Could Covid save the Green Belt?

At engineering school we learned one of the costs of the black hole that is London, whose gravitational pull was once so great that everything in the island was drawn inexorably into its maw. In this case it was sand and aggregate - an effect known as the Aggregate Drag.

Essentially all sand and gravel quarried in the south-east is delivered in the direction of London; gravel from Chelmsford will go to London, gravel from Ipswich will go to Chelmsford and gravel from Diss will go to Ipswich. Likewise roadstone from the Midlands and the north is always (in aggregate, ahem, terms) delivered southwards. So pernicious are the economic and transport infrastructure effects of this drag that interventions have frequently been made with the intention of by-passing the movements. London plans have preserved sand and gravel wharves right in the heart of the city, from Deptford to Richmond, to take millions of tons of traffic from the roads radiating to Kent and Anglia. The aim is to take gravel from Diss and such parts direct to London and leave Ipswich and Chelmsford supplying themselves. Railheads have been established in Scots 'superquarries' that hollow-out entire mountains to send millions of tonnes of Scots roadstone directly into coating plants in the heart of London rather than into Northumberland. And so on.

London's insatiable demand for building and expansion led the well-intentioned but over-controlling planners of post-war London, with a masterplan known universally as the Abercrombie Plan, to create a green belt. In the same way as they sought to control Aggregate Drag they sought to control People Drag; establishing a series of new towns on the other side of the green belt. This is an original plan -

In recent years both councils and developers have been poised with back-hoe excavators at the ready (oh come on - you don't expect us to write 'bulldozers' on this blog ..) at the edge of the existing green belt - always somewhat smaller than the 1944 plan - doing the housing-queue equivalent of shroud-waving. At times it has been doubtful if the green belt can survive. However, Covid could change all that.

In a matter of months we have undergone a decade's worth (in more normal times) of change. The culture wars have left the workplace a minefield in which first smoking then alcohol and finally human contact has been banned as too hazardous. Lawyers and HR departments were in the ascendant, 'micro aggressions' lurked round every corner, and one couldn't even move someone's yoghurt pot in the office fridge without risking a misconduct hearing. You can get away with this nonsense in the BBC and the public sector, where maintaining the right diversity quota is always more important than actual output, productivity and efficiency, but the new mores have hit the private sector hard.

Covid has actually come as a welcome shock-adjustment for many firms. Overnight whole legions of HR executives monitoring breaches of fridge-etiquette are redundant, as are lawyers taking on yoghurt-pot cases for no win no fee. Workers can crack a beer in their home offices without breaching company policy, and hug their spouses or significant others without risk of disciplinary action. Of course we have still to work out some important stuff like how employer's liability in law will work if a home-worker trips on a printer cable, whether home offices are lawful in planning terms, who will pay for the heat, light, power and water consumed to the firm's benefit by household-based workers and so on. But such solutions will come.

More significantly, housing demand in and around London will start to fall. If you can work remotely from Harlow, why not Bishop Auckland? Or Austria? And if housing demand falls, then so will pressure to develop the green belt. Covid could turn out to be a very green disease. 

The death of London - but not of the City

Allister Heath delivers the synapse-tingler this morning in the 'graph. The death of London. Of course one needs to remember what pre-war London was like to appreciate the possibilities - and understand the damage wrought by Patrick Abercrombie and the London County Council. 

London was not just an agglomeration of villages but of little towns. Domestic service remained widespread and food was distributed through local shops and markets via the huge food wholesale markets at Billingsgate, Smithfield and Covent Garden. London's docks brought sugar and produce from around the globe. Fresh milk was either from the few dairies still with herds of cows kept stalled in the heart of the city but more often by train from dairies such as Lord Rayleigh's in Chelmsford, built adjacent to rail lines to allow rapid transport of milk.

