A dragon's best friend

Summary: Why politicians must articulate a message of hope for the future – and a realistic yet ambitious one, in order to make us feel our collective sacrifices are worthwhile in the longer term.

The past few days haven’t been easy on my mental health. I’ve struggled to concentrate on anything – hardly new, but with an added level of despondency. Today we had the unsurprising news that the lockdown was being extended by another three weeks. I’m not sure what the thinking is but my take is that the lockdown in one form or another is going to be in place for a lot longer than that, and politicians need to prepare the public for this.

A couple of posts have mentioned social class on the political approaches to PPE and on lifting the lockdown.

For some reason it reminded me of the Farepack scandal that screwed over many working class families. The latter didn’t get bailed out by the Government but a few years later when the banking collapse happened, the Government stepped in.

Next week in (The virtual) Parliament will be interesting – not least the response of MPs to the scandal of doctors, nurses, carers and other frontline workers dying in the line of duty from the CoronaVirus, having had to work without suitable Personal Protective Equipment. Heartwarming though it has been to see communities getting together to make the scrubs that hospital medics have to wear, the latter should not have been put into such a position where their health and safety is still being put at risk.

There has to be a political reckoning for ministers past and present for not having contingency plans in place given how prominent a pandemic was on the Government’s national risk register. But that is for the public inquiry that surely has to follow once we’re collectively through this. The Health and Safety Executive need to be far more prominent in media and public discourse on this. Not least because several employers may well find themselves breaking the law on on PPE – and trade unions in particular are expert in bringing such cases to court. Improving health and safety in the workplace is one of the main reasons for their very existence. It’s in their DNA. I wouldn’t be surprised if some ministers and senior civil servants are summoned to give evidence in future court cases.

Are we going to go back to normal after this?

Normal is what got us into trouble in the first place – whether on the climate emergency through to the lack of contingencies in the face of a decade of austerity. Furthermore, ‘normal’ is not a sustainable place for me to be in. My parents won’t live forever, and the funds from my share of my late grandparents home that I’ve used to fund my local historical research also won’t last for years into the future. Having a different GP every time I book a doctor’s appointment is really not good for continuity of service. (For the first three decades of my life I only ever had three GPs. Then Andrew Lansley came in and messed everything up). The only treatment on offer on mental health to me from the local mental health trust is a time-limited slot of CBT which has been shown not to be suitable for me. In the grand scheme of things I’ve been treading water for the past decade without a solution, let alone a cure in sight.

I can’t go back to ‘normal’ after this. Hence thinking at one point that if I took a bad hit from the CoronaVirus I’d be mindful not to fight it and let the damn thing finish me off. Not a pleasant thought I know – which is why a collective political message of hope after the pandemic is over has to be at the forefront of post-pandemic planning from politicians. Otherwise more of us who are experiencing mental ill-health may run the risk of serious harm.

Some of the thinking has already begun inside Whitehall

Mr Cattell who I know from my UKGovCamp years has started informal crowd-sourcing on this. My tuppence worth was pointing civil servants to the evaluation of the New Deal for Communities Programme – where my final post in my civil service career was as Audit Manager in the final 18 months of the programme, ensuring we could account for as much of the £2billion spend over ten years as possible. (Easier said than done, mindful of the huge changes to how the civil service used IT between 1999 and 2010).

The longer the big restrictions remain in place, the more restless the public will become. Ditto the infection and death rates. Headlines with daily death rates from any virus or disease in the high hundreds [on top of average mortality rates] is ***not normal***. And the print press has rightly come in for criticism for some of their headlines as mortality numbers due to the CoronaVirus started to rise rapidly.

“Outside of Whitehall, who needs to be doing what?”

This is where historians come in use – in particular historians of social policy. At the end of the First World War there was significant public debate on how the country should be run. Unfortunately much of it outside of ‘Votes for Women’ and ‘Homes fit for heroes’ has been forgotten. A century ago the prominent women of Cambridge met at St Columba’s to demand a significant role for women in international politics. Despite the failures of the leading men in politics and military in the interwar era, a number of women made a success of things. One of the most prominent of the Lost Cambridge heroes was Eglantyne Jebb, who ultimately became a League of Nations Commissioner.

Fast forward to the Second World War and you have Sir William Beveridge.

