of fungi and the plants and animals on which they host - and hosted. And it's here that the 'City of Saints and Madmen' came to mind. the book - a collection of short stories set in a fictional city called Ambergris - has at its heart the uneasy relationship between man and mushrooms. The city is a human settlement placed in the heart of an older, grander and more complex city built by super-evolved mushroom-like humanoids, the 'Grey Caps'.

Perhaps, by design or accident, Vandermeer hit on a strange truth - fungi are an overlooked essence in the development of sophisticated life but we see the myco-world as parasitic, feeding on death and decay rather than creating and enhancing. So our response to the mushroom is fear and repulsion:

Manzikert found the gray cap repellent, resembling as it did, he is quoted as saying, "both child and mushroom", and if not for his fear of retaliation from a presumed ruling body of unknown strength, the Cappan would have run the native through with his sword."

In a weird way Vandermeer's fantasy echoes the research Prof. Stajich and his colleagues are undertaking:
 resolving these earliest branches in the fungal genealogy scientists can study what the likely characteristics of ancestral fungi were, and determine what traits emerged first and were necessary as part of the transitions of life from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-evolutionary-history-fungi.html#jCp


...by resolving these earliest branches in the fungal genealogy scientists can study what the likely characteristics of ancestral fungi were, and determine what traits emerged first and were necessary as part of the transitions of life from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems.



Perhaps, from out of all this we get a glimpse of a future mushroom world!

....


Thursday 25 September 2014

The garden city - a stultifying, depressing but comfortable, car-free suburban zombie-land



I've known David Rudlin and Nicolas Falk from Urbed off and on for about a dozen years mostly because they've both been involved in some of the thinking - good and bad - about the future of Bradford as a place. And like many in the urbanist and urban design world, David and Nick are, I fear, a little trapped in a planning model rather than a people model. The solutions Urbed produce are - at the macro level - about deciding things for people collectively or, worse, about trying to second guess the aggregate impact of millions of consumption decisions.

Urbed were the winners of the Wolfson Economics Prize 2014, which focused on "how best to deliver a new garden city which is visionary, economically viable and popular." And, in Urbed's slightly disruptive tradition, the winning entry rejected the old 'new town' model of the garden city in favour of large urban extensions. It's well worth reading how Urbed responded to this brief because it reveals a very high quality of thinking about the challenges of a brief to deliver places rather than a new generation of uninspiring, predictable housing estates.

Given the brief Urbed's response was exciting, challenging and stimulates us to think about the model for future development in England. However - and this is what I will examine in the rest of this article - the approach is profoundly illiberal, assumes that more fixing of the housing market is needed because our planning systems have skewed that market and fails to consider how travel, communications and work will change over coming decades.

Writing in New Start, Nick Falk sets out some of the essentials that lie behind the Urbed entry.

Tomorrow’s cities not only have to be affordable in a world where few earn enough to make a deposit on a house, but also to cut carbon emissions, and create a sense of community. Letchworth was built at a time when the man was the breadwinner, working locally, and when energy was delivered by the coalman. Various religions brought people together; alcohol was banned, and people made their own entertainment. The motor car was hardly practical for most people’s needs.

The problem, as Nick recognises, is that the system we have of designating land for development (while protecting most other land) results in unaffordable housing. In Surrey there is famously more land given over to golf than to housing. It's true that our system of housing finance has also contributed but the primary cause remains the deliberate limiting of land available for the development of housing. Indeed, Falk notes this - although he may not have meant it this way - when he says:

...we have to find ways of doubling housing output and locating them where there is easy access to jobs and services, and this means taking much of the risk out of development.

Put more simply (and from the perspective of the housing consumer rather than the urbanist or planner) we need to build most of the housing in places where people actually want to live. This is something of a challenge and isn't met by the Urbed approach of urban extensions but rather by something that Nick Falk rejects - small scale developments in local communities that act to sustain those communities as places. The problem is - as Falk comments - the 'experts' reject this approach:

Through focus groups, we found that not only was there a general feeling among professionals that concentrating growth in a few planned settlements would produce better results than spreading it around, but we also identified ways in which a ‘social contract’ might be negotiated. 

This preference is determined not by the economic realities of housing demand but by a concern with 'climate change' and 'low carbon'. Thus we reject the idea of extending a village with, say, 400 homes to be one with 600 homes (thereby securing the future of the village pub, the post office and the shop) because such development is predicated on the motor car as the primary means of transport.

The result of this is that development simply doesn't meet either need or demand without public subsidy. Indeed, Nick recognises this with his proposal to freeze land values. Ostensibly this freeze is to prevent 'speculation' but, in reality, it represents an enormous public subsidy to those developing the garden city. Indeed, it is clear that - if the Howardian model is to work - such intervention is inevitable. In effect the state identifies a given area for development and takes the additional value rather than allowing this value to accrue to the land owner. The idea that this can happen without compensation is nonsensical.

Nick Falk also cites places like Freiberg in Germany as examples of how this 'social' development approach has worked. Now, it may be that this is the case for some but if the only option for the young worker in the South East of England is such a place, I fear that they'll still look in envy at those in million pound homes in gorgeous Surrey villages asking why. Indeed, this is the vision Nick Falk would impose on those young workers:

In Vauban, if Rieselfeld residents are to be believed, green living is compulsory. 'It jumps in your face a little,' Claudia Duppe warned me, 'and there is a lot of social control. If you walk into the quarter with an Aldi carrier bag, it's, "Sorry, I'm not talking to you; you shop at a discount supermarket and you don't buy organic." It feels claustrophobic, because everyone expects you to behave in the same way - and of course you are not allowed to have a car.'

