Town & Country Planning, September 2008
I’ve been spending most of August in the middle of a remote Swedish forest, together with insects, pine trees and a great deal of fresh air – and some studiously invisible moose – and it made me think afresh about British centralisation.
Scandinavia is so similar to the UK in its traditions and history, and yet so different. There is a strong central state but powerful local government too, and both of them really collect taxes. That is why it has for so long been the ideal to which European social democrats aspire.
But there is so much difference as well, and it isn’t just the weather and the open space. There is somehow less of that British awkwardness about the place, and – perhaps as a result – no similar tradition of voluntaryism.
There is wind power everywhere you look. It is, or seems to be, an enlightened and civilised region of the world. But that sense that people can, and should, go off and make things happen themselves, which so underpins the UK tradition of localism – despite all the attempts by politicians to pretend it is just something to do with decision-making – is less powerful in Scandinavia, and this matters.
The mild sense of conformity which you experience wandering around Stockholm feels ever so slightly alien, a mild pressure behind the neck. Admittedly this was in the driving rain, where conformity is thrust upon the best of us, even in London.
If something is worth doing in Sweden, as they used to say in Lewisham, then it’s worth government doing it for you.
That may be fine for Scandinavia, but it doesn’t work in the UK, and although the founding principles of New Labour are voluntary to their core – in practice, the distrust of our political masters about doing anything for ourselves runs very deep.
So although London’s chaos, individuality and basic non-functionality drives me occasionally insane, and although there are many aspects of life and government in Sweden and Denmark which we urgently need to learn, there are parts of our life in the UK that I prefer to Scandinavia’s smooth humming machine.
But when I got back here last week, I was reminded that there are two areas where the basic building blocks of UK localism are seriously under threat.
The first was the abrupt departure of the chief executive of the Shaw Trust, placed on ‘gardening leave’ for unknown reasons.
A private matter, no doubt, except that the Shaw Trust is one of those mega-charities that has burgeoned into becoming practically a government department, providing government training programmes for disabled people – and now employs 1,300 staff.
The biggest 1.6 per cent of our voluntary sector now gets two thirds of the income, mainly to deliver what are in effect public services.
They are the winners out of a nightmare system that means charities are squeezed by centralised funding regimes and bizarre reporting requirements, while the rest find themselves constantly forced to prove their own innovation, spending their dwindling resources on collecting irrelevant statistics for distant funders.
The second headline which made me worried for UK localism was the one about the desperate squeezing of suppliers by the Big Four supermarkets, embarking on a new price war.
The problem when you have what is a semi-monopoly, despite the poor old Competition Commission, is that there is no chance of a fair exchange between supermarket and supplier. If small farmers and milk producers are having to pay the extra petrol costs of the big retailers – which is what is actually happening – then they will very quickly go to the wall.
In those circumstances, if supermarket buying power began as a buttress against inflation, it will soon become the opposite as we are all forced to import our milk and farm produce, and pay the burgeoning fuel costs ourselves.
So I find myself back at work feeling particularly aware of the vulnerability of what makes us different from Scandinavia, that combination of diversity and British cussedness that underpins our creativity and liberty.
None of this is, of course, to say that our rulers should not be urgently learning the lessons on energy and waste which Scandinavia learned decades ago. They should; it’s just that things are different there.
I remember a long and agonised conversation in Denmark some years ago with local officials about setting up the first generation of time banks in Scandinavia, building community by measuring and rewarding the effort people make.
But if something moves in Denmark, it is taxed. If you were measuring people’s time, and if people could bank it in any way to use for help later, then somehow it must be taxed – yet how can you tax time?
Finally, there was a moment of revelation for the chief Danish official. “Oh, I understand,” he said. “We had exactly this problem with the sperm bank.”