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January 08, 2005
The road to a good government job is paved with good intentions, so what the hell?
Mr Ron Bramwell has asked me this question in connection with my article "The sensational and the trivialising press":
"What was driving the public housing planners of the 1960s? Was it money from builders, or voters?"
It is a long, long story.
Part of what drove the planners of that time was sincere do-goodism. They knew best. An old friend of mine wrote a book at the time about the Newcastle planners. The title of Jon Gower Davies's book exactly caught the point: The Evangelistic Bureaucrat. A German book was entitled The Drawing-Board Preachers. My books at that time were about the Sunderland planners.
The planners were not out on a limb. Most people of woolly good will lived outside the slum clearance areas. Among the leading lights of the New Left in London (many of them ex-public school boys), very rapidly joined by the middle-class Marxist and Trotskyist students of the new universities, there was the ridiculous idea that working class life in northern England in the 1960s was accurately described by Engels in his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844. (In the early 1890s Engels himself had said that those conditions no longer existed.) In those days, town planning used to head the list of worth-while professionals among students (there were beginning to be a lot of them in the 1960s), so the planners were bouyed up by that.
In People and Planning I go through the history of Sunderland's housing and neighbourhoods from the growth of the town as a great shipbuilding and coal-mining centre in the middle nineteenth century to the 1970s.
Until the 1960s people who desperately wanted to be rehoused were being cleared from their crowded, multi-family houses, with few amenities in squalid neighbourhoods. They couldn't get into council houses fast enough. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s families on the new estates would proudly display their new homes, modern schools and new other community buildings and shops to their admiring working-class relatives from the older parts of the town.
It was only in the 1960s that the planners began to bite into respectable working-class neighbourhoods--great communities--and use against people perfectly capable of looking after their own homes, and increasingly owner-occupiers of them, the compulsory purchase laws that had been intended for use against slum landlords.
The estates were further and further away from the big shops and leisure focuses of the town centre. Suddenly, prefabricated tower blocks made their appearance. The local authority allocated dwellings on the basis of "need". "We can't have her rattling about the place like a pea in a pod." People who had a couple of spare rooms where their grandchildren could come and stay found that they had no chance of spare space if their house was demolished.
Then "need" began to mean preference for unmarried girls who were pregnant or had a small child or children. Within three of four years the uncontrolled children were the bane of the housing estates. People who expected neighbours to respect one another's privacy and property moved out, or would not move in. A vicious circle was created. You stood a better chance of a council house if you didn't get married. (That's not a red-top myth. I looked at all this at the time, as a full-time researcher, in the housing offices of the old Sunderland Corporation.)
The inculcated idea that a man's duty primary adult role was to live under the same roof with the mother of his children, and provide by his own work for each child for at least the first sixteen years of its life, was increasingly redundant. Young men were free to drink and fornicate as they liked. It took many years before drugs and the crime that was needed to support drugs took a firm hold. Nobody in those days dreamed that it would spiral as deeply as it did. Perfectly sincere, gruff old Labour politicians, many of them the salt of the earth, were on automatic pilot that more and more council housing was a good thing, and that the very few "bits of lasses" who "got themselves into trouble" should be treated kindly. The very few.
Labour men and women active in an industrial provincial town like Sunderland, with hardly any contact with or sympathy for the advanced ideas of the emerging libertarian Left of the student movements, didn't think there could ever be more than very few. Their world was a world of the universality and permanence in civilised societies (yes, they were as yet untouched by shame about English social institutions) of what everybody knew was the best way to handle sex, companionship and mutual aid, and the upbringing of children: namely, conception within marriage and life-long monogamy.
Men worked hard and long in the forges, foundries, shipyards, glassworks, shipyards and the pit. Women worked hard and long with the children; they worked hard and long in their homes' tiny sculleries, and over the poss-tubs, mangles and coal-fired boilers in the little brick outhouses in their back yards. But there was not much trace of the idea that women had the worse half of the family's grinding existence, and that the institution of marriage had failed.
That they would be the instruments of the family's destruction rarely occurred to any of these old Labour councillors. The prediction would have horrified them.
But--and this is why you commented as you did, I suppose--the planners and councillors who pursued policies of slum-clearing and rehousing were backed up by the people who made money in all the private professions and businesses surrounding demolition and construction. The planners were backed up by the myriad traditional local government professionals whose jobs came to depend on the endless momentum of demolition and rehousing schemes: the quantity surveyors, the architects, the public health officials, the lawyers in the Town Clerk's department, and all their support staffs.
Eventually they were backed up by the extraordinary variety of new professionals and pseudo-professionals in national and local government, and the academics and pseudo-academics who taught them, who emerged to service the burgeoning failures of the new prize winning estates and Corbusieran "machines for living in".