This would be the triumph of the urban planner, a place where a supposed 'social contract' determines every last thing about the way people live forcing on them a constricting, unnecessarily dense urbanism where there words of Jane Jacobs critique of the garden city become stark and depressing:

...the creation of self sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

This, rather than the shining city on the hill, is the reality of the garden city. Nick Falk would have us create pretty 21st versions of Stepford, Connecticut (or at least its fictional version). Places where conformity with the 'social' rules are enforced by what began as a charming 'common weal' and quickly becomes the suppressing of difference - a modern prohibition.

I do not want to live in this socially contracted world of Falk's 'pocket utopia' for that supposed perfect place is anything but perfect. Instead it is the creation of planners who see people as things to be placed in carefully designed 'communities' and 'neighbourhoods' rather than as free agents able to, through their interacting with others, create real communities and real neighbourhoods - places that work. Some people want to live hugger-mugger in dense city places, some want space to breathe and a view and others want a variety of choices in between. For a few, Falk's 'green wonderland' would be just the ticket but if this is presented as the future of the urban place it will be one free from creativity and edge, bereft of individual initiative, a stultifying, depressing but comfortable car-free suburban zombie-land.

....


Tuesday 23 September 2014

Quote of the day:On Miliband's speech

****

John Rentoul in the Independent with the cruelest summation of Ed Miliband's address to the Labour Conference:

...I thought it was lamentable, weak, clichéd, embarrassing, uninspiring, stylistically inept, vacuous, unambitious, grandiose, cringeworthy, patronising, foolish, an unappetising blend of impossiblism and incrementalism, and a complete and final disaster for the Labour Party.

Ouch!

....

Monday 22 September 2014

Carefully crafted bigotry - a comment on Hilary Mantel's 'Assassination of Margaret Thatcher'

****

Hilary Mantel, I'm told, writes historical fiction. I haven't read anything that she has written before today.I am unlikely to read anything she has written or will write in the future.

However, Ms Mantel has written a little short story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher and is defending herself from the criticism that her writing inevitably precipitated. Now, I've no real issue with Ms Mantel writing such a story, just so long as she is willing to countenance counterfactual history written from a perspective that challenges her prejudices (which I somehow doubt - imagine a story where the assassination of JFK failed and he led the US into WWIII or one where Nelson Mandela was executed for terrorism).

However, her defence (or at least the part quoted in The Guardian) is something of a confused concoction:

“I think it would be unconscionable to say this is too dark we can’t examine it. We can’t be running away from history. We have to face it head on, because the repercussions of Mrs Thatcher’s reign have fed the nation. It is still resonating."

The first sentence is fine. Of course we can contemplate why someone might want to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, we don't have to go far to understand that mindset because a man who actually did try to assassinate Margaret Thatcher is alive, well and living in freedom (which says a great deal about our society). However, the second sentence - from someone who has made a fortune from exploiting history - displays a profound misunderstanding of even some history within my living memory. It is Ms Mantel who is running away from history, choosing instead a slanted rewrite formed out of prejudice rather than a real analysis.

In the end all this is fine - I've read the story and it's filled with the sort of bien pensant hatred we've come to expect from the UK's literary elite. It gives us a sort of stage Scouse Irishman as a suitable mirror to Mantel's personal hatreds, a kind of justification for her carefully crafted bigotry:

''It's the fake femininity I can't stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people. It's the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It's her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It's her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can't cry?''

As an analysis of Margaret Thatcher this is useless but as a revealing insight into Hilary Mantel's hateful bigotry it is really valuable. Everything about the paragraph resonates with the dismissal of an inferior (Thatcher) by her superior (Mantel). Just as the working class man in Ms Mantel's little story is shallow, cardboard, a thing to be patronised, Margaret Thatcher is provincial, suburban, a little bit ordinary. In both cases unlike Hilary Mantel. But the working-class terrorist is portrayed as a victim whereas the lower middle-class shopkeeper's daughter who became prime minister is the villain.

Speaking personally, I find it hard to contemplate creating a false history purely from blind - and ignorant - hatred. Not the fictional vehicle of a conversation between a terrorist and a women whose home he'd barged into - that's a fine basis for a short story. The blind and ignorant hatred is the caricature of Margaret Thatcher, the view that this is the sort of women - indeed Ms Mantel can barely call her a women - who is so unlike me as to be a monster. Ms Mantel goes on and on about how Margaret Thatcher wouldn't like her hair, how she doesn't like the way Thatcher walks, her handbag - she casts herself as some sort of Anti-Thatcher, as a thing entirely built from the PM's disapproval.

What we see here from Ms Mantel is something that, in truth, is foreign to those of us who share Margaret Thatcher's lower middle class background. Taking the trouble to construct a fiction based entirely on your hatred of a caricature of a women you have never met is something peculiar to the bien pensant left. What this short story tells us about Hilary Mantel - bitter, bigoted, ignorant - is far more important than any flicker of insight into the motives of the Provisional IRA or the character of Margaret Thatcher.

....

Quote of the day: on suburbia

****

I'm a child of suburbia - like most of middle-class Britain. But the criticisms of suburbs outweigh the praises that suburbia is due. We never hear how suburban dwellers are more communal, more engaged with their neighbours and more friendly than those crammed into cities or enjoying a more bucolic lifestyle.

And this - albeit about America - is so true:

The abandonment of the suburban ideal represents a lethal affront to the interests and preferences of the majority, as well as their basic aspirations. The forced march towards densification and ever more constricted planning augurs not a return to old republican values, as some conservatives hope, but the transformation of America from a broadly based property-owning democracy into something that more clearly resembles feudalism.

We are reminded that 'Generation Rent' isn't caused just by the financial circumstances of the economy but by the deliberate and specific impact of planning regulations. People have to rent because they can't afford to buy, and they can't afford to buy because the planning system has, for four decades, prevented the building of enough new homes to meet demand.

....

If you want to control something you need its right name - a problem with poverty and inequality

"Now you know the Rules of Names already, children. There are two, and they're the same on every island in the world. What's one of them?"