Light industry was spread evenly throughout the city and small workshops, factories, warehouses and ateliers were scattered everywhere - even up to the walls of the Tower, where a dock connected the Empire to the canal network. After the Blitz, the Abercrombie plan changed it all. Industry was banished to the outskirts, new road networks and warehousing hubs replaced rail, people were to be housed in suburbia and the dense inner terraces were to be flattened (those that the Germans hadn't already flattened, that is) to make way for new concrete office blocks. It was to become a Soviet planned City. But the LCC's planned changes were continued into the 21st century by further phases of more organic change driven by economics and unconnected local planning preferences that had a cumulative effect -

A few years ago, Bridget Rosewell, an economist, revealed how the capital lost 1 million, mostly manufacturing, jobs on radial routes in the suburbs over three decades and created 1 million, mostly high-value-added services jobs in central London. Suburban factories and offices became homes. Economic activity became hyper-concentrated in the centre. This model was seen globally as a triumph of renewal. There were risks: it was contingent on staving off urban decay, avoiding terrorism, making sure taxes were not hiked, ongoing vast subsidies to public transport, continued globalisation, containing property prices – and yes, avoiding pandemics.

As to the downsides: the rest of the UK failed to pull off its own transition, becoming addicted to transfers from London; and the capital’s culture shifted corrosively, becoming the epicentre of Remainia, Corbynite attitudes and intolerant illiberalism.

We have a London that is dangerously unbalanced, seeded with the cankers of disorder in the ugly post-war Abercrombie public housing estates, already drowning the city in a welter of teenage blood. Only the city's wealth and massive levels of public service provision have kept a lid on things. But all that is about to change -

The private sector, for its part, is facing gargantuan structural losses: the economics of offices and retail is predicated on mass commuting and tourism. The former won’t fully come back; the latter will take a year or two. The arts, luxury, fashion, transport, hospitality, restaurant and many service industries face decimation. It’s a full-on biotic crisis: London’s economic ecosystem is suffering an immense decline in diversity. Lower-paid jobs, in particular, are being culled; the population could fall, with tens of thousands returning to Europe.

As Sadiq Khan will shortly learn, there is no more money. This first lockdown has busted the bank.

But what of the City, the square mile, now with an offshoot in Docklands? Well, the City has always been independent of the LCC, the GLC and now the GLA and thus stands a good chance of making decisions to its own benefit. The concatenation of related expertise will keep London's place in the financial world. There may be a retreat from Canary Wharf - those vast towers may empty, along with the thousands of service jobs emptying the bins and flipping burgers for the thousands of clerks as the clerks get their P45s in September. However, the square mile, with its own police force and local authority, will tough it out. Heath is bullish - allow the change, take the hit

Boris Johnson must not seek to prop up bankrupt central London investors. Instead, he must allow the market to work, and encourage Tory heartlands – suburbia, exurbia and smaller cities – to hoover up London refugees, workers who no longer need to commute daily.

London saw house price rises of over 750% between 1995 and 2015. Anyone who hasn't already cashed-up will need to stick it out now - just batten down and wait a decade or two.

The City reboots itself

The threat from Brussels was as crude as one from any third-rate mafia hoodlum - 'Give us all your fish or we'll destroy the City'. The more old-maidish amongst the commercial gents, probably the sort who would have advocated giving Mr Hitler exactly what he wanted, were quick to point out in their broadcasts and newspaper columns that fishing was a tiny fraction of the UK's GDP, a piddling insignificant part of the economy, and should certainly be surrendered to save the City. Indeed, if Catastrophe May had still been in power, she would have tried to do so. Fortunately for us this government is made of sterner stuff.

The City itself seems to have shrugged-off the threats, as Matthew Lynn wrote yesterday in the Telegraph. Indeed, his entire piece is so upbeat it's hard to pick a single snippet to quote; we're turning our backs on EU regulation and our faces out to the world, and the City is starting to feel the stirrings of that old buccaneering spirit again, after forty years under the sclerotic over-regulation of the unelected officials in Brussels. It's not a puff-piece though - there's a potential hard reality -

Step by step, the City, under the control of the Bank of England and the Treasury, is shaping its own regulatory system. True, there are risks in that. The City may lose access to European markets. That matters. British financial exports to the rest of Europe amount to £26.1bn, or 21pc of total UK services sold across the Continent, and that is far more than we import. And yet, despite that, it is still the right decision.

