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Diary Note /0036
Monday 25 March 2002
for yesterday's thoughts

Stevens v Paddick

The irony of this week was that the courageous and innovative Brian Paddick of Lambeth, formerly its Divisional Police Commander, was "carpeted" by the mischievous troublemaker Met Chief Sir John Stevens, who last week, as Police trade-union protest intensified, publicly attacked everyone involved in the administration of criminal justice - except the Police. It must have been a bizarre encounter. And it must be likely that, if the charge of failing to report relationships with a bailed criminal defendant is proved, further promotion for Paddick will be closed.

That would be an undesirable outcome. We need thinking policemen like Brian Paddick, particularly in the contentious drugs sector. New thinking is needed generally, on the way our Police police residential and retail areas. Elementary personal security for all is essential to equality, indeed evidence suggests that the poor and disadvantaged suffer disproportionately from the effects of crime and civil disorder - see my New Socialist Settlement But I am impatient with the seeming nostalgia for earlier, "simpler" days, when the village bobby only had to raise an intimidatory eyebrow for disorder to be contained. Their re-creation would be no answer now. In my home community of Mumbles, where I am a Community (Parish) Councillor, we face the common problems of police-station closures, the absence of any continuing street presence, a deep sense of estrangement from the Police.

This malaise will not, however, be addressed in isolation. The Police bear only a small part of the blame. There is far more mobility in society than there ever was, far more visitors, far more unknown faces everyday, than there ever was with the old "village" communities. Surveillance cameras are here to stay, and we must learn to manage the civil rights risks involved. New techniques of two-way electronic exchange has been tried, in France, enabling anxious older residents to use videophone to chat with the local police-station. We must learn new community building skills, creating new institutional structures which can help to reduce anxiety- Neighbourhood Watch is of one example.

I am in no doubt that many residents feel a growing sense of insecurity and threat, whatever the crime statistics say. In our village, local gossip abounds of muggings, bag-snatching, aggressive begging, sneak-thieves, and disruptive drunken behaviour. But the solution is not simply to found with neighbourhood policing. We must do far more to strengthen local communities generally, as identifiable institutions, particularly within our major cities. A first step would be to ensure that every community had its own elected Community Council, if only to act as grit in the oyster, a focus for amorphous suburbs and urban neighbourhoods. Greater London is now the only region within the UK where communities do not have the right to elect their own community councils. That is a gap which Labour, as a democratic Party, should be quick to fill.

What do you think? Drop me a line.

Short’s Shortcomings

This is not an attack on Clare Short. She is a political asset to our Government, delivering hope to the Labour Party’s rank-and-file that the pragmatism of the Blair Faction will not always have the last word, and that principled politics will one day return to our shores. But she must conserve her credibility, and make sparing use of her "licence to differ"... And that credibility is rapidly ebbing away, by virtue of her stance on the Tanzanian Air Traffic Control (ATC) contract.

Let me re-cap, just in case the full facts of the case may not immediately come to mind. The Tanzanian Government wants to buy, from British Aerospace, a state-of-the-art ATC system, serving principally civilian purposes, but also good enough for military deployment. The cost seems modest, for such a system – it is Ł28 million. The Tanzanian Government has confirmed its wish to proceed with the contract, which it considers meets its requirements.

The problem is that Clare Short disagrees. Tanzania has benefited from recent international debt-forgiveness measures, and is a very poor country. She thinks the Tanzanians have been oversold by British Aerospace. She also considers it is wrong for the Tanzanians to accept debt relief and then to spend their money on this particular ATC system. She agrees that the country needs a decent air traffic control system, but contends that it could be bought for much less. Gordon Brown apparently agrees, but Tony Blair wants the contract to go ahead, with UK aid funding.

Clare Short is wrong. We should not seek to constrain independent Governments in their judgment, even if they are making a mistake. Her position is simply that theTanzanians are being gulled - but even if true that is not an honourable reason for intervening. She reminds me of the Lady Bountiful who refuses to give cash to a beggar, insisting that she will instead buy him a meal of her choosing. Bounty bestowed without freedom is a new form of serfdom: the beggar must be free to spend the gift as he wishes. If the democratically-elected Government of Tanzania has considered the matter and decided to go ahead, who is Clare Short to double-guess them? Democratic freedom means the freedom to make mistakes.

Clare is precious, to many in the Labour Party. She should get out of the Tanzanian kitchen and concentrate on Iraq, where the front-door bell is ringing...

When is a company British? Or Australian?

Just fifteen short years ago British Airways was privatised, and has successfully built on its superb public service foundations. Margaret Thatcher decreed that only 49.9% of British Airways could be owned by foreigners - and already, the figure has reached over 48%. How silly can you get? What does it matter? Will the 51.1% "British" shareholders be a nicer class of capitalist? The share-owning firms will in any event themselves have diverse patterns of share-ownership, and interlocking relationships. When will our governors learn that you cannot pigeon-hole an artificial person, as if it were Charlie Dimmock? Remember it was that kind of mistake that sparked the Tony & Lakshmi Show, in the Romanian Steel series.

