Civil contingencies

In my more histrionic moments, I wonder whether this is what the early days of a civil war feel like.

Since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, I've been fascinated at how peaceful modern societies slip into bloody conflict. How do friends, neighbours and citizens drift from fellowship, to disassociation, to mistrust, to hostility, and eventually to murder, concentration camps and ethnic cleansing? Is there a moment when the rift becomes unbridgeable and conflict all but inevitable, or is the descent so slow, smooth and subtle that it can hardly be spotted? Ignorance and suspicion replace understanding and empathy, and provide fertile ground for rumour, conspiracy theory and paranoia.

We are - of course - nowhere near there. As I said, 'histrionic'. But we are not as far away as I'd like us to be. Brexit splits feel sharper and deeper than those of party politics. The subject is avoided with family and friends, rather than fuelling debate and discussion. Social and conventional media deploy the rhetoric of 'treachery', 'racism', 'bad faith' and 'ignorance'. Both leavers and remainers, for example, lambast the BBC for its bias in the others' favour.

Perhaps it is made worse by the way that the conflict is seen as existential for people's identities, for the United Kingdom, for sovereignty, for a sense of engagement and inclusion in the world. When you re playing for keeps, rather than 'giving the other lot a go' for the next five years, you think in more manichean or even apocalyptic terms about the struggle, to be won or lost for all time.

The compromises that might have made everyone slightly happy three years ago seem more and more remote. Only the unambiguous victory of a 'clean Brexit' or a revocation of Article 50 is acceptable to the ultras, and they are largely in control of the discourse, ready to assail the motives of anyone ready to settle for seond best.

Still, this is not the Balkans and this is not 1991.  But you do wonder whether things may have turned out differently if, in some small Bosnian grad thirty years ago, Milan had paused to consider whether Ahmet really was the scheming fifth columnist that the papers were suggesting, rather than the neighbour who he had known since childhood, and to consider whether there was some way of resolving differences that did not involve displacement, hostility and the unmaking of nations.

Colonel Blimp's Brexit

At the London Conference last week, Michael Heseltine seemed positively sprightly despite his 86 years. Interviewed by my boss Ben Rogers, he reflected on how his interventions had transformed urban policy in England.

It was only at the end that Ben asked about Brexit, and what made Heseltine so fervently pro-EU. "I was a product of the Second World War," Heseltine replied. "I was born in 1933, on the day Hitler came to power in Germany. Even now I can hear Neville Chamberlain announcing the declaration of war in 1939, and I can remember the the bombers that came at 9 o'clock every night when we were living in Swansea. It Must Never Happen Again. It is why Europe is what it is."

This was a powerful expression of a common narrative among the generation that estabished and strengthened the European Union, that it is a bulwark against the genocidal forces of nationalism and fascism that tore the continent apart twice in the 20th Century. It was what Heseltine said next that was more striking.

Britain had won the war, but "perhaps the psychology of victory had its own problems. We had stood alone. Without us, what possible victory was there? We had a special relationship with the US, we were head of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. How could we throw our lot in with these defeated boring people?"
 
This sense of proud isolationism, so iconically captured in Low's June 1940 cartoon above, seems as powerful a force in anti-EU sentiment as the narrative of 'never again' is among the Union's advocates. It is reflected in the endless invocation the spirit of the blitz, in talk of treachery and enemies, in complaints of "bullying by Germans", in romantic notions of trade alliances with former colonies.

And there of course is the point. Britain was never truly alone. 3.5 million troops from the British Empire fought in the Far East, the Mediterrranean and the Atlantic, 5 million Russians pushed the Nazis back on the Eastern Front, and 16 million US troops fought (2 million in Europe). But the myth is powerful, and underpinned by the endless cyle of remembrance of battles and - perhaps most poignantly - defeats such as Dunkirk.

But Britain really could be alone after Brexit, even more so if Scotland and Northern Ireland secede. Myths of military glory, of victories snatched from the jaws of defeat, of davids knocking down goliaths, are part of every nation's narrative patrimony - harmless if sometimes distastefully jingoistic. But they shouldn't be mistaken for political prescriptions, or blind us to the messy realities of yesterday and today.