My own view is that right now, and for the immediate future, the EU simply won't be able to deliver on its Covid rescue package without the City. They will make whatever post-transition adjustments they need to secure continued access to the bits of the UK financial services nexus they need. But their ambitions are still to displace London with a hub of their own - Frankfurt, Paris or Amsterdam.

Of the three, Amsterdam is the only serious contender and although, handicapped by the EU as it is, it will never overtake the City, it will provide healthy competition and stimulate continuous innovation and improvement in London. They're like us; northern, with a liking for legal probity. Germany is too corrupt, the courts too partisan and biased, shareholder protection the worst in Europe, creditor safeguards too low and business is endemically bent. Frankfurt is a dreary little provincial town, Paris is too frivolous and France too bankrupt.

Standing up to bullies has more benefits than just exposing their weakness. It allows us to discover we still have a spine - and for the City, the scent of freedom is intoxicating.

Wands and Lycra louts

As a teenager I was a fearsome cyclist. I had, I recall, three bikes; a heavy chugger, a utility bike and a whiplike racer, for naked speed is fun, all built or re-built by me. The chugger was a heavy old steel machine with Sturmey-Archer gears and wired-in lights powered both by batteries and a dynamo and despite its age was superbly comfortable for long, low speed rides. It was also very sturdy - I once carried a No.19 radio set including power unit and variometer, which must have weighed 30kg, for about 25 miles. All in all, I cycled many thousands, even tens of thousands, of miles. The object wasn't health or exercise but either exploring or visiting mates, who were scattergunned across half the county. I was already smoking, and never quite managed to overcome the uneven burn on a fag when smoking whilst riding, though at 14 I bought a pipe in an experimental effort to do so. So I should be well disposed towards cycling, which I am. But not so well disposed towards the arrogance and violence displayed by many cyclists in London.

Londoners may have failed to notice the little plastic bendy rods springing up in long snakes along their roads; it's what the councils have been doing during lockdown. These wands designate new road space for cyclists. So rapidly have these been deployed, so assured the position of the new routes, one can only imagine that instead of stockpiling PPE the London authorities were stockpiling plastic traffic wands, ready for a crisis such as the Wuhan virus to roll them out overnight. London's incredibly low rate of new infections at just twenty-four a day may mean that drivers venturing out from lockdown will encounter these for the first time, and find that their own roadspace has just been reduced by a third or more.

What I'd like to see are these new spaces colonised by families on bikes, including the wobbly learners, by slow pleasure riders of all ages with wicker baskets or panniers, by cycles with babies and infants strapped into carriers, all cheerily smiling and nodding and behaving gracefully. What I fear we'll get is the lycra louts, with an enormous sense of entitlement, who will with great aggression assume their right to dominate these new spaces, and feel nothing but vindication for their past boorish, uncouth thuggery. They will assume the lane expansion is a reward for their previous loutish and utterly selfish posession of cycle space. And until it becomes legal to kick the buggers off their bikes, I'm not sure what can be done about it.

London - more children slaughtered

Bridget Prentice, who used to be my MP, left the Commons when scandals about her expenses mis-spending began to emerge. I was about to present evidence of her using Parliamentary expenses to subsidise the running of a constituency Labour Party office when she threw in the towel. She ligged a job as an electoral commissioner which came to an end in September 2018 - putting her well within the frame of the 'Corrupt Commission' that acted so partially against Brexit bodies that it was condemned as 'not fit for purpose' by leading politicians. Anyway, back in 2008 I wrote to her over the mismanagement of the Met Police - a mismanagement that has got far worse since.

Here in the borough of Lewisham we pay the salaries of around a thousand Metropolitan police officers - our share of the 32,000 strong force. Yet where are they? Our homes can be burgled, fouled and violated, the possessions of a lifetime stolen and trashed, and we are told it's no longer a concern of the police - we're invited to leave our details on an answerphone. This year nearly thirty teenage boys have been knifed to death in London, yet on the buses and in Lewisham market at the end of the school day are scores of knife-carrying teens terrifying each other and causing public fear.

She replied

I do not believe that life in Lewisham is as grim, unappealing and crime ridden as you portray in your letter. If you feel that 'knife-carrying teens' are terrorising 'the buses' and 'Lewisham market' I suggest then that you raise the matter with the police.

The arrogance and contempt of her response was quite typical - Bridget was never a clever woman, and I doubt she had ridden on a bus or visited Lewisham Market since being elected. It is exactly her brand of purblind ignorance that has seen the numbers of dead children in London multiply in just ten years - the young corpses no longer confined to black-on-black violence but claiming victims who really did stand chances of becoming architects or doctors. Yet there is something surprising about this - take a look at the Met's stats

Boris served as Mayor from 2008 to 2016. His first term was dominated by the Olympics - but in his second term, he concentrated his efforts on knife crime, with some success. Then two things happened. From 2015, Theresa May, as Home Secretary, prevented police from carrying out stop and search - and in 2016 Sadiq Khan took post as Mayor of London.

London is now stuck with exactly the same brand of asinine, purblind social democrat stupidity that we had before 2008; there is little to choose between Bridget Prentice and Theresa May in terms of (in)ability, and Khan is as robust and effective as a feather in the wind. May is even now defending her appalling tenure as Home Secretary, and the vain, preening little Khan has only an eye for photo opportunities rather than dead teens.

For whatever reason, the number of fatal stabbings is increasing - counter intuitively, for if the volume of knife crime is what it was in 2008 with thirty dead, one would expect a learning curve in trauma medicine and response to have lowered lethality.

Perhaps now that normal middle-class grammar school kids are bleeding to death in the gutter, London's Labour mafia and their tame Prime Minister might take notice.

Gangs of London

With yet more violent death and gang warfare on the streets of London over the bank holiday weekend, Sadiq Khan's orders to the Met Commissioner on taking office to cease regular programmed stop and search has probably been responsible for much pain and bloodshed. It matters not that the blood being spilled is largely young and black; allowing or tolerating any form of violent largesse on our streets disgraces our civilisation and, as it will spread beyond the current milieu, dangerous for us all. Here is what is at the heart of it - London's gang territories

Territories are of two types; large geographic areas bounded by roads or geographic features, and small blocks which are council or social housing estates. As young black people travel largely by bus, their journeys are sometimes circuitous to avoid routes passing through rival gang territories. How they know the origin of strangers on their turf always puzzles me - these kids don't wear 'colours' or have gang tats - but they do. Schools, work, relationships are all governed and constrained by these gang territories.

A decade ago I wrote constructively to Bridget Prentice, then my MP, about the number of these kids carrying knives. Bridget is not a clever woman (she's now an electoral commissioner) and the Commons champagne terrace was more familiar to her than the pubs and public transport of her own constituency. She poo-poohed my concerns. And that's the problem with these purblind Labour dags; it's their bloody council estates and social housing that breed the gangs that shed the blood.

This is a short bank holiday post that could easily become an essay. My own quadrant of London has warfare between the newly-arrived Somalis and the established West Indians, with Nigerian gangs dominating London's fraud capital of Thamesmead in the east. Knives have progressed to machetes and axes. 

Causes are complex, but London's housing shortage (itself exacerbated by Labour's immigration non-policy) and structural economic changes are likely to play a part. Neither Sadiq Khan nor Cressida Dick (who commanded during the killing of Jean de Menezes) has had any effect. However weak, stupid and vacillating London's current mayor is, we must now intervene over his narcissistic and pointless head.

We CAN NOT tolerate a situation in which a child's choice of secondary school and what lies between home and school can determine the risk of dying in a pool of blood.