Sheffield's trees: a maze worthy of Kafka

Have you been following the scandal that I like to think of as Sheffield-street-tree-gate? No? You don’t know what you’re missing.

Let me start by giving a little background. This may seem a bit of a roundabout way of setting the context, but bear with me – it will make sense in time.

It’s his novel The Trial that made an adjective, Kafkaesque, out of Kafka’s name. In it, the protagonist K (and, no, the choice of that single letter is unlikely to be mere coincidence) comes under investigation for a crime without ever being told what it is. And yet, even if he doesn’t know what crime he’s accused of, he somehow knows that he’s guilty – a neat way of expressing the universal sense of guilt, over the harm that each of us has somehow done. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his contemporary Oscar Wilde said “each man kills the thing he loves.”

As any of us would, K does try to deny his guilt. But the policemen who arrest him make it clear there’s no point:

”Our authorities, as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draw them out, like it says in the law, and they have to send us police officers out. That’s the law. Where do you think there’d be any mistake there?”

“I don’t know this law,” said K.

“So much the worse for you, then,” said the policeman.

Near the end, K explains his predicament to a priest.

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.”

“That is true,” said the priest, “but that is how the guilty speak.” 

Kafka's Trial: a vortex that sucks us in and grinds us down

The Sheffield street-tree scandal concerns the activity of a private company, Amey’s, that has been contracted by Sheffield City Council to look after its trees. It has started by felling a number of them, and in one particularly notorious incident, showed up at 5:00 in the morning, demanding that residents move their cars or have them crushed by falling trees. Two women aged 71 and 70 found themselves arrested for the first time in their lives when they tried to prevent the felling, prompting protests from Nick Clegg, the local MP, who denounced “scenes you’d expect in Putin’s Russia.” I suppose that, given the President Elect’s admiration for Vladimir, one might be tempted to add “or Trump’s America”.

This is the same Clegg who, as leader of the Liberal Democrats, made a pact with the devil by entering a coalition with the Tories. That kept David Cameron in power for five years with nothing achieved for himself but the reduction of his parliamentary presence from 62 to 8. 

But I digress. 

The Save Sheffield’s Trees group told the Guardian that if Amey’s people “blitz the city’s trees in the first five years of their 25-year contract, they can spend the next 20 years with much lower maintenance costs”. I suppose some will see that view as unduly cynical. Not implausible, though, is it?

Another person arrested over the battle of the city’s trees is a Green Party member, Simon Crump. He apparently was held by the police for eight hours, but he believes it took that long because the police simply couldn’t find the right charge to bring against him in their computer.

“It was quite Kafkaesque,” he informed Helen Pidd of the Guardian. “I was being imprisoned because they couldn’t work out what to charge me with.”

He’s right. And no doubt, whatever it was the police thought he’d done, he was guilty as charged. 

Kafka would have been proud.

Alas, poor Tories, and poor us: the lesson of Hallam

With just a day to go before the British General Election, there are a whole series of seats which are promising us “Portillo moments.” The term refers to former Thatcherite Minister Nigel Portillo. In 1997, he was beaten in an extremely safe seat, Enfield Southgate, to much rejoicing at the downfall of this notorious right-winger.

It’s unfortunate that such upsets are now named after him. Since leaving politics, he’s turned into rather a good broadcaster, taking honest, well-argued and – frankly – frequently liberal stances on a wide range of questions.

Still, there are still such upsets, many of which would be highly welcome if they occurred. 

It would be wonderful to see Nigel Farage of the dangerously far-right United Kingdom Independence Party losing his bid to enter Parliament in Thanet South. Equally, there would be a sense of Karma if the constituency of Sheffield Hallam waved goodbye to Nick Clegg, whose support for the Tories – in breach, many would argue, of fundamental principles of the Liberal Democrat Party he leads – made the government of the last few years possible.

Possible isn’t the same as bearable.

The reality is that Clegg will probably hang on in Hallam. In fact, the latest constituency poll, carried out by ICM for the Guardian suggests that he has a comfortable lead – 42% over 35%. Curiously, the second-placed party, historically in Hallam David Cameron’s Tories, is now Ed Miliband’s Labour Party. The Tories, indeed, are down to 12%.

Nick Clegg: unlikely to lose his seat
But the way he retains it may be highly instructive...

Hold on a minute, though. As well as asking whether voters would choose Clegg or one of the other candidates, ICM asked them to say which party they preferred. Which gave substantially different results.

To that question, Hallam voters split 34% for Labour, 32% for the Liberal Democrats, and 21% for the Conservatives. A 2% lead for Labour. That’s pretty much in line with the previous poll carried out by Lord Ashcroft.

A fascinating picture emerges from all this, doesn’t it?

What it says is that Labour supporters show some real conviction. Between the two questions, the Labour vote stayed practically unchanged. But of those who prefer the Tories, nearly half chose Clegg when they were asked about specific candidates.

That rather suggests a lot of Tories have identified Nick Clegg as a natural friend. A great many of us would say they’re far from wrong. He certainly already seems to be angling for a new invitation into government from his mate big Dave. And now it seems it’s a substantial group of Dave’s supporters in Hallam who might give Clegg his constituency back.

The poll, however, also implies that rather a lot of Hallam Tories need to be reminded that Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, the man who kept their party in power for the last five years, leader of the Liberal Democrats, is their local MP. And standing for re-election. By them. 

One wonders how many, prompted with his name, responded “who?”

Not exactly on the ball, one would have to say.

It’s not my aim to be unduly mean, but I can’t help feeling that this reflects a level of intellectual horsepower which might make a lot of other complex ideas difficult to grasp. Like compassion. Tolerance of difference. Human rights.

And certainly anything sophisticated like social justice.

In turn, that might go a long way to explain a lot of our problems. With Tories. Far beyond Hallam.