So said the teacher in Ursula Le Guin's short story "The Rule of Names" as she explained how knowing something or someone's true name gave power over them. And there is truth in this if we but look - if we describe something other than as its true nature then the resulting policies and strategies will be misplaced and will likely fail.

I've said again and again that we need to talk about poverty. About how, in a land of abundance, there are some who really go go without things we'd all consider essential. If we are to look seriously at our welfare state and ask about its effectiveness then it is this simple fact - people going without - that tells us the system doesn't work. This is not to say that the system is, as too much rhetoric wants to suggest, set so these people go without because it isn't. But it remains a terrible truth that a system designed to deliver care and support fails a lot of people who it was designed to assist.

I watched a presentation from some housing officers about the simple economics of life for these people who stumble through the torn and badly repaired safety net of welfare. Set out in stark numbers was the reality of the trap such people are living in - a spiral of dependence, debt, ill-health and ignorance. A world where getting a job can make matters worse not better, where the short-term loan quickly becomes a loan shark and where a bewildering array of 'agencies' and 'key workers' creates more confusion than they clear and more trouble than they solve.

Now I don't know precisely what should be done for these people - there's a short-term fix involving making sure they get food on the table, medical support and a house they can afford to heat and light. But there's a longer term fix needed which is about employment, education and health. There isn't a magic wand to wave, we've demonstrated that the poor gain little from expensive government programmes and that the welfare system, no matter how we tinker with it, also provides a hit-and-miss kind of respite.

I've said all this - and I mean it too. But none of it is about the headlines, infographics, data-laden tomes and think-tank reports of the 'poverty' industry. Or rather to correctly name that collective of researchers, charities, academics bodies and Labour MPs - the 'inequality industry'. And it is here that the problem is found. We're told repeatedly that the problem is 'inequality' giving us the impression that poverty and inequality are interchangeable terms meaning essentially the same thing.

Throughout my life - or the politically-aware part of it, at least - the left, in its many manifestations, has wrapped itself in the mantle of caring for the poor and that concern has made us all aware of these issues. But today the left has stopped and instead concerns itself with the non-problem of inequality, with the idea that our problems stem from the fact that one man has more stuff or more income than another man. And this obsessing with inequality has meant that the attention has shifted from the question of helping those people going without to the question of how much another group - 'the rich', 'the 1%', 'the elite' - has.

At a Bradford Health and Well-being Board meeting not so long back, I made the observation that many of Bradford's health challenges derive from poverty and their solution lies in reducing that poverty. The Chairman, and Leader of Bradford Council, chose to agree except that his response talked about 'health inequalities' rather than 'ill-health that results from poverty' - these are not the same thing at all yet we are moving inexorably to a strategy based on health inequality, a strategy that simply won't work because it is responding to the wrong thing - to difference rather than lack.

I do not lay claim to a policy or strategy that would eliminate poverty. Indeed, the nature of poverty is that the reasons for it are many and varied, not simply some failure of system but also a consequence of human frailty, inadequacy and foolishness. But I do know that if we continue to call 'poverty' by the name 'inequality' our policies will not have the desired effect. If we want to resolve, reduce or control poverty then we must begin by seeing poverty and not something else as the problem. And this isn't just a question of arcane ideology but a choice that, if we name the problem wrongly, will result in more poverty even while we claim less inequality.

....

Sunday 21 September 2014

Finding a New England




Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch.
In the taking of it breathe
Prayer for all who lie beneath.
Not the great nor well-bespoke,
But the mere uncounted folk
Of whose life and death is none
Report or lamentation.
Lay that earth upon thy heart,
And thy sickness shall depart!

A couple of days ago, I made the case that the only sustainable solution to the 'West Lothian Question' is an English Parliament based in Bradford. However, there are several challenges to this being achieved, not least the Left's continuing fear - even hatred - of the idea of England. It is this that lies underneath Labour's opposition to any resolution of what we should really call the 'English Question' far more than naked political calculation or the national ambitions of Scottish MPs on Labour's front bench.

Don't get me wrong here, all those Labour MPs will cheer on English national sports teams - especially when this is needed for the purposes of getting votes. But those same MPs are from a generation brought up to believe the myth of a white supremacist, flag of St George waving idea of English identity. A myth that was - for all that racists and fascists still try to claim it a truth - blown to smithereens, for me and millions of other Englishmen, by the sight of Ian Wright's celebration of England scoring. We'd been told that the idea of England was racist, something not for black or brown people, and suddenly that wasn't so.

Yet the left still hates England, is still ready to see the red cross on a white background as a symbol of something to be hidden away, something shocking. The left point to the lunatic fringes of the racist right, to the EDL, and say 'that is England'. But it isn't and it never has been, England was never about the hooligan or marches or flags as symbols of race. Indeed the English were never a race - I remember my dad talking about a school friend with a name like Seamus O'Toole who would gleefully thump anyone who tried to tell him he wasn't English.

Today, as the flag and the idea of England is reclaimed by decent folk, the left has discovered a new problem. England is capitalist, we genuinely are that thing Napoleon thought was an insult but isn't - a nation of shopkeepers. More than that, we have taken that idea of self-reliance, independence, trade and the mutual benefit from exchange and made ourselves rich. Indeed the criticism of England is almost a cry of envy - how dare you make yourself rich by providing consumers with the things they want. And I know that we're not the only capitalists - everywhere is in the game of creating wealth, after all - but we are a nation that thinks capitalism is a damn fine idea, something to celebrate.