This was also a time many a book and pamphlet was being published, educating citizen and serviceman & woman alike on how the political system functioned at the time, as well as discussion pamphlets on a wide range of issues that were easily available for the reading public.

One field that inevitably got a lot of attention was town planning. I find interwar and early post-war literature fascinating to read, not least because they give an insight into the social problems they were trying to design out.

The challenge for politicians is coming up with a method of finding out what people’s hopes for the future are, and then formulating them into policies that can withstand the very heavy lobbying that very powerful interests will inevitably throw at them – especially if it involves reducing the power and wealth of those institutions in order to deliver on the hopes of what is likely to be a global population that has experienced a collective trauma of a global pandemic, the likes of which we have not experienced before.

It’s only officially the end of week two, but I’ve been on very restricted movements for the past three/four weeks. And it’s not easy.

I’ve sort of been trying to distract myself with all things local history – for example finding out what happened the last time Cambridge (and the rest of the world) faced a pandemic. But there’s only so much solitude a person can take before we start craving human contact – whether a face-to-face conversation, a warm embrace, or intimacy with a relationship partner.

It’s been just over a decade since I moved back in with my parents – after having had a decade of independence leaving Cambridge for Brighton to go to university in 1999. It’s a continual reminder of how my health has not, and I now accept will never recover to the level where I’m able to hold down a full time job. (It’s also a reminder of how messed up the housing market has been for so long).

Like others in my situation – a number of whom I’ve interacted with on social media for years, I try to keep as much of my day-to-day life as independent as I can. But there’s only so long I can keep going for until I run out of spoons and have to spend the following day bed-bound through exhaustion.

Being forced to face some very difficult questions about the future

I think far more of us are being forced to face up to some very big picture questions and issues that perhaps we’ve either put off or tried to ignore for far too long. A bit like our responses to climate change. That goes for royals (think of the Sussexes), ministers of the Crown who spent their political lives calling for small state solutions only to find themselves post-Brexit having to deliver big state socialism in the face of the biggest pandemic the West has had to face since the end of the First World War…something that is also hitting the rest of the world, and in particular the source of many of its imports, China.

As we’ve seen over recent days, it’s the front line people-facing professions that are now essential to keeping as many of us fed and healthy – occupations that for decades if not centuries have been underpaid and under-appreciated. It’s not just the medics and the emergency services, but also the care workers, the supermarket workers, the delivery drivers, the cleaners…people often paid at or even below the national minimum wage (i.e. illegally – but people in those positions are seldom in a place to have their rights enforced). And yet for all the nationwide applauses organised online which proved surprisingly popular (even down my road the applause was ringing out – we never do stuff like that!), it doesn’t make up for the lack of protective clothing, long hours and low wages.

I’m still of the view that unless a vaccine is discovered very soon, we will be under various restrictions for until 2021 at the earliest. As a result, the level of collective disruption to our lives will be something that forces people to think about the lives we live in the longer term. This does not feel like a short term blip that we can then return to something approaching normality by midsummer 2020.

One of the biggest changes that we’ve seen culturally is on television. Programmes that rely on studios full of technicians and backroom staff, or shows with live studio audiences are now being broadcast from the homes of presenters with little more than a laptop and a webcam. For light entertainment shows it really isn’t working – you need that crowd dynamic. One of the biggest concerns inevitably is on the mental health impact on children and young people – they can no longer be with their friends. Furthermore, for those children on free school meals, the issue of how to ensure they have at least one nutritious hot mean a day becomes more of a challenge.

I can’t pretend that the current lockdown has reinforced an already far-too-high level of isolation and loneliness of recent years. One of the (many) things I don’t like about the faux self-employment that ministers pushed on lots of former public sector workers when they brought in their austerity policies in 2010 – now shown to be devastatingly irresponsible in the face of the present pandemic, is that it breaks up the social bonds that bring and keep people together. We saw the impact of this with Thatcher’s policies in the 1980s – their experiences put to music by Oysterband in 1992 in their haunting cover of Bells of Rhymney.

One of the other things the pandemic has forced us all to do is to face up to the fear of dying – or rather the fear of dying ‘before our time is up’. The number of frontline workers – from medics to bus drivers who have lost their lives to this virus is shocking. Not least because all too often it sounds like they have not had adequate protection in their workplaces due to shambolically poor contingency planning combined with a decade of austerity. But we must wait for the coroners to rule and for the public inquiry to hear the evidence and judge accordingly for the final verdicts.