Again, they were, by and large, decent ordinary people who'd done pretty well in the job market. Their intentions were, by and large, benign.
But the damage they were doing didn't affect them adversely, and they knew (at least intuitively) that if the damage stopped being inflicted they'd be on the dole. In their cocoon of self-righteousness and often their superciliousness, they were quite happy to continue "doing good".
In the late 1960s the planners and the public health people produced "scientific surveys" of the housing districts that showed that the houses were technically unfit for human habitation, and physically incapable of lasting another five or ten years.
The surveys were self-contradictory bodged-up balderdash. (You'll have to read People and Planning and Public Participation and Planners' Blight to see the evidence for that, and to see whether or not you agree that the evidence produced there justifies these harsh remarks.) But in the planners' and health officials' eyes it did not matter. They were in the right in their policies of clearing these slums. The system required them to justify their policy by facts. But what did a few facts about the attitudes and homes of working-class people here or there have to do with their grand designs? "Everybody knew" that slum-clearance was a good thing. That's what they'd been taught; that's what their colleagues took for granted; and that's what their advancement in their profession depended on.
There was plenty of petty corruption. Housing and planning councillors were often in the pockets of the better educated and better paid senior officials. But the corruption was, say, bottles of whisky at Christmas from contractors to officers, and drinks bought at conferences by the officers for the councillors, for which the sozzled councillors were sufficiently grateful. The officers weren't doing anything they didn't want them to do.
In the later 1960s the planners nationwide were backed to the hilt by a Newcastle politician, T. Dan Smith, a principled Trotskyist in his younger days. I have no doubt that he was sincere enough in thinking he was doing good. But he was so arrogant in his self-conception, that he was enlightened and right and ordinary people were backward and wrong, that to oil the wheels of progress he spread corruption far and wide through local government.
Wisely, he kept his home base in Newcastle relatively free from corruption.
Corruption was not more than a petty problem in Sunderland (as far as I know, but I've led a sheltered life, as I have admitted in other articles) under an incorruptible and highly competent politician who took over as Council leader in the later 1960s. Charles Slater.
In County Durham corruption in connection with town-planning projects was rife. It was originally exposed by Private Eye in an article entitled 'Handy Andy'.
Smith operated by appointing "consultants" to his various "public relations" firms. Depending on the size of the local authority and the influence of the councillor, he'd appoint him or her (nearly always him in those days) as a consultant at £500 or more, running into the thousands of pounds a year or as a single fee.
Smith was always in the clear. The Chairman of the Housing or Planning or Management Committee would do what Smith was paying him for. Legally he had to declare an interest as being on Smith's payroll. If the errant councillor was exposed, Smith could say, and did say, "How shocking that he did not declare his interest! I naturally assumed he would do so. His misconduct has nothing do with me".
When a prominent Labour leader of a London borough, influential throughout the whole of the south-east of the country, was prosecuted for taking a bribe in this form from Smith, he was found guilty. When Smith was prosecuted for bribing him at a subsequent trial (he managed to have them separated) he was found innocent of bribing him. That's how well it worked.
He was the darling of the Department of the Environment. He once stayed at a London hotel, waiting for the call he expected to receive from Harold Wilson to join his new Cabinet. This was at a time when rumours were swirling around him. But the rule of public life that had prevailed since the middle of the nineteenth century, that the nature of corruption meant that the appearance of impropriety was sufficient to disqualify a person from public office, was being replaced by the assumption that a public official was innocent until his was proven guilty. If anything marked the beginning of the degeneration of British culture, that did.
Practice did not, of course, always follow the rule. The Marconi affair, cash for peerages, police malpractice and other scandals occur as quickly to my mind as to the mind of any reader. But by the middle of the twentieth century, English politics, English public adminstration, and English public life generally were probably as clean as in any large society that has ever existed.
Anyone interested in this side of the matter can look at the Smith affair, and contrast it with the the Sidney Stanley affair, as dealt with in the report of the Lynskey Tribunal, and as dealt with by both Churchill and Attlee when the Lynskey Tribunal's report came before the House of Commons.
The whole thing blew up in everybody's face when a Pontefract architect called John Poulson went bankrupt. When his documents were subpoenaed, hundreds of notes on scrappy bits of paper were unearthed, implicating dozens of politicians, from Westminster to the obscurest pit village on the Durham coalfield. Poulson had kept them for quasi-blackmail purposes. If he went down, they'd all go down with him, so they'd better protect him.
For months, as the scandals unravelled, Smith was supported by important sections of the national broadsheet press. (Guess which.)
He was eventually jailed.
Ronan Point collapsed in east London. People hated the maisonnettes and blocks of flats. Whereas in the 1960s working-class communities had united in opposing the plans to demolish their houses, in the 1980s they were turning out to cheer the dynamiting of the flats into which they had been rehoused.
So it was all bad do's. But it wasn't driven by "builders and money". It was driven by good intentions.
The point is, that if the good intentions had meant that Smith lost money (he ended up on "Millionaires' Row" in Newcastle, and the Rolls Royce of this poor lad from Wallsend had one of the first customised plates--was it T Dan 1?); or had meant that the building industry fueled with enormous taxpayers subsidies lost money; or that local government officers were being sacked instead of hired as fast as the machinery of government could manage; or that university, polytechnic and training-college posts in social work were being curtailed instead of vastly expanded, then the effects of the good intentions would have been subjected to scrutiny by more than a handful of extremely unpopular academics (as one critic wrote) "from their fastnesses on the banks of the Wear". (Note from Jon Gower Davies: "Heh! What about the fastnesses on the banks of the Tyne? I was just as unpopular as you.")
Go to the top of the class the person who sees any resemblance between this phenomenon and the dismemberment of the institution of life-long monogamy. If divorce meant a halving of the houses being needed instead of a doubling of them when the former united household splits into two; and if only half the washing machines, TV sets, refrigerators, beds, resulted from families breaking up instead of doubling the number, do you think that the crime, the disorder, and the damage to children would have been accepted complacently as a case of "change but not deterioration" (the slogan of the 1990s)?
Big business didn't drive the cultural revolution. But the cultural revolution turned out to be very profitable for big business.
And as the breakdown of the family has been good for business, not to speak of armies of government and voluntary social workers of all varieties, then any adverse effects of the breakdown of the family have to be soft-pedalled.
It must be literally among the daftest things that have ever been said, that crime is lower today than it has been since records began. Yet that's what the Home Office officially said in dismissing Cultures and Crimes.
And the Guardian quoted an "expert" (somebody called Professor Mike Hough) who was "bemused" by the book, because "most academics" (still only most academics!) believe that crime rose "in the early 1990s" but that "crime had fallen since then".
The headline in the Guardian was, "Experts deride report on crime and moral decline". Experts? It need not be said that I'm no Einstein (the understatement of the year), but I was reminded of what Einstein said when he heard that Hitler had provided one hundred physicists (wow, that's a lot of experts, Einstein's in trouble now) who all agreed that Einstein was wrong. Einstein remarked, "If I were wrong, one of them would have been enough".
So I agree with the sense of Mr Bramwell's comment. But what interests lie behind any particular long-lasting folly of the intellectuals is sometimes quite a complicated matter, and what those interests are is a puzzle that has to be unravelled in each particular case.
Posted by at January 8, 2005 06:44 PM
Comments
Thank you for your reply to my question concerning the motivation of public housing planners. You concluded with the challenge to unravel the intellectual arguments surrounding the issues of the day. A good place to start would be the changes that have been made to the police across England and Wales over the last two decades. I would suggest that it has moved from a police force to a engine for social change. It has become wrapped up in the politics of diversity etc.We must not forget that diversity, respect etc are tools to achieve a political goal. In the process the old conservative, male dominated, police had to be broken. We have seen this process in action with sneering comments about canteen culture, and the suggestion that if only more women and ethnic minorities were involved the police would be super effective and efficient. This change of role has contributed to the rise in recorded crime.
Posted by: Ron Bramwell at January 9, 2005 01:12 PM
The creation of artificial cities like Birmingham
which is periodically redeveloped to conform to an
abstract blueprint and, in practice, has no grace, no charm, is cold, ugly and brutal; it has no history to help the people get any sense of being a part of something, and no identity –it is a muddle of styles taken from other places. For example, next year they are planning to have Gondolas on the canals!
We should build on what is, not sweep all away to
start again leaving a deculturalised, universal city!
To re-create a sense of identity we must rebuild
several historical buildings, to locate people in
place and time. They are destroying something and
severing the communities from their roots. It is a
rationalistic design without character or difference: the plan must be reified exactly, regardless of taste, culture or history. A new development must fit the plan exactly with no bits unsmoothed. This makes all else secondary, people are only seen in abstract as fitting in as consumers – a dehumanisation while culture and history are utilised as sterile adornments.
A pub called the Railway in Birmingham has
no place in the concretisation of the abstract
blueprint, it must be knocked down, despite its local importance as the venue where Led Zeppelin and Ozzy Osbourne began their Careers.
As I walked through Liverpool recently a boast in the window of the “regeneration office” caught my eye: Liverpool is changing! No it is not, it is being changed. There are plans to completely redevelop the entire city altering its character and scale.
Liverpool has a natural culture and wit which is in the people. It is something that the Council should cherish not destroy to fit an abstract plan. It is to make Liverpool less English and more European. This is the most famous English city in the world after London and has more modern history than anywhere: it is also
the city that demolished the cavern, where the Beatles started!
That does not stop the oligarchs. They do not carewhat they destroy as long as they benefit. There has been hardly any public consultation. A little town in the West Midlands called Cradley Heath is about to have one side of the town centre demolished for a road to relieve congestion! What gives councillor’s, who
are only elected by a minority, the right to destroy the history, character and identity of this town?
This is the same wielding of tyrannical and
irresponsible power without legitimacy that has
destroyed almost every town and city in the UK over the last 50 years. American tourists are appalled at the way Councillors are destroying our culture after only being elected by a minority. That is how it works in architecture. In society it leads to tyranny and Totalitarian control. Rationalistic planning was newborn in Burke’s time and was the explosion of abstract and a priori ideologies that broke out with the French Revolution. It began the transformation of
societies from natural to artificial.
Posted by: David Hamilton at January 10, 2005 11:24 AM
Very interesting even if I have to admit that I miss a lot of your allusions within an English context.
Posted by: David Sucher at January 11, 2005 03:12 PM
May I recycle an idea that someone floated for the millenium? We should have an annual vote on which god-awful building should be demolished. A TV prog, or series, could advocate some candidates. The "winner" would then be bought - using, I suggest, the "good causes" cash from the lottery - and razed. I used to live in Edinburgh, and even that very beautiful city had one ultra-strong candidate, a horror called the St James Centre. We can but dream.
Posted by: dearieme at January 11, 2005 06:07 PM
Furthermore, I understand that the genesis of the destruction of our towns and cities was the Labour party's " 1947 Town and Country Planning Act", which was part of the move to a "new jerusalem" - everywhere planning for Utopias with Socialists. The style of high rise flats that people taken from their communities were give derived from the soviet union, apparently. It seems that Rationalist plans are more suitable to the academic mind than to the rest of us: They are not engaged with the outside world, but some intermediary that gives security, a text, a theory - some protective film, as it were.
There is a departure between myself and classical liberals because to the liberal mind those in power and influence are never responsible for their actions, only the rest of us are.
If an ordinary person does something wrong or makes a mistake we are told that they have personal resposibility. If, however, one in authority does then liberals make up excuses for them, "oh, they did not realise the consequences", "they were well-meaning but misguided".
As an example, I will mention just one. Halesowen used to have town centre as beautiful and traditional as that of Ludlow. From after the Second World War plans were developed to demolish the town centre and build a modern shopping centre. This was achieved in the early 1960's and all those beautiful buildings were destroyed. But who was on the council?
There were 3 local builders and one, Mayor of Halesowen in 1957, was a demolition contractor!
Why should we pretend these were merely misguided and make up excuses for them?
To restore Halesowen from a horrible, artificial, rationalist construct, that historic town centre must be rebuilt.
Posted by: David Hamilton at January 12, 2005 11:32 AM
Save Sloane Square
As Edmund Burke wrote,"I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption,to consider his country but Carte
Blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases."
The future of Sloane Square in a consultation
leaflet shows the intentions of the Royal Borough
of Kensington and Chelsea.The Council want,to make the Square safer and pleasanter for pedestrians. Option one would provide more public open space by removing underused road space and fewer vehicle conflict points for pedestrians. They hope the increase in open space will increase opportunity to implement high quality landscaping and pedestrian amenities such as
more seating, cafe areas and, public art in a
pleasanter environment. The Council has decided to take this option forward because of the merits of the scheme and the overwhelming support it received in the public consultation. Objections to a radical change were expected, but the Council was surprised at the level of support the radical option received -this gives the Council a strong mandate to take the scheme forward to the next stage.
As far as traffic is concerned a patron of the Save Sloane Square Committee, Sir Philip Goodhart,himself a traffic expert who created the Red Routes, believes it will actually cause”traffic chaos”. He read from a letter to him from Arrive buses at the recent public Save Sloane Square meeting, which that the scheme
will increase traffic congestion around all of
London. As Edmund Burke noted," If an idea is good in theory but not in practice, it is a bad idea."
The "radical change is not so radical but part of a craze. The idea is to turn the square into an
Italian-style Piazza. Throughout the country large areas of our towns and cities are being Europeanised and one cannot escape the conclusion that this is to make us fit better into the Europe Union by making us feel less English.
The web site of the umberella body of Civic
Societies, the Civic Trust, says, “the trend towards mixed uses in town and city centres and towards more “continental style”, living with life after hours,instead of bleak and desolate streets.” The streets are not bleak and desolate at all. They are English.
That is what the trend setters really object to. Whether they are aware of it or not, the people who are changing our way of life for us, are involved in social engineering through rebuilding our towns and cities to look European.
As Edmund Burke noted: "The cunning and contriving politician can easily destroy what it passes his wit to rebuild”
Posted by: David Hamilton at December 14, 2005 10:52 AM
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