Time for some conscious uncoupling of London's Green Belt

[First published in Estates Gazette, 1 November 2019)]

Tackling the housing crisis was top of Sadiq Khan’s policy agenda in 2016. So, with the next mayoral election six months away, the publication of the planning inspectors’ report into the mayor’s draft London Plan – the blueprint for London’s growth – is a big moment.

There is some good news for City Hall in the report, published last week. The inspectors back the mayor’s plan as a whole, his assessment of housing need and also his affordable housing policies – including the threshold approach to fast-track permission, which they say is “appearing to bear fruit”.

But the report does challenge the mayor’s assessment of housing capacity, and in particular his expectation that small sites could supply 25,000 of the 65,000 homes planned each year. As the inspectors acknowledge, this would require a 250% increase in building on small sites in outer London boroughs – the very locations where dense development can provoke the most furious rows among neighbours, politicians and community groups. “Whilst the policy approach is aspirational,” the inspectors conclude, “its delivery is not realistic.”

They recommend halving the small sites target to 12,000 homes a year, giving an overall housing target of 52,000 a year. Given that London is projected to need 66,000 homes a year, of which 55,000 are simply to keep up with population growth (the rest being to deal with the backlog of need), this would leave London with a worsening housing shortage. The gap looks even wider if you use the government’s new calculations of need, which come up with an annual figure of 72,000 homes.

This may all seem a bit moot when London is only building around 30,000 homes a year, but balancing need and capacity is a foundation stone of town planning. The inspectors reject the Sisyphean suggestion – made by former secretary of state James Brokenshire what seems like a political aeon ago – that the plan should be immediately reviewed. Instead, they recommend that the mayor should lead a strategic review of London’s green belt, in the light of the projected shortfall of land for housing (and industrial uses).

This presents the mayor with a dilemma. His commitment to tackling London’s housing crisis is matched only by his commitment to preserving London’s green belt. And you can see why. Green belt reviews are popular among planners and policy wonks, but toxic for the general public; recent polling shows that opposition to building on or reviewing the green belt is as strong as ever.

All of which may suggest that it would be a “bold” politician (in the Yes Minister sense of the word) who agreed to lead a green belt review in what may be a multiple election year. Positions are entrenched, and debates about the green belt can be as fervent – and as futile – as debates about Brexit. But there is an opportunity here too: the mayor could bring light where there is currently just heat, and show that elected mayors can take the lead where governments freeze like marginal-seated rabbits in the headlights.

A review, in partnership with councils and communities, would be an opportunity to discuss the green belt’s role as a constraint on sprawl, for public recreation and as habitat, and to consider how different land uses meet these aims – rather than defending the green belt as sacrosanct in principle while allowing it to be nibbled away and leap-frogged in practice.

It could explore different options for change, from allowing building in railway station catchment areas to planning and building urban extensions, as exemplars of “good growth” rather than incoherent and exclusive car-based suburbs. It could consider how to substitute for any green space lost, and how to enhance the quality and accessibility of what remains.

The inspectors’ report suggests that, having grown by 30% in three decades, London is starting to strain against its boundaries. It feels like the moment for an open and rational debate about how the next 30 years’ growth can be environmentally responsible and socially inclusive. The next mayor of London – whoever that is – should lead this debate.

What would a "Singapore-style" Brexit mean for London?

[Originally published in CityMetric, 9 October 2019)

A few months ago, a senior EU official told a friend of mine that their most feared outcome from Brexit negotiations would be the UK diverging from EU standards to become a low-tax, low-regulation “northern Singapore” on the continent’s doorstep. 

Reports over recent weeks suggest that this is precisely what the government’s attempted renegotiation of the EU Withdrawal Agreement is seeking to achieve – more room for divergence from Brussels on standards and regulation. Whatever the desirability or feasibility of such a shift, what might it mean for London?

Singapore is an occasionally liberating reminder that there are other ways of running cities. The island city-state off the coast of Malaysia is the magic mirror of urban policy, in which both right and left can see what they wish to see. The right sees low personal and corporate taxes (public spending is half the level it is in the UK), business-friendly regulation, self-reliance promoted through compulsory savings for retirement and health insurance, draconian law and order policies including capital and corporal punishment, and active promotion of family values – for example through giving married couples with children priority allocations of flats.