I remember discussing this during my university years with a flatmate who was far better read than I will ever be, as well as being a far-left intellectual. He compared my own fears at the time with what my late grandmother sometimes asked me when I was younger. “What will you do when I die?” I didn’t really know the answer to that one – at the time no one in my close family had died so it wasn’t something I had to consider. It was something I was more worried about in my teens, but far less so now I’ve hit the big 4-0. Furthermore, I’m reconciled to not becoming a parent because I know my health could not cope with the worry and pressures.

Such an important point explained in the post below. You don’t have to agree with my answers because it is a personal decision we might have to make …

• If I am seriously ill I want to go to hospital.
• I want lifesaving treatment IF there is a good chance of a good life after. I do NOT want to live with a minimal quality of life.
• If the likelihood is significant brain damage, for example, I refuse.
• If I might need a few aids to help with my new life, fine. But if I would be stuck inside forever, no.
• Chronic pain, no.
• If it’s borderline/if in doubt, no. Because if you incorrectly let me die, I won’t know, but if you incorrectly force me to survive…exactly.

One thing I’m mindful of is what happens once we’re collectively through this – assuming I survive it. What then? The commentary in the media is still one of ‘getting back to normal’ once we’re through this – you only have to look at the ‘V-shaped’ graphs from the TV news. I simply can’t see that happening. The number of big name brands who have already gone into administration for a start means that thousands of people won’t have jobs to go back to. Disrupted supply chains won’t simply repair themselves.

The psychological impact of the increased number of people who died untimely – and avoidable deaths – won’t be without consequence. Some people might not be able to go back to their old jobs. Others may not want to – and choose to do something else.

The one thing I’m really feeling is the lack of meaningful human contact. Even online video for me just doesn’t cut it. But health-wise for the past year or two I’ve been stuck in this horrible vicious spiral that makes it hard to maintain face-to-face contact. I think part of it was the psychological impact of my stay in hospital in late 2017. Part of it is also related to not being part of a team in an organisation working towards a shared and agreed long term goal. At the same time, I also don’t have the health or stamina to work in the sort of high-performing team that I was part of in early 2007 in the civil service following my transfer from Cambridge to London.

The psychological impact of the lockdown is something I’ve noticed a lot of people discussing online. The mental health impact doesn’t seem to be discriminating. I’m almost reminded of some of the phrases put to me over the decades. “What have you got to be miserable about? You’re a talented young man!” or “But you’ve just got married and have a supportive employer – what have you got to feel down about?” or “Stop complaining – I’d love to be in your situation!” We’re all struggling with this – paradoxically in different ways but just like everyone else…if that makes sense.

Instinctively I feel I should be doing something practical in response to the emergency. I trained up as a civil contingency volunteer in my civil service days. Once a civil servant eh? But I can’t because family that I live with are shielding. Hence when I return from even a trip to the local grocers all of my outer clothing goes into the wash. Exercise is also only once every other day rather than every day. The conflicting messages that are coming from everywhere add to the confusion. “Stay Home!” and  “Do exercise locally!” Doesn’t that mean going outside? “Use your garden!” Not everyone has a garden! “Don’t spread the virus!” But I need to get food! “Get a delivery!” The next one’s not till the summer! “Volunteer in your community!” But that means going outside again!

One of the things I was pondering today was seeing if I could spend part of the lockdown elsewhere in the community. Part of the reason is that I struggle to concentrate at home -in what was one of my childhood homes. I’ve got a big reading pile to get through that’s not getting smaller. Also, home is not the ideal place to film even monologue pieces to camera. Far too many disturbances – mainly with the kitchen being at the centre of the house.

I also have a mental block with all things music, which is not good for my mental health. Strange to think that I can sing to a crescendo in the largest concert hall in Cambridge but can’t do it inside my own bedroom. Music lessons were part of my plan for 2020 but that’s not happening here, even though I have the kit to keep volumes down – whether the mute on my viola to the mini amp I have for my keytar. (I can only play the piano one-handed, so that 1980s classic the keytar is an ideal alternative). Again, moving – even if just for a few weeks, is far easier said than done – and that’s without the pandemic! And ultimately the regulations on lockdown may even prevent this. Which means I’m stuck.

Summary: 

On the formal lockdown, and what’s happening in my neighbourhood in the face of a public health emergency that is as much local as it is global.