But to make this work we need a new England. Not a changed England but a rediscovery of some bits of that idea of capitalism we lost sight of along the way. We need reminding that capitalism isn't about the fix, is not a thing of exploitation, isn't some plaything for masters of the universe. We need to realise that capitalism is about trade and exchange, it works because I get more value from that thing you have than you do - and I will pay for that added value. So capitalism isn't about banks, it's not about macroeconomic and it's not about international oil companies. It's about hand carved shepherd's crooks, it's about craft ale, it's about barbers, bookmakers and the boozer. A million and one things that make our lives happier, healthier and more fun.

The left simply doesn't understand this and fears that a new England would reject its controlling, dictatorial and depressing philosophies. So bogeymen are invented to try and destroy English identity - stuff about racism or the rise of UKIP - in the hope that we don't create that new England. This is why rather than an English Parliament, Labour and the Liberal Democrats will try to push for regional government or a confused devolution of some powers to some local councils (but not to all of them).

At the head of this piece is a quotation from Kipling's 'Charm' - reading it brings lump to my throat because it's not about government but about England. Just as all those other things we cherish in England - church bells, the pub, afternoon tea, football on a Saturday afternoon - have little to do with government. Yet all those things are affected - and some are threatened - by government, by the left's petty little programmes of control, by their unchanging belief that they know better than you do.

To win the argument, England needs more than 'fairness', we need to form an ideological basis for home rule just as Scottish Nationalists created the idea of Scotland as a 'progressive' nation, we need to make the case for England as a conservative nation, as a place where those values of community, self-reliance, decency and looking out for the neighbours are held to our hearts. Not as justifications for government but as the values that all of us try to live our lives by. I could sell that in Cullingworth.

....

Friday 19 September 2014

We need an English Parliament (in Bradford)


I remember, prior to the 2010 General Election, speaking with Eric Pickles at Party Conference about the 'West Lothian Question'. Eric's view back then was that the question wasn't really a problem and explained - accurately - that it wasn't exactly a burning issue on the doorsteps. You typical Tory voter wasn't going to add 'English Votes for English Laws' to the things they wanted from a new Tory government - certainly not compared to the urgent job of sorting out the economy and mending the train crash that was Labour's management of government finances.

I think that has changed. Not as much as people think following the sensible decision of Scottish people to reject the blandishments of Alex Salmond's rose-tinted independence. But next election, for the first time in a long while, the asymmetry of the UK's constitutional arrangements will be an issue in England especially if we assume that the process of delivering on the devolution promises to Scotland is under way.

Two questions need to be answered - probably on the same timetable as Scottish 'DevoMax'. Firstly are we content with constitutional asymmetry and secondly, having answered the first question, giving the precise details of any new constitutional settlement for the UK. In both these questions the real issue isn't about Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland but is about England. If we reject asymmetry meaning that all the devolved elements of the UK have the same powers and the same relationship with the UK government, then the question for England is whether we have a single English Parliament or a series of regional assemblies.

If we accept asymmetry then the picture for England is more complicated with options ranging from no change at all through solutions founded on English MPs 'double-hatting' to Spanish-style regional mayors or greater devolution to local councils. The problem here is that we retain resentments since one area gets more power or cash, or else we create a series of demarcation disputes between UK and English laws, between differential devolution to regions or sub-regions and between the devolved assemblies and areas without comparable levels of devolution.

Much though there is some appeal in 'home rule' for Yorkshire, I don't see regional assemblies as a solution - firstly because we immediately face boundary issues and secondly because devolution from a UK government to individual regions effectively abolishes England (at least in constitutional terms). If there is to be devolution to regions, sub-regions, cities or shire counties then that should be a decision for an English Parliament.

It seems to me that a 'four nations' solution matches local expectation but also opens up reforms focused on a more federal arrangement for the UK - this might include the numbers of UK MPs, the role (and means of election) for the House of Lords and the promotion of new locally negotiated arrangements for local government. Although giving English members of the UK Parliament a secondary role as an English Parliament provides a quick fix, it also raises some challenges in terms of administration even while it resolves the issue of law-making. Put simply there would be a Scottish government and a Welsh government but no English government - we could find the situation where a Scottish education secretary can't vote on the laws but is in charge of their implementation in England. The 'West Lothian Question' won't have been answered.

It seems that the Conservative Party is committed to seeking a resolution of the question - albeit with a preference for a Westminster solution rather than an English Parliament. However, neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats seem to want this with the former wanting some sort of gathering for the great and good to decide on a new constitution (or not) and the latter wanting to abolish England.

For me, the answer has to be an English Parliament with the same devolved powers as those given to Scotland. And, of course, that Parliament should be in Bradford.

....

Thursday 18 September 2014

A comment about grooming...

****

During a long conversation with an educated, intelligent Pakistani man that ranged across many subjects - Gaza, Kashmir, education, anti-semitism to name a few - the matter of grooming arose. And this man made a very interesting point - not an excuse or even an explanation but something worth thinking about as we consider our response.

The man - around my age - observed that Pakistani families and especially Pakistani men have no idea how to discuss matters relating to sex and sexual relationships. There is no concept of the father taking sons aside to talk about sexual behaviour or even about 'the birds and bees' for that matter. Nor, beyond the bare teachings of Islam, is there any discussion about sexual mores in the madrassah or mosque.

This isn't the full answer to what this man called 'a male problem' but it was a perspective on the matter of street grooming that I hadn't considered - we have a load of young men (and not so young men) from right across our communities who are, for the lack of parental attention and education, sexually stunted.

....

Wednesday 17 September 2014

When voting matters, people vote...

 ****

I've said this for years. While others fret about turnout, participation and engagement, I've argued that people aren't voting because it doesn't matter to them. When it does matter they will vote:



....

Taxation without representation - haven't we been here before? Labour and saving the high street

****

The Labour Party wants to extend the scope of things called 'business improvement districts' (BIDs) - organisations of local businesses that are (subject to a poll of local businesses) able to levy a charge on all businesses in an area for the purposes of improving that area. These BIDS are popular with high street regeneration folk and are usually managed by a private business organisation.