The left looks to another side of Singapore. It sees active regulation for environmental protection and reduction in congestion, through restrictions on car ownership and use (albeit administered through a regressive system of high-priced permits and road tolling). It also sees the Housing Development Board (HDB), the government agency whose flats house 80 per cent of Singapore’s citizens. Most are sold at 20 to 50 per cent of the price for an equivalent open market flat, though some are available at low rents of five to 20 per cent of household income. A complex formula is used to ensure a representative ethnic cross-section in every development – part of an explicit commitment to engineering a cohesive nation state from Singapore’s various ethnic groups.

The HDB makes a loss every year (around £1.8bn in 2017-18), but the rationale for its work is aspirational rather than welfarist. In the words of Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew: “That loss is to give the man an asset which he will value, which will grow in price as the country develops, as his surroundings become better.”

Both sides may also look at Singapore’s education system in admiration. The city spends less on education than the UK (as a proportion of GDP), but Singapore consistently ranks at the top of the PISA international education league tables. The system emphasises teacher-led education and is accused of prioritising rote learning over creativity, but it is also based on paying excellent salaries for the best teachers, and rigorous testing of educational reforms.

It is simplistic to think that one can simply replicate the conditions and practices of a tropical city-state in south east Asia in a northern European city. Culture, history and geography all underline differences. But the focus on housing and education does respond to two of the biggest challenges of maintaining social cohesion and economic welfare in an open global city economy.

As London’s economy has opened up, the city has already seen a surge in both house prices and workforce qualification levels. Londoners are competing for housing and jobs with people from across the UK and beyond. House prices have jumped from seven to 13 times median salaries since 2002, putting them out of reach of more and more Londoners on modest incomes and without access to capital, and dramatically widening wealth inequality.

Similarly, London is highly qualified: 53 per cent of London’s workers are qualified to degree level (compared to 31 per cent in the rest of the UK). But the population as a whole doesn’t compare so well: London scores less well than many other global cities – and less well than other English regions – when compared on the basis of international tests such as PISA and PIAAC. Without the wealth or skills to compete, it is hard for Londoners or other British citizens to make their way in the capital.

Singapore’s oddity is that it includes both low-tax, low-regulation elements that commend it to global capital; and active intervention in transport, housing and education policy to protect the environment, ensure social cohesion, and to enable the local population to benefit from the opportunities that global city trading can offer. Whether or not the UK chooses the former, London urgently needs to consider the latter if all citizens are to feel they have a stake in their city and an opportunity to share in its prosperity.

Loads of bull

In a tapas bar in Spain (well, ok, Marbella) last weekend, I saw this poster for Fundador, a Domecq brandy that was my mother's favourite tipple on family holidays in the seventies and eighties.

The poster shows an angry-looking bull rearing over a fence, on the other side of which a young man lies sprawled in the grass, his capote de brega (bullfighter's cape) half-covering his legs. He has been trying his luck with the bull, we infer, and has been chased over the fence by it. AL Kennedy writes, in her elegant study of bullfighting, that it was not unusual (though definitely discouraged) for aspirant toreros to steal onto rural granaderos (cattle ranches) by night to hone their skills.

Bulls are a popular motif for Spanish brandies. Domecq's previous advertising for Fundador had included a poster of a young picnicker chased up a tree. Don Alvaro Domecq y Diéz, who ran the family company from 1937, was a bull-fighter and -breeder. And Osborne's bull signs, seen on hilltops in silhouette against the harsh Spanish sun, have become one of the most instantly recognisable symbols of the country.

But I couldn't help thinking there was something else going on here, perhaps because I've been reading Giles Tremlett's excellent book on Spain and its carefully curated amnesia.

The poster dates from 1968, the tail end of the Francoist era, when its harsh Catholic Nationalist ideology was increasingly under siege, not least from the bikini-clad holiday makers who were starting to arrive in Benidorm and points south. Does the poster reflect the anxieties of the beleaguered?