As the Prime Minister announced restrictions on the movement of people that were unprecedented even in wartime, The Telegraph went after their man in No.10 – Johnson being a longtime writer for the publication.

The end of freedom or temporary restrictions to flatten the curve of the spread of a deadly virus?

The ploughing through all of the Commons stages of the Corona Virus Bill (all the Bill documents are here) on Monday 23 March 2020 disturbed many MPs – in particular the small state pro-Brexit MPs such as Steve Baker MP on video here. Watching some of the proceedings that afternoon, it became clear that the powers in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 were not considered strong enough for ministers in the face of the current emergency, hence seeking the powers they are. I got the sense from MPs that they were more than prepared to come back to the Bill post-enactment and provide proper scrutiny for it once Parliament returns in a month’s time – either through the six month formal review or through the tabling of formal amendment bills or motions to clarity and limit the powers in some clauses.

Some of the regulations have already been tabled in Parliament – such as the ones that force non-essential businesses to close.

“Requirement to close premises and businesses during the emergency”

Above – the first substantive heading of the regulations that enable the Secretary of State to order the closure of businesses in a public health emergency. Sobering reading.

Storing questions for a future public inquiry

Be in no doubt there will be the mother of all public inquiries once we’re collectively through this. Not so much in how the virus emerged – professionals in the field and academic experts had been saying for many years that we were long overdue a massive pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic of which Cambridge did not emerge unscathed. What will need investigating in detail is the UK’s response to news of its emergence, arrival, and spread.

The reason I’m particularly interested in such an inquiry apart from being under lockdown like the rest of the country, is because I was trained up as a Government Liaison Support Officer during my civil service days. In my mid-20s, physically healthy, single and with no dependents, I was an ideal candidate to be sent anywhere by the government for an extended period of time at very short notice. So when the massive oil storage terminal at Buncefield blew up in December 2005 – the biggest industrial fire in Europe since World War 2, I was called up as part of the civil service response to have a central government presence at “Gold Command” located at Hertfordshire Police’s HQ. It was a very surreal 10-12 hour shift I remember doing – not least because everyone from the taxi driver at the station through to the desk I was to be sat at seemed to know my name and was expecting my arrival.

I was lucky in that we had done a major civil contingencies exercise a couple of weeks before in the office – remember this was a year after the enactment of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. So I was familiar with the basics of the set up and the individual agencies that I’d expect to see in the real deal – even though at the time of the exercise I didn’t believe for a moment I’d be called up to deal with the real thing. As a result, I am staggered as to how long it took for ministers to trigger the establishment of county-level Gold Commands across every single county. (Cambridgeshire’s one is at Shire Hall – but it took far too long to set up. Hence a local line of questioning is on when they received a call from Whitehall to action civil contingency plans for a large pandemic).

Local responses in South Cambridge

Every person who has been willing and able to get involved in the response deserves credit for their actions. In one sense I feel a little frustrated in that despite my training I can’t really do anything substantive to help because of my own health and that of my family members that I live with. The best thing I can do is stay home, and keep my exercise walks and cycle rides to a local area.

Above – posters all around the Coleridge Ward, Cambridge.

In Queen Edith’s ward the Community Forum has been established for longer so activists there started before Coleridge did. Trumpington, which contains a large number of recently built homes and thus new residents, has got its page here. There are also a number of mutual aid social media groups at ward level that are being established with the assistance of local councillors. I hope the government and the public gives this under-appreciated group of local politicians the credit they deserve in the face of a public health emergency.

I’m not going to pretend to have a clue as to what’s going on north of the river not least because I cannot get there, let alone speak to people who have got far better things to be doing to help their communities. This public health emergency is as local as it is global.

The Swiss Laundry – due to move out to Papworth after a century on Cherry Hinton Road, forced to close in the face of the public health emergency.

More than a few firms closed before the regulations mandating closure came into force. I’ve not gotten much further than a very limited radius from my home to see how places like Mill Road or the city centre are coping. And to be honest I’m not prepared to take the risk either.

Above – Cherry Hinton Road at sunset – normally at this time the traffic jam backs up the hill to the Carbuncle Cup nominee The Marque on the horizon.

It makes me wonder whether the local fauna have noticed that there are far fewer cars and far fewer crowds of people about!

Above – Coleridge Rec(reation Ground), Cambridge.

