Single Aspect Blog

An article in Private Eye No.1274 dated 29/10-11/11 about the possible selling off of council assets (translation – buildings paid for by rate payers over the years) to developers, has prompted consideration of the way things used to be and how life for all of us might be better if they still were.

I was recently prompted into thinking about these things by a fellow blogger who pointed me to his take on the Big Society.  After reading his thoughts here:-

https://ukregeneration.org.uk/2010/11/29/the-big-society-age-%E2%80%93-now-it%E2%80%99s-official/

I was driven to reply as follows and my reply encapsulates all my thinking on private versus public provision.

Some things are better done by large groups of people.  As with insurance where risk is spread across many the individual cost becomes trivial compared with the cost of reinstatement of the insured item, so it is with libraries, swimming pools, parks, roads.

There is a trap for the unwary here. Many poorer areas are likely to remain so without outside intervention, community ownership will not help areas where white flight or middle class flight has taken place because both the finance and the knowledge will have fled with them.  Even where the will exists in a poor community I am by no means convinced that the expertise exists to design and build and maintain sports centres, post offices, swimming pools and libraries.  These are specialist facilities built and run by the few for the many with public money funded as with my insurance comparison above.

I fully understand, appreciate and respect your reasons for tying your campaign to the Big Society and for what it’s worth, I’m with you all the way.  It’s just that having grown up in the countryside in the 1960s and London in the 1970s I have an acute and passionate belief in the power of state funded essentials to bind a local society together and the dissolution of that by ideas from Phillip Blond would sadden me greatly.

We have already seen the disbandment of the council’s horticultural division and the demolition of their greenhouses that used to nuture plants for local parks, and provide a centre for maintenance of the cities roundabouts which instead of sprouting bushes and flowers now sprout plastic signs that say “sponsored by so and so”.  I know which I preferred.

There is a place for the national i.e. roads, defence, taxation, air traffic control, shipping, railways, power generation, water supplies, gas supplies, telecoms, post offices, education to some extent and there is a place for the local, village halls, community centres, pubs, schools at the primary level, libraries run by the council.

I do not think either extreme is healthy.  The former Soviet Union under communism ultimately fell, although there were fewer inter-state wars then.  Pure capitalism as practised across the pond is undesirable too.  We used to have a working model in this country.  It was called the 1970s.  It had financial and industrial problems to be sure, it had smoking, strikes, heavily subsidised industry, pollution and inefficiency.  However it also had a generation left over from the war, people in their 50s and 60s with the manners, behaviour and morals of that period.  They are mostly gone now and our society is the worse for it.

I like to think that in celebrating the Big Society David Cameron really has at heart the benefit of us all, what I actually think is that he just wants to cut income tax again before the next election to gain votes.

Then just the other day John Harris wrote an article on the reduction in provision of libraries which prompted a number of comments that caught my eye with one contributor in particular.  “David Cruise” twice uses the phrase the “common good” and this to my mind is something that has fallen by the wayside with the success of Thatcherism, the growth of the me society and its pursuit by New Labour.  The libraries article is linked below:-

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/10/libraries-future-government-policy

with my selected comments reproduced below.

DavidCruise

10 December 2010 2:33PM

More ideas? Well, you could always read Private Eye, which has had quite extensive coverage of libraries,closures, the wishful thinking that volunteers can and will do what should be a paid job, and the philistinism of too many politicos.
[F]air play for the ‘campaign’, but don’t make it too narrowly about libraries (not least because that might not strike a chord with as many as one would hope). This is about nothing less than the undermining and erosion of any sense of the common good, and the common weal. Libraries are just canaries in the mineshaft in this respect.

• DavidCruise10 December 2010 2:46PM

  @ simonsview

  Can someone tell me please why, as a pensioner, I should have to pay for a library that I cannot use?

  The same reason that I should,and do, have to pay for your subsidised bus pass, winter fuel allowance, your TV licence fee. It’s called the Common Good.
  If you don’t want that,fair enough,but then don’t call on state assistance or subsidy.

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/10/libraries-future-government-policy

The promises made by both sides before the last election (May 2010) about separating investment banking from the high street banks has not been pursued and does not look likely to be either, not with so many millionaires in the coalition government.

Then there are the buildings.  In the same edition of Private Eye referred to at the beginning of this article the proposed sale of council buildings in Tunbridge Wells.  You only have to look at the damage wrought on the former library in Mare Street Hackney to see what will happen.  That is now a night club and fire exit doors have been punched all along the side through the stonework, I dread to think about the interior but cannot believe that the replacement libary across the road all on one floor, is superior.

Through this carelessness we are in danger of carrying out vandalism to town and city infrastructure on the same scale that was carried out in the 1960s in the name of comprehensive redevelopment when entire areas of inner cities were flattened for Arndale centres, ring roads and multi-storey car parks.

Civic Pride and the Common Good are now as imperilled as they were in the 1960s with the banking crisis being used as the bulldozer and all cries of restraint ignored.  In Hammersmith and Fulham, at a time of supposed austerity, the council want to redevelop large parts of King Street at cost of £35 million while cutting local services.

It’s not redevelopment we need at a time of austerity, it’s fair treatment for the taxpayers of this country and not an excuse to drive through right wing ideology capitalising on the opportunity presented by the banking crisis and a weak opposition.  Who will make the banks pay and not the public?  What price civic pride and the common good?