The young man is not dressed in traditional Spanish peasant clothes, let alone in a bullfighter's traje de luces. Rather, he is wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and his hair may have seen some pomade. His boots even look like they might have a cuban heel. He looks more like a rocker than a bull-fighter, a symbol of the threat to Spanish values posed by teenage rebellion and delinquency. In which case, perhaps the bull represents his nemesis, Spain's eternal Francoist essence - virile, macho, tied to the land, 'natural'.

A Domecq poster representing the triumph of traditionalism and machismo over coiffed modernist degeneracy would, I suspect, have fitted with the boss's politics. Don Alvaro was not only a bull-fighter. but more significantly a keen Francoist, fighting for the nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and being appointed Mayor of Jerez by Franco, and also a member of the conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei.

But I wonder whether there's something more. As the young man sprawls helplessly in the grass (his legs at very odd angles, but that's another story) and the bull eyes him, it all looks a bit 'Tom of Finland'. Is the bull after a bit more than just goring (as Zeus was when he appeared as a bull to rape Europa in Greek myth)? Is it a sly joke, or a subconscious reference? Or is it simply advertising? Sometimes, as Freud never said, a bull is just a bull.

Slow Train Coming - apocalyptic glee and abandoned adoration

It was forty years ago today (or last Tuesday anyhow) that Bob Dylan unleashed on the world the stream of invective, religious chauvinism, misogyny and racism that is Slow Train Coming, the first of his born-again albums.  All these years later, Slow Train is still shocking and enthralling in equal measure; much against my better judgement, it’s one of my favourite Dylan albums.

Mark Knopfler’s guitar has rarely sounded better than it does casting shimmering chords and arpeggios around the punchy backbone of the Muscle Shoals Horns and Pick Withers’ drumming. Helena Springs and Dylan’s future wife Carolyn Dennis provide backing ballast to Dylan’s voice, which sounds unusually clear, lively, committed.

Most of the good stuff is on the first side. The loping Gotta Serve Somebody sets up the album’s basic Manichean thesis – the world is divided into the godly and the wicked, and you gotta choose your side. Three tracks later, the belligerently swaggering title track pours scorn on everything from food surpluses, to OPEC, to Alabama road safety regulation.

But it is the tracks that these two sandwich which draw me back to the album time and again.  Dylan starts Precious Angel thankful for his damascene conversion, but swiftly moves on to excoriating those who remain unredeemed. Then he switches to a chorus – “Shine your light, shine your light on me” –  that is sparkling and joyous, a sincere riposte to the woozy gospel posturing of Shine a Light on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St a few years earlier.

One of the song’s joys is the way that, over six minutes, the pace picks up and Bob Dylan’s voice audibly warms and becomes more enthusiastic. By verse two, he directs his attention to his immediate circle:

“My so-called friends have fallen under a spell;

They look me squarely in the eye and they say, ‘Well all is well’.

Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high

When men will beg God to kill them, and they won’t be able to die?”

The pay-off stings like a slap in the face – talk about throwing shade – and the lines are sung with almost indecent glee. Dylan has not found a friend in Jesus but rather a harsh avenger.

The next track, I Believe In You, is very different in tone. Rather than triumphantly overseeing the apocalypse, Dylan is himself cast out, persecuted for his beliefs, for his love. The song mixes divine and secular imagery, sometimes seeming to address itself to a one-night stand, sometimes to an absent lover, sometimes to a forsaking deity. “Don’t!” - twice Dylan pleads not to be abandoned, his voice contorting into the yelp of wounded animal. Few Dylan songs sound so raw and direct, so adoring, with some of the eroticised longing that early medieval hymns direct at the bloodied body of Christ.

It’s the sound of someone utterly convinced of his righteousness, in love with his own new-found passion. It is as captivating as it is horrifying.

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Could tighter border controls boost London's population (July 2019)

[Published on Centre for London blog, 26 July 2019]

After easing off in 2017, London’s population growth picked up pace last year to hit 83,000, with a resurgence in international immigration the principal cause of the recovery, as illustrated in Centre for London’s most recent edition of The London Intelligence.