This view illustrates the importance of large parks and wide open spaces in our cities. I’d spent the previous two days indoors so decided to go out in the late afternoon. As with Cherry Hinton Hall at the weekend, there was enough space for people to maintain the 2m social distancing measure with no effort at all. That combined with a noticeable improvement in the air quality as well.

We’re only at the beginning of what will be a very long time under severe restrictions. We also found out that over half a million people have volunteered to help the NHS in the response to the public health emergency – which is incredible. Remember this isn’t a one-day event, this is over an extended period of time. I also hope the volunteers get paid or at least their expenses covered. Given how intense that work will be, for people who have not done this before it will be life-changing, and hopefully life-enhancing too. It will also be a collective experience with as many downs as well as ups. With the former you only have to look at the pictures from those countries where the death toll is high and growing. It’ll be an incredible challenge to support those families while maintaining the necessary 2m distance along with the restrictions on attending funerals – something that came up in Parliament in the week that led to a Government amendment to the Corona Virus Bill on burial and cremation of the deceased.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a photo of the Coleridge Dragon. It was installed by Cambridge City Council a year after Puffles stood for election in Coleridge Ward in the city council elections in 2014. Vote dragon, get dragon.

 

 

 

 

Summary:

After the first week of lockdown. And I dread to think what life is like for the healthcare professionals from consultant to cleaner in our hospitals right now. 

And the Prime Minister said the UK can turn the tide of the CoronaVirus in a similar timescale.

If I was an optimist I’d probably agree with him. But I’m not. I’m anything but. Short of some miracle vaccine being discovered, developed, manufactured, distributed, delivered, and given enough time to take effect in that time scale, I struggle to see that happening. And remember that ‘turning the tide’ only means slowing the rate of infection. It doesn’t mean widespread immunisation and a return to ‘business as usual’. But then will it be possible to return to business as usual any more than the UK would be able to return to some pre-EU-Referendum steady state?

Credit to equalities and disabilities rights campaigners for fighting for workplace flexibilities that many employers are now taking advantage of

Flexible working? Working from home? Part-time hours? They didn’t invent themselves and they certainly weren’t given to the working population by a kind and benevolent ruling class. They had to be fought for and won. Politicians need to acknowledge that.

News moves fast. Very fast

As I was typing this, new guidance from Downing Street came out.

Because both my parents who I live with fall into that high risk category, I’m not going anywhere. The full press release is here.

I continue to remind myself that in the grand scheme of things I’ve got it easy compared to what my grandfather (a huge presence in my childhood) went through – he was conscripted as all able men his age were, and he was sent off to fight in the jungles of East India and Burma. It was only after his death that I found out more about where he fought. He never spoke about his experiences in battle. That generation seldom did. In comparison, I’ve just got to sit still for three months.

Well it’s certainly made me clean more!

Actually the new restrictions are still sinking in. Earlier today I went for a walk up to Cherry Hinton Hall and back – fortunately the grounds are large enough to make social distancing easy. I was also getting into a routine of putting all my clothing from my exercise walks into the washing machine followed by an immediate hot shower. The new restrictions means the only place outside I can go is the back garden. For those without gardens it’s even worse. But again, this is a public health emergency.

What will a minimum 12 weeks indoors do to my mental health?

Actually my first worry is for my parents – will all of this be enough to protect them until a suitable vaccine is discovered (assuming it is discovered) to immunise the population? And looking at the numbers, ministers quote a figure of 1.5million people having to stay indoors. That’s at least 5% of the population if I do the sums in my head. That’s not counting those that live with them and wider family/friendship networks that will also be concerned for them.

Looking at the date, we’re looking at Midsummer’s Day as the earliest point at which any of the restrictions are lifted. When put in that context, that means it will be only about four more weeks before the schools are timetabled to break for their summer holidays in England, which means most won’t be back at school until September. That’s six months off.

In one sense my movement since my hospital stay in late 2017 has been significantly reduced – though that’s not been a heart-related thing. It’s been a mental health thing. For some reason I just find travelling much more exhausting than I did a decade ago. The hardest thing to deal with – and has been for some time is not being in any position to work full time since 2012. It’s a situation I can’t see getting any better. The state the Conservatives have left health services in has also resulted in no named general practitioner or mental health specialist being my ‘go to’ person for mental health. I’ve been treading water for years. