Same Old Conservative Mistake - Build The New, Not Save The Old
And of course it's the lefties who are the conservatives
One of the little conundrums of the British political experience is that there’s no one quite as conservative as a British socialist - and thus the British Labour Party. They are, too often, in the mood to try to preserve the old and clapped out instead of allowing the new to arise.
Yes, yes, we all know, it’s supposed to be the Tories who are the sticks in the mud but this really isn’t true. The Tories do contain some of said sticks within their ranks but the general “right” within British politics also contains the classically liberal revolutionaries. OK, the true neoliberals like myself are a bit off the edge for actual electoral or party politics but there are those there on that right who think that change is just fine as long as it’s change that happens organically.
For the left this seems to be less true. The National Health Service was built off the near Stalinist ideas of immediately post-war thinking and the suggestion that this might change, even at the edges, is met with shrieks of horror. As we can all see when Wes Streeting says something sensible like “Why not use private doctors to treat people waiting years for the NHS to get around to not treating them?”
If it were only the NHS that was treated in this manner - that the archaic may never be changed - then we’d all still be dying young and untreated but we’d also be richer and in more pleasant country. Unfortunately, the Labour Party really is a wholly conservative institution:
Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper will unveil their party’s plan to "reverse the Tories’ 14 years of decline on Britain’s high streets" during a visit to Tees Valley.
The Party claims that under the Conservatives, there are 3,710 fewer fruit and veg shops, butchers, and newsagents since 2010, while an additional 385 towns have seen their last bank branch close, or announce that they will be closing imminently.
High Streets? Greengrocers? Newsagents for the Lord’s Sake?
We all go to supermarkets now for the meat and veg (well, those of us not having them chopped off at Tavistock at least) and the expansion of Aldo and Lidl has made them vastly cheaper too. As to newsagents, have they not in fact heard of the internet? Which is where near all of us get our newspapers and magazines now. Meaning that newsagents really are very close indeed to being culturally redundant in their entirety. And no, while they all used to sell fags that was a very low margin business, there in order that folk would get their newspaper and a pack of Polos at the same time they stocked up with tabs.
So Labour’s using examples of technological and market redundancy as evidence of something that must be saved? They’ll be whining about the coal mines next.
And, yes, there’s also that internet effect on shopping more generally:
We simply need less retail space - and less retail spaces as in High Streets - than we used to. Therefore some of them are closing and all of them are looking a little more sparse. Well, tough, but that’s how the cookie crumbles, that’s how the world changes.
But apparently we’ve got to expend great effort - and thus treasure - in reviving what simply isn’t needed any more. You know, how conservative do you have to get?
The actual answer is very simple and very obvious. The country has a shortage of residential buildings. It also has a surplus of commercial and retail ones (offices are suffering from work from home, retail as above). So, logically, we should be converting commercial and retail into residential. One advantage of which is that it would bring life back into those High Streets. If nothing else a few chimney pot pubs* will arise.
OK, how do we organise this? Organically, obviously. Leave the people be to decide which is going to be what. We’ve already granted planning permission, in that general sense, to any building that currently exists. The plot of this Blessed England is already covered in concrete and for anything built after the 1950s might even have foundations (no, your Edwardian in Fulham probably does not). So, leave people be to decide which is used for what.
We currently do have a partial permission for offices to be turned into residential. You’ve got to jump through a lot less planning hoops than is usual at least. We should just expand this to everything. There’s a building there. Great, so, the owner and any potential users can just get on with that mutual decision about what it’s going to be. We might - might - say that industrial isn’t allowed in Mayfair but that would be about it - and no one is going to build industrial in an expensive place anyway so even that’s redundant.
We could even call this what it is - a market. A market in uses for the extant buildings and building plots in the country.
Some will say that this, well, but, but, it removes local political control from what is built where. Yes, that’s right, it does. That’s the point. Because we’ve got what is clearly going to be the next government in this country arguing for something loopily conservative like subsidising newsagents when there are no more physical newspapers for them to sell.
There really is nothing so conservative as a British socialist. Which is why we need proper market systems, so that no one can use politics to mire us in the archaisms that were outdated 30 years ago.
Or, to repeat, we’ve a shortage of houses and too many shops and offices. So, change the shops and offices into houses. And don’t let any politician anywhere near any of the decisions or processes. At all. Shoot them if they try to get involved even. And only one part of that is rhetorical excess.
*Archaic, but useful. A chimney pot pub is simply the local boozer for some set of households. Not a gastropub, not a destination pub, just the local for 50 or 200 houses. Sure, maybe we only can support one per 500 households these days, one per 1,000 even. But still a useful designation, the local for a residential area.
“It’s all obvious”.
Never has your blog name been so appropriate. This is all so bloody obvious. And yet you’re largely talking to a brick wall.