It seems that, flush with the success of these organisations, Labour's resident 'experts' on saving the high street have come up with a wheeze to make BIDs even grander:

An advisory group created by Labour to consider the future of the high street has recommended that it looks at introducing a new levy on residents to fund a major expansion of Business Improvement Districts, which manage local areas.

In its report, which has been seen by The Telegraph, the High Street Advisory Group recommends “diversifying the application of BIDs, including the ability to assess property owners and residents” and says that “new tools will need to be explored which diversify income streams”.

Now there are two things that are utterly wrong with this proposal - even if you set aside the nonsense that yet another tax is the solution to anything. Firstly, taxation is bad enough when government is doing the levying but surely allowing a private organisation to levy the tax runs totally against the principle of good governance? And secondly, don't we have at least a tenuous attachment to the idea that taxation goes hand in hand with representation?

We could talk at length about high streets but these proposals represent a step beyond local businesses agreeing to a local levy (and for the record, I find the idea behind BIDs coercive and hard to defend) - every tax should be levy by a body over which those being taxed have some control. This is a fundamental tenet of democracy and if you ignore it the result is the dumping of tea in the harbour.

However, and in the interests of bipartisan policy-development, I have a wonderful solution to the dilemma. It doesn't require any new legislation or any new organisations. This solution has been tried and tested over many decades. It has its limits and its problems but most of the time it works. It also meets those tests - representation, democracy and public accountability - that we should apply to bodies that levy taxes. These are hundreds of these bodies across England ranging in size from a few folk meeting once a year to large organisations employing full time staff.

The bodies are called 'parish councils' (although you can choose to call them town, community, village or local councils too).

...

Tuesday 16 September 2014

On our relationship with public health...

****

In an excellent piece on vaping and e-cigs, Clive Bates describes our relationship with public health - or rather public health's relationship with us the public:

They are the ‘public’ in public health. They should be a matter of professional interest to you.  In your profession,  you need to understand them and why they do what they do, in order to make professional public health judgements. You need to do this with high standards of professional conduct and to approach them with humility and empathy. You probably have something to learn and you might even get to understand what inspires them. But they have no similar obligation to you. They have other jobs, other lives and no professional need to understand you or engage with you. If you think “there is a lot of mistrust & misunderstanding on both sides” that is your problem, not their problem.   Their interest in you, if any, is that you might spoil what they are doing, that you are making provocative or unfounded remarks about them or what they do, or you are dismissing their experience as mere anecdote.

I do feel that this fact about relationships is a lesson for public servants everywhere and especially those in public health who seem to believe they have some sort of duty to remove our rights to choose.

....

In which a Liberal Democrat describes conservatism but doesn't know it...


David Boyle used to live in Crystal Palace, a fact that automatically puts him in my good books. Except you don't live in Crystal Palace but in Penge, Sydenham or (if you're in SE20 and posh) Anerley. But David has moved down into the South Downs - he doesn't say where but he does describe the place and it will be familiar to many English people:

My town is outside the commuter belt, one of the advantages of being impossible to commute from, and it is in some ways a step back into a bygone age.  People are patient and polite in the street.  There are four banks in the thriving high street.  There is an effective and forward-thinking GP practice.  The local library is open six days a week.  There are more cubs, scouts and beavers than most people could count.

I sat in church on Sunday, marvelling at the full pews, the identically dressed, healthy-looking people on final salary pensions, the contingent in RAF uniform for Battle of Britain Sunday, saluting as we sang the national anthem.

David, welcome to Conservative England. It is a lovely place filled with lovely people who care about where they live and the people who live there. However, David denies this essential fact saying that the place isn't 'naturally conservative' because it has green action groups and solar panels. As if looking after the place we live isn't the most deeply conservative thing we can do. One of the glorious ironies about green politics is the manner in which it has been captured - and corrupted - by the metropolitan left rather than living in it natural suburban conservative home.

The place David describes could be one of a hundred or more small towns and market towns across the English shires. Places filled with people who, like David, have chosen to live there and who have the time, money and commitment to fill parish councils, voluntary groups and churches with vibrancy and activity. And overwhelmingly these people vote Conservative - indeed are conservative.

Since David fails to full grasp the essence of conservatism - preferring the urban liberal myth that somehow conservatives believe in plutocracy - I can help him with a quotation from one of the two great conservative poets, Rudyard Kipling. Sweetly this quotation is about the place Kipling loved more than anywhere - Sussex:

GOD gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good. 

That, David, is what being a conservative is about and your new - conservative - neighbours demonstrate that love of place and people every day.

....

Monday 15 September 2014

...if you're going to leave please don't slam the door on the way out

****

It's Saturday night, we're at one of the barrel-top tables in The George and we get to the moment in the evening when we talk about something other than the day's football results. It's a bit of a ritual - somebody will say, 'perhaps we should talk about something other than football' and we do. And often the topic is political - partly this presents a chance for me to get a gentle ribbing but mostly it provides a sort of half time breather before returning to the travails of Leeds United or the correct pronunciation of Louis van Gaal.

So we talk about the Scottish independence referendum. This isn't a detailed debate - more what d'you think, 'yes' or 'no'? And the consensus is essentially that we'd all rather Scotland didn't pack its bags and leave because, despite all the banter, we rather like the place. But, if Scotland insists on going could they not slam the door on the way out.

The problem is that we also know that Scotland - should the vote be 'yes' - has every intention of not only slamming the door but also kicking over the bins and pulling the gate off the hinges. And then coming back the next day to go round the house with little labels saying, 'that's mine, that's mine, I'm having that'. The idea that Alex Salmond would negotiate in good faith is as ridiculous an idea as believing that the moon is made of green cheese or that Newcastle United can win this year's premier league.