In Australia, the process is becoming even more hilarious, in the context of their regulation of cross-media relationships. This week, in Canberra, the Government introduced a reform bill into Parliament. Presently, a "foreign" company cannot control more than 15% of an "Australian" TV company - and not more than 25% of an "Australian" radio company. The opportunities for playing games must be enormous, in a system like that. No wonder that both Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell built up their labyrinthine empires in this murky sector.

Remember: a "company" is simply an abstraction. It may have a name and a number and an address, but it has no nationality - no brain, no motive, no will, no principles, no moral sense. All that comes only from the management. Think about it.

Green Belts
A problem of Class

Rowntree has done it again! I am delighted that Richard (now Lord) Best and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have entered the murky argument about residential land supply, which has engaged me for most of my adult life. Rowntree makes it clear that society must review its so-called "Green Belts", and that London in particular will have to build over 80,000 new houses in the Green Belt every year for the next twenty years if a housing disaster of gigantic proportions is to be avoided. Bravo! The truth at last!

This is a cool objective analysis, as befits an educational charity.

(NB JRF is the charity, which has its own excellent website Check it out - whereas the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust is the remarkable, and quite separate trust, which reserves its funds for political investigations and the stimulus of political debate, sacrificing the tax advantages of charitable status for the greater degree of political freedom) - you can find them at Reform Trust

Successive Governments have been in denial about the inadequacy of housebulding land, particularly in London and the South East. These statistics were first published in 1995, by the Tories - but nothing was done with them before 1997, and they were left as another time-bomb (like Railtrack)for Labour to defuse. One of my more recent publications on the subject was in 1996, in the magazine Prospect Land and Freedom . Please read it: it's short, and it sets out my arguments in full.

As a housebuilder by adopted trade, I have tried on many occasions to explain the facts of commercial life to my Party. The right to a satisfactory home is a primary dimension of equality, the first foundation value of socialism - and Labour should never give up the fight for that equality - see my New Socialist Settlement

That means confronting, not appeasing, the middle-class majorities of London's Green Belt. The low-salaried public employees of London deserve better from Labour than a pale imitation of John Gummer. And we should beware Richard Rogers' siren call to cram the working-classes together in London, at ever-higher architect-designed densities - if the middle-classes, with their young families, prefer the suburbs, why should we deny that choice to others? Isn't that what equality means?

The Green Belt, created by great Labour London County Council in 1937 as a device for opening up countryside parks for Londoners, has been hi-jacked, suborned, twisted into a bastion of modern class restrictiveness, denying to ordinary people their chance of a place in the residential sun.

Sadly, my Party friends have taken no notice. They do not see it as the gut political issue that it is. Five years after they seized power, Labour Ministers are still repeating the same tired old Tory shibboleths about land scarcity, and the primacy of the countryside. I do not deny that there would be problems with increasing land-supply, and many conflicting priorities to be overcome. But Labour still fears the political implications of action, the middle-class backlash. We owe it to the poor to recover our political courage. And please do read Land and Freedom

New Housing Format Needed

Part of the UK problem lies in the failure to develop an acceptable format for new rented housing. In this, we stand out in dramatic contrast to all other Continental countries. Owner-occupation has been the runaway success of our society, with Governments over generations favouring the building society movement. And at the very top of the market, particularly in London, there is a strong new-build rented market.

But that's all. Council housing is now finished, politically and socially. And the present wave of stock transfers to the housing association sector will change little, in that it will not generate any new stimulus to the new-build rented housing sector, in the middle-income bands. Social landlords, and housing authorities, will remain at the core of the managed public sector, the one formal and the other informal. That sector will remain (at least in class-ridden England) an institution of low social status. The question is how can we get a market sector going, where new self-generating business initiatives occur?

The Condominium could be the answer. My suggestion is that, under the Industrial & Provident Society legislation, developers and other investors could form new condominiums which would be occupied on short-term unprotected tenancies, at rents adjusted to a fixed proportion of tenants' income. The IPS would have shares and would be subject to landlord's ownership rights in the ordinary way; some might operate as subsidiaries of the major housebuilders.

Every tenant household would be asked to pay, in return for the right-to-occupy, a fixed percentage (say, 20%) of the household's post-tax income - and would be contractually required to disclose IR figures or certified accounts. Rent would be adjusted for Year Two only on the basis of certified income in Year One, and there would be no retrospective adjustment. There would be a low contractual minimum, to mesh with the statutory system, in the event of unemployment.

An income-stream of this kind, which would not be open to the coercive intervention of any rental tribunal, would be more buoyant that conventional rents, and would also offer the tenant a buffer against unemployment and other sudden changes of circumstance. My belief is that, properly managed, a Condominium formula could develop a cooperative style of tenant participation, offering a genuine alternative to other tenures.

Would that be enough to "make a market" in new-build rented accommodation? Would it work outside London? Would it work for both flats and houses? Would it be possible to generate a sufficient sense of common interest to enable the system to work? Is the idea a starter?

Let me know what you think.

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