Town & Country Planning, April 2008
Hazel Blears has always seemed a cheery enough soul, at least at a distance.
She probably believed her mild foray into planning history for IPPR was pretty anodyne stuff – I think we could probably all subscribe to a ‘vision’ of a world with neither gated communities nor sink estates – but it has actually convinced me that our current government is never going to ‘get’ localism.
She cited Bevan’s vision of towns “where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the labourer all lived in the same street”. She is right, of course, that the same principle should probably apply to different ethnic groups – but what about the doctor, butcher and grocer? Or has the government abandoned all that to supermarket-led degeneration?
That blindness was depressing enough, but there was worse. The real reason we know about the speech at all is for the mild implied criticisms she directed at Prince Charles’ new community of xxxx in Dorset. But thanks to that, we also know about her ignorant dismissal of the pioneering model towns of Saltaire, Bourneville and Port Sunlight, lumping them all together as ‘ego-trips’ for their creators.
Salt, Cadbury and Lever certainly had their egos, but their towns were critical, imaginative and generous experiments in new kinds of civilised living, making leaps of faith about the perfectibility of people that government ministers can only dream of.
Her criticisms of them, and the contrast she made with the new towns programme, displayed a horrifying cynicism about local or individual initiative, unmediated by ministers – and a blinkered faith in government programmes. As if anything local is necessarily flawed by its very nature.
Not only is the Blears view of history patronising – though it is good to see the occasional glimpse of history from New Labour – but it also seems to have learned nothing about the limitations of centralised decisions. It implies a blissful faith in planning without action; a Fabianism without socialism.
It also missed out the ‘third way’ pioneered by Ebenezer Howard, which built on the lessons of those model towns which went before. The success of his garden cities were and are a testament to individual vision and local initiative. As Howard said at the time, if you wait for the government to do it, “you will be as old as Methusaleh”. Still true, I fear.
Watching the old mantras of centralised Fabianism trotted out again, at least as mediated through the shocked tones of the tabloids, was itself a kind of history lesson of history – and it raised an interesting question: why did British politics take the Fabian turning and avoid the co-operative alternative? Why did it embrace centralisation and turn its back on localisation a century ago?
How come so many of our great twentieth century institutions and ideas have come down to us via the baleful influence of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (someone who confessed at the end of her life that, although some old ladies fell in love with taxi-drivers, she had “fallen in love with Soviet communism”)?
Oddly enough, I had just written one of those chapters in a book of counterfactuals – the history of things that didn’t actually happen – in which I suggest an explanation for this, and do so with only part of my tongue in my cheek.
I have wondered for some time whether things might have been different if Beatrice Webb’s abortive affair with Joseph Chamberlain had actually resulted in marriage – whether her passion for co-operative experiment and his radical Liberalism of allotments and three-acres-and-a-cow might have transformed British politics in a more co-operative direction.
Instead, they fell out over the role of a political wife. Beatrice was driven into the arms of state socialism and Sidney Webb, with his pince-nez and goatee beard, while Chamberlain married an American heiress and became a Tory.
A sad story really, because we are now having to revisit, in so many ways, the missed opportunities and roads less travelled of a century ago to find our way out of the sclerosis of centralisation, where government is deeply suspicious of local initiative and not nearly suspicious enough of the illusion of activity generated by its own target numbers.
We are having to re-learn co-housing from Scandinavia, community land trusts from the USA, and mutualism from almost everywhere else (except Russia and Zimbabwe, perhaps).
Whether you agree with my fantasy about Webb and Chamberlain is really beside the point – though I’m glad to say that the Tribune reviewer described my essay as “deeply insulting to everyone involved”.
The point is that, under our current neo-Fabian administration, the basic lessons of localism – the basic trust in local initiative that is required – have still not been learned. Probably that means they never will be.
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. His essay about Beatrice Webb was published in President Gore and Other Things That Never Happened, edited by Duncan Brack (Politico’s, £12.99). www.david-boyle.co.uk.