Today several thousand people have gathered in Trafalgar Square clasping their flags and slogans to - politely - encourage Scots to stay with the United Kingdom. In doing so, a lot of people who don't have a vote on Thursday about something that will profoundly affect their country are making the point to Scots that, whatever is said about oil, hospitals, bank notes and bagpipes, we really are stronger as a united kingdom.

Sadly an all too typical Scottish nationalist response is this sort of tweet:


Tory toffs? I had a good look at the picture and saw a lot of ordinary people taking time out after a day at work to urge Scots not to be daft enough to vote for secession. But it suits that nationalist agenda to argue that anyone in a jacket working in London is a 'Tory toff' - a statement only an inch or two away from the related argument that all Tories are English and 'we don't like Tories do we'. And this soon slips into saying that all the English are Tories.

Some argue that it's not England or the English that Salmond and his pals dislike so much but this abstract thing called 'Westminster'. Except that such language is whistle-blowing in the direction of anti-English sentiment - if there is a problem with the sense of entitlement that goes with modern representative government, please don't tell me that it's resolved by moving the location for that sense of entitlement from SW1 to EH1.

In the end I'm with the view of most folk down here. I like Scotland and the Scots, admire the passion for place and the sense of nation but believe secession would be a grave mistake that future generations of Scottish people will come to regret. But if the Scots insist on going, do so quietly without demanding that the country you're leaving gives you everything you have now plus a whole load more. Independence means just that, it means the good and the bad, the tough choices as well as the promises of eternal happiness. What Scotland can't argue for - although this is core to the SNP argument - is for it to have its own apartment, car and wardrobe courtesy of an English sugar daddy.

....

Sunday 14 September 2014

Quote of the day - on city marketing


From Aaron Renn (who's always good value):

This is easiest to see in marketing videos put out by various chambers of commerce and convention and visitors bureaus. If you happen to watch one that isn’t of your own city, you will immediately be struck by how generic it is and how it tries to sell you on a list of purported amenities and attributes we’ll label “conventional cool.” A list that includes things such as coffee shops, bike lanes, trendy fashion boutiques, startups, microbreweries, skateboarders, silk-screen-print posters, hip restaurants, tattoos, public art and so on.

Add faux heritage, urban growing and farmers markets to get the set! Aaron's point is that cities need to be distinctive, different to succeed. The city has to offer something that the visitor - or aspiring resident - can't get somewhere else.  This doesn't have to be 'conventional cool' as Aaron puts it - he cites Nashville, home of country music, as somewhere that has got it right. In the UK there are places with that same distinctiveness  - I think of Hebden Bridge and Todmorden in Calderdale, of Brighton and of North Norfolk. But our cities - other than London - are way off the pace.

What we get, again and again, is the same generic solutions - an 'independent' or 'cultural' quarter, a budget for 'edgy' street performance and a slew of street art. Add to this a nice city centre mall, a series of chain restaurants and a more-or-less featureless town square to get the standard issue English city - it could be Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham. This isn't to disparage the efforts of regenerators, merely to observe that the marketing of cities has got itself stuck - we're still thinking about 'Grade A Offices' and high end retail when the nature of work and shopping is changing rapidly, pulling away from the world of the CBD and shopping mall.

The pitch we make to sell the city appears more as 'we're just like all the other really good places' rather than 'this is the home of...' something. If your city is the best place to shop, sell it as the best place to shop and don't pretend that you offer culture when you don't. And if you've been curry capital of Britain for years on end, doesn't that tell you something about your uniqueness? If you've a great pop music heritage, go for it - not just the kitsch remembering but getting the cool kids who want to make music to come there. And if your city's strongest brand is a football team, make that the point of difference.

As Aaron Renn concludes:

Rather than rejecting their actual selves, cities need to embrace -- but update -- who they are. Adopt best practices to be sure, but also be true to the native soil. A great city, like a great wine, has to express its terroir.

...

Sorry Nick but great pop music isn't a side effect of youth unemployment

****

I suspect that Nick Cohen is somewhere in the same age group as I am, which means that the edgy and tough popular music of his youth was, without a doubt, fuelled in part by the willingness of some to layabout on the dole playing with guitars. But this statement from Nick isn't true:

If you want to know why British pop has lost its rough energy, you should blame the Department for Work and Pensions, not a plot by the record label executives. 

I know this because arguably the greatest age of British pop music wasn't in the 1970s but was in the first half of the 1960s (it pains me to say this as a teenager of the 1970s but it's true). Those bands and performers weren't created by kids on the dole but by kids at school or college - John Lennon set up The Quarrymen while still at school and Paul McCartney and George Harrison joined the band as a 15 year old and 14 year old respectively. The same story can be told for the Rolling Stones, for Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and a host of others - most were, in effect, professional musicians who made money from performing - not a great living but not the myth of 'kids on the dole making music'.

I'm sure there are examples of bands that started because the members could take dole money and muck about in dad's garage but mostly bands started because kids wanted to make music. If British pop has 'lost its rough energy' (and I'm not so sure it has, unless you deem the X-Factor manufactury as definitive of current pop) it's for reasons other than the availability of benefits. When those British bands that changed popular music in the 1960s started out there wasn't much in the way of unemployment - even in Liverpool. So it is odd that this myth persists - music is created by musicians and, much of the time, those musicians worked as musicians before getting famous.

....

Saturday 13 September 2014

Labour MP wants to ban car ownership...

****

I know it's hard to believe but there are still people whose only response to a 'problem' is to propose a ban. And this proposed ban - on us owning our own car - is priceless in its loony leftness: 

Dr Alan Whitehead, a Labour MP for Southampton Test and a member of the Energy and Climate Change select committee...went on to suggest that ‘outlawing’ car ownership was better than banning car use altogether, preferring ‘regulation rather than prohibition’.

Dr Whitehead added: ‘What if the Government simply regulated for cars to be sold and used just as they are at present (hopefully with an increasing presence of electric and hybrid vehicles) but outlawed individual ownership?"

Now we should note that the 'doctor' isn't a scientist (his doctorate is in politics) but one of those experts in public policy who believe that everything can be planned, managed and controlled in order to achieve whatever goals the leaders of society set. It worked really well in the Soviet Union and folk like Dr Whitehead still think it would work here.

I could dissect Whitehead's argument but it's not worth the trouble - everything about it is wrong, from the belief that the roads will become more congested to the idea that we can somehow force people to use public transport (or the bicycle). But the political stupidity of the argument is staggering.

....

Friday 12 September 2014

Friday Fungus: now this is what you call a mushroom!


Yes folks that's not photoshopped, that really is a giant - indeed humongous - puffball. 

“My uncle was driving to see my grandfather and as he was going along 30th Ave. He thought he saw something in the ditch,” Heather Hoyt, who brought the mushroom find to The Sun’s attention, said. “He pulled over to check it out and discovered that it was a huge puffball mushroom.”

It weighed in at 11.4 pounds - a pretty big mushroom but not unheard of for the Giant Puffball (Calvatia Gigantea). However, the best bit of the story is the disappointment of the mycologist consulted:

“I wish I could have seen it before they cut it up and ate it because it may very well have been one of the biggest I have witnessed.”

I'm guessing it was a fine meal! And why not.

....

Thursday 11 September 2014

How can you have community-led design when there is no community...more on the problem with garden cities


Philip Ross is a former mayor of Letchworth Garden City and founder of the New Garden City Movement, he is keen on garden cities. And, for New Start magazine, he has blogged about these new garden cities:

Community-led garden cities need to start with a community-led definition of what a garden city is. This definition should belong not to one organisation or thought up in Whitehall but should reflect community values. It needs to be born of a partnership and an alliance between the social values and the design and architectural values. The ambition must be to deliver a sustainable community, a community proving inter-generational equity that is socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. If successful it will create a sense of place, purpose and a stake in community, in one word ‘citizenship’.

The funny thing here is that Letchworth, where Ross was mayor, wasn't created by any community but by the ambition of one man - Ebenezer Howard. Indeed, there is a good reason for this - before Howard built Letchworth it was fields of corn, potatoes and sugar beet in rural Hertfordshire.It may well be the case that today Letchworth has a fantastic community doing wonderful things filled with sustainability, inter-generational equity and stakeholder engagement. I don't know, I've never been to Letchworth (although I'd be very surprised is more than one-in-ten of the residents are involved in Ross's little sustainable enterprise).

I've raised concerns about the idea of new garden cities and especially the vision of them as sort of neat, tidy, middle-aged versions of Freetown Christiana all filled with commonweal, cooperation and collectivism. Frankly this is a recipe for a controlled environment littered with signs telling us not to do things, where the management of gardens and the content of garages is fussed over by the garden city's appointed guardians.

It merits saying again and again - garden cities aren't the solution to the UK's housing problems, cannot be delivered on the model Howard used back in the days before we had a planning system and seem to me more akin to Stepford or Midwich than any place I'd like to live. As ever, Jane Jacobs summed it up in her comments on Ebenezer Howard:

“His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge."

....


Wednesday 10 September 2014

What are local councillors for?

****

I attended the Annual General Meeting of a local wellbeing charity this evening and, while waiting for the meeting to start, I chatted to the man who runs the charity's community garden and allotment project. Partly the conversation was about potatoes and runner beans but he also asked one of those deceptively difficult to answer but simple questions - what does a councillor do?

Now I've an answer to this question - people elect us to represent them. And this means that we do two things. The first is to go down to City Hall and make decisions for the simple reason that not all of those people can get down to do their own voting. In our discussion of such glories as community leadership and 21st century councillors, we often forget this simple - and central - function of the people we elect. Making decisions about the things that local councils do is the core function of the councillor and the main purpose of representative democracy.

The second way in which we represent the people who elect us is by acting as a route through which those who elect us can ensure their voice is heard. Sometimes this is a communal voice campaigning for new things or preventing old things from going, and sometimes this is an individual voice that the councillor can amplify by making sure it is heard by the right person at the right time.

None of this is about leadership, change or indeed anything other than being something of a voice for the people who elect us. Which is why I was interested in Localopolis' idea that us local councillors should be mini-mayors:

Mini mayors are local councillors with added status and recognition.  More than simply the community’s representative on the Council they are the focus for community governance.  Many councillors already act informally as mini mayors – the idea here is that this role could be formalised and given legal weight. 

I rather like this idea - I would because, as a local councillor, it strokes my ego. I'm not just a little voice in a big council but a big voice in a little community. In making the proposal Localopolis observes that, under the 'leader and cabinet' model of governance most councils use, backbench councillors feel unfulfilled and are excluded from council-wide decision-making. So we seek out a new role for councillors - the mini-mayor.

The idea is that the councillor - ex-officio - sits on a number of sub-council bodies like parish or community councils, school governors and the management boards of any 'community initiatives'. This brings me back to my conversation with the chap who ran the allotment project - I made the observation that, dull though it sounds, my special skill as a councillor is 'going to meetings'. I said this partly in a moment of self-deprecation but also in a recognition that 'going to meetings' is not an end in itself, you have to do something as a result of going to the meetings!

If this idea of the mini-mayor is seen as a good one, it needs to get beyond going to meetings. As a local councillor I represent five villages, four of them parished, three secondary schools, six primary schools, two village societies, three community associations, two village halls and a host of other people and organisations making up Bingley Rural's 'Big Society'. However hard I try and even with the support of my two ward colleagues I can't make it to all the meetings. And even were I to achieve the nearly impossible and get to all the meetings, I would not be in a position to "join things up locally".

