Getting the public to appreciate the public good

He wished to God the dust would settle. Why didn’t someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one’s responsible, no one gives a hoot.

Ah, I wish I could write with le Carré’s intense succinctness. A few short sentences to conjure up an entire atmosphere. This is Peter Guillam, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, undertaking one of the most terrifying tasks as a spy: stealing information from his own service, in the duty room of its headquarters in London.

But it’s the idea le Carré expresses that struck me. No one gives a hoot for a place that many people use: “it isn’t mine, so it isn’t my responsibility”. I suspect we’ve all come across that attitude at some time or another.

It poses a problem for Socialists. How do you get everyone to take responsibility for something none of them owns as an individual, but we all own as a collective?

The simple way around the issue is to go for nationalisation instead of public ownership. Unfortunately, they’re absolutely not the same thing. A nationalised undertaking belongs to the state, not to the people. The extent to which it serves the public interest depends on who controls the state.

As I repeatedly point out to the fans of nationalisation, it was a nationalised industry, the National Coal Board, that was responsible for the slagheap slip at Aberfan in 1966, when 144 people were killed, 116 of them children. It was that same National Coal Board that broke the back of the miners and, in effect, killed the coal industry in Britain in the 1984 strike. 

‘Nationalised’ is not synonymous with ‘at the service of the people’.

One of Luton’s most attractive places: Stopsley Common

There are, however, instances of common use, if not common ownership. The trouble is, like the duty room in the spy service building where Guillam was at work, because no one owns it, some may well abuse it.

Danielle joined volunteers cleaning Luton streets when we lived there. What’s more, one of the loveliest places nearby was Stopsley Common, its very name underlining that it’s a public asset. Sadly, though, some people felt that this tract of common land was an ideal place for dumping waste. It was repeatedly disfigured by piles of builders’ rubble. Someone had decided that, since it was cheaper to dump the waste on the Common than take it to a tip, and the land didn’t belong to them as individuals, they might just as well leave it there.

It’s an international problem, as we confirmed this weekend. Near us, here in Spain, La Vallesa woods are even more spectacularly beautiful than Stopsley, and just as much a public resource. We joined volunteers there this weekend to clear up junk. It included, once more, builders’ rubble. In some cases, the rubble was in sacks, which had been dragged quite a way from the road, as though the people who left it were prepared to make a special effort to make it more difficult to collect.

Why drag it into the woods?
By the road, it would have been easy for the Council to collect

The woods don’t belong to them. To use Le Carré’s language, they don’t give a hoot.

The encouraging factor, on the other hand, is that there are people who do give a hoot. There were several dozen people there helping to clear up. There’s not a huge amount one can do in a couple of hours, but it was nonetheless a pleasure to see so many show up.

Volunteers cleaning up the rubbish

They represent the spirit that can make common ownership viable. That’s the public at its best.

We just need to educate the waste-dumpers to see things the same way. They’re the public at its worst, least concerned with the wellbeing of all. Make no mistake about it: it’s the biggest blockage to a socialised approach to the public good, and the attitude is by no means limited to the most privileged in society. A mindset change is needed throughout society.

When we’ve surmounted that obstacle, one of the fundamental planks of socialist thinking will stop being just a pious wish and become a feasible objective. But don’t be fooled – it’s very different and far better than mere nationalisation.

Reminders of the shame of austerity Britain

Often, it’s the little things that mark you…

There is, near where we live in Luton, a rather attractive open space known as Stopsley Common. In the middle are wide open spaces, including three cricket fields and a dozen or more football pitches, as well as areas simply left open for walking. Around the edge are hills and wooded areas crossed by well-maintained paths.

Luci and Toffee enjoying Stopsley Common

It’s a place frequented by cricketers, footballers, dog walkers, joggers or just people out for a quiet stroll. It is an invaluable resource to be enjoyed by all, a reminder that community matters too, and not just the capacity of small numbers of individuals to makes themselves rich.

Sadly, however, it’s also an area much favoured by joy-riding bikers, the kind that like to race their motorbikes or quads, without registration plates, across the grass, churning it up and endangering lives including their own – the obligation to wear helmets is one of many they ignore.

Many of these people seem to be what one might call sedentary travellers. In other words, they belong to that community of people we think of as travellers, in the sense that they wander around the country in caravans (often, it has to be said, drawn by large BMWs or Mercedes) and only stop for short periods in any one place.

However, a group seems to have set up permanent home in Stopsley. Occasionally, they alert their more peripatetic brethren of the fact that a gate has been left open, or blocks of cement designed to prevent access to certain places, are more mobile than their designers imagined, and we discover a few days later that a favourite place has been invaded once more.

I use the word “invaded” advisedly. When these travellers move into a place, they don’t simply inhabit it for a few days before moving on, which I would strongly favour tolerating. Although they use highly sophisticated caravans, they seem not to like the toilets most of them contain, or perhaps they don’t like dealing with the waste. So they tend to use the area around where they park as an open toilet, making it generally less attractive as a place to wander in.

At least that involves substances which are biodegradable. Far more unpleasant still is one of the ways they have chosen to earn a living. They contract with unscrupulous builders to collect waste from construction sites, which they then dump, at no doubt highly competitive prices, anywhere they choose – including those same places, that others value for their beauty and their amenities. Our Council is starved of cash, so it can take many weeks before these materials are cleared away.

No way through
Dumped construction site waste blocking a path on Stopsley Common

”But,” you will no doubt exclaim, “such behaviour is surely illegal!” And it is. But the law can only be enforced if there are people to enforce it. I’ve already said that the Council is strapped for cash; so is our police force. It has the resources to chase major crime, to track down murder or terrorism. But what merely lessens quality of life or inconveniences the public, is beyond their resources. So no action is taken over the dangerous quad bikes or the dumping of rubble in a public park.

In 2010, David Cameron assured the British electorate that “… we have a moral obligation to stop running up bills that will have to be paid by future generations.”

He won the election that year and he and his successor, Theresa May, have had the opportunity to honour that moral obligation. The result? National debt has grown from a trillion pounds to approaching two trillion.

What has been the result of their austerity programme? Nurses are 14% worse off than they would otherwise have been. It seems that the poorest people in society are to lose on average a further £50 a week of income by 2020 or around £2500 a year. To put that in context, median income in Britain is around £25,000 a year. By definition, half the population is below that level; the forthcoming cuts will disproportionately hit such people.

Belatedly, the government has realised that its approach is failing. It has decided to start moving away from its pay cap for public servants. As usual, however, it is doing so in too mean a way – police are to have an increase of 2% instead of 1%, in other words a rise that is  paltry as opposed to derisory – and as divisively as possible: most public sector workers, including nurses, will have to suffer at least another year of the 1% limit.

Austerity has caused pain, but there has been no gain on the debt front. On the contrary, things have got worse. And life has been impoverished in myriad ways.

For me, it’s the spoiling of Stopsley Common. That is a fitting tribute to seven and a half years of Conservative austerity rule. But I don’t deny it’s only the monument: the real thing is the terrible suffering being inflicted on people already poor enough.Still, at least the state of many part of Stopsley Common reminds me of the sheer ghastliness of Tory rule each time I take the dogs out there.

Reminders are what the British electorate apparently most needs.