The latest ONS population projections suggest that London will continue to grow at around this level in the coming years, adding 774,000 residents over the period 2016-26; growth of 8.8 per cent. The capital will still be the fastest growing English region, but will not be growing as fast as it did in the ten years to 2017, when growth was estimated at 1.1 million residents (15 per cent). Net international immigration outstripped net domestic out-migration by around 10 per cent last year, but the ONS forecast the net impact to be more balanced in future with natural change (births minus deaths) continuing to account for the expanding population.

Looming over these projections, however, is the spectre of Brexit. Leaving the European Union will definitely have an impact, but what will it be? It could be that the UK’s departure will lead to an even sharper slowdown in migration; certainly immigration tailed off during the two years of limbo since the referendum, and remains much lower than it was in 2015 or 2016. Given London’s high migrant population, this could hit the capital, and its economy, particularly hard.

But beyond the current hiatus, post-Brexit immigration rules could do precisely the opposite. Notwithstanding the change of government (and any deals done as part of future trade negotiations), the plan appears to be for EU and other migrants to be on an equal footing. Immigration from within the EU may fall back, while immigration from further afield may rise or at least stay steady. The London Intelligence already shows a rebalancing in the number of national insurance numbers issued to EU and non-EU nationals: the former were six per cent lower in the year to March 2019 than in the previous year; the latter were 21 per cent higher.

This matters because immigration from beyond Europe tends to have a different geographic distribution from European migration. Specifically, it is more concentrated in London and – to a lesser extent – other cities. While London has just over twice as many EU migrants in its working age population as non-urban areas of England and Wales do, it has four times the proportion of people born beyond the EU. Similarly, while the largest ‘core cities’ (Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield) have similar levels of EU-born working-age residents to the rest of the country, they have twice the proportion of people born further afield.

	% of 16-64 year old population born in other EU countries	% of 16-64 year old population born in non-EU countries
London	14	32
English and Welsh core cities	7	16
Rest of England and Wales	6	8

Source: Annual Population Survey, 2018

So more immigration from outside the EU, and particularly from emerging economies of the southern and eastern hemispheres, may mean more concentration in London and other big cities, where people from these countries will already find settled communities of their former compatriots.

And in London, this trend may be intensified by another element of the government’s proposals, a pay threshold for jobs held by foreign workers – designed to prevent the import of cheap unskilled labour. The government has not confirmed what this threshold should be but the Migration Advisory Committee recommended maintaining the current level of £30,000 (while abolishing other requirements such as the ‘resident labour market test’, which requires jobs to be advertised within the UK before recruiting overseas).

While many jobs in London, particularly in migration-dependent sectors such as restaurants, pay poorly, salaries are significantly higher overall. Government data on earnings show that 66 per cent of workers in London earn more than £30,000 pa, compared to 30 to 40 per cent of workers in other regions. So setting a minimum pay threshold – whether at £30,000 or at lower levels, as groups such as London First have argued – could further concentrate immigration in London, where more jobs would in theory be accessible for foreign workers.

Giving preference to immigrants with higher qualifications, through a more ‘points-based’ system as advocated by Boris Johnson during the Conservative leadership campaign, could further focus immigration in the capital, as immigrants who settle in London also tend to be more qualified.

These factors, together with perceptions of London as a city that is still open to immigrants, may serve to focus future international immigration on the capital, potentially turbo-charging population growth. This may look superficially serendipitous: London, the part of England most at ease with immigration and most opposed to Brexit, may see a resurgence in immigration, while changing demographics, and tougher salary and qualification requirements may curb immigration beyond the M25.

But it may also deepen economic as well as cultural differences between London, other cities and the rest of the UK. While London continues to make the case for infrastructure to support a growing population, other regions may start seeing population decline, as their economies struggle without the migrant workforce that farmers, restaurateurs and hoteliers rely on.

We may even, in time, see a shift in the tone of national debate, with politicians making the case for immigration rather than avoiding the subject – or even seeking to implement policies to encourage immigrants to look beyond the big cities as in Canada. As with so many aspects of Brexit, seemingly simple moves can have complex, surprising and far-reaching consequences.

My thanks to Professor Tony Travers of the LSE for his insights and help with this article.