If mini-mayors are to work then councils have to delegate some of the decision-making from the eyries of City Hall to the local wards - to councillors. Because - back to the point of electing us - it is decision-making that is the main purpose of the councillor. Localopolis's idea only works if councillors have a formal decision-making role in the communities they represent. Without that authority, the 'mini-mayor' operates in a contested environment - parish councils with their own income and status, community groups jealously guarding their ideas and territory, and village halls or sports clubs promoting what they want to do. And this is before we remember that, in most places, the role of the councillor is also politically contested.

Much though I see merit in the mini-mayor idea, it is a reminder that the 2000 Local Government Act emasculated local councillors and created the situation where many ended up flapping around wondering what their role and purpose might be. Fortunately local councils - thanks to Mr Pickles - now have the option to create governance models that bring councillors back into decision-making. Councils can also - and should - devolve a great deal more to area committees and other structures below the main council administration.

In the end though - and to answer my question - local councillors are for 'representation'. What we need to do is give those councillors the support, access and capacity to actually do that vital job of kicking down the doors of bureaucrats to ensure that the people's voice echoes round those offices as loudly as possible.

....

Monday 8 September 2014

...go and make where we live even more fantastic than it is already


A while ago I wrote about the little boy who built a little library in his front yard (it was America where the word 'garden' presumably has another meaning). Well the blogger who brought that story to my attention has another story of the busybody - this time about that quintessential institution of US suburbia, the lemonade stall:

This time, it’s a more timeless marker of community that’s emerged as the source of conflict. Specifically, it’s 12 year old T.J. Guerrero and his Dunedin, Florida lemonade stand.

T.J. is, by all appearances, a pretty savvy young entrepreneur. Toying with and measuring the performance of different hours and locations, he ultimately settled on 3-7pm and secured permission to operate in front of a neighbor’s house with desirable, intersection proximity — something that didn’t sit well with nearby resident Doug Wilkey. Wilkey calls the stand an “illegal business” and has contacted the city on at least four occasions in an effort to get it shut down.

Now to give the local council its due, it has made clear it's not in the business of shutting down T.J.'s enterprise (although the local planner's response suggests this is a 'won't' rather than 'can't' decision). But, as I'm sure my fellow councillors will appreciate, there is a sort of person who wants that perfectly ordered, directed and controlled garden city environment free from anything enterprising or unusual and certainly anything noisy or involving children.

The blogger here - Scott Doyon - makes another interesting observation:

Politicians, especially local ones, tend to require some level of political cover when it comes to taking on new ideas. They need constituents organized in support of shaking things up. 

The big problem here is that people like Doug Wilkey are the people us local councillors hear most from. They're at the neighbourhood forum, they attend the parish council meetings (indeed their enthusiasm for attending means they often end up as members of that parish council), they write letters - these days emails, even tweets - of complaint to local politicians and officials. As local councillors we can always get that 'political cover' Scott describes by opposing things, by saying 'no'.

A few days ago I went to Bradford Council's Regulatory and Appeals Committee at the conclusion of a fairly long process. And, for the first time ever, spoke in favour of a major housing development - not because we're all ecstatic in Cullingworth about 238 new houses but because supporting the development meant we could get a new village hall and pre-school some time ahead of hell freezing over. The balance of benefit for Cullingworth was better with the new development than without.

But doing this was only possible because the existing village hall charity has provided that 'political cover' - doing the community survey, collecting names for a petition and raising awareness about the need for a new hall. Without that 'cover' I would either have been stood there opposing the development or else sat at home with a cup of tea and a good book.

This may be very different from that lemonade stall but the truth is that both situations are about how we respond to initiative and how just a few people can have a disproportionate impact - good or bad - on a community. And it seems to me that, if we want the few people to be positive, innovative and fun, then we have to look for those in our communities that want to do something rather than those who want to stop something happening. We need people who respond to what others want to do by saying something like, "how do we make what you want happen without causing a problem for other people", rather than the more commonplace, "the rules don't allow that to happen so you can't do that".

Parish and town councils illustrate this problem perfectly - for every parish that's embracing neighbourhood planning, promoting new initiatives and dragging the district council into acting for the community's good, there's another that sees its job as turning the regulatory wheel, stop change and seek to control individual initiative. Sadly 'not invented here' syndrome is all too common in local government and we see that too often the first response to any proposal is 'no'.

In the end, communities are made worse by people like Doug Wilkey and better by people like T.J. Guerrero. Yet many of our suburban communities are filled with and dominated by Doug Wilkey sorts - described so well by Jane Jacob's in her criticism of 'garden cities':

His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

Where councils - at whatever level - adopt this outlook, they create lifeless places where the interpretation and enforcement of the rules dominates, where communities are more concerned with policing their neighbours than with creating something with those neighbours.

Although Scott Doyon talks about 'shaking things up', I'm not really sure that's what its about either. You probably like your house but that doesn't mean you've no plans to change things - some new curtains, a speaker system for the telly, some new kitchenware or a makeover for the front bed in the garden. What you don't want - or need - is some sort of comprehensive regeneration, a massive change making the place completely different.

Take this into the community and it becomes a case of making the place even better not some sort of abstract 'change'. Maybe the War Memorial's looking a little in need of attention or the high street could benefit from flowers, flags and bunting. Perhaps the recreation ground needs better drainage or the football club new kit. A hundred little things that make the place that little better, more of a place, more of a community.

So if you want to know what your parish council should be doing (and how to get your district councillors involved) it's a load of little betterments that show the place is loved and cherished. The neighbourhood plan isn't just a grand thing for the planning authority to use, it's a set of ideas - changes, initiatives, actions - that the community can get on with doing. It should gather together all the T.J. Guerrero types and say to them: "here's a list of stuff to do, it's not definitive, go and make where we live even more fantastic than it is already and have some fun while you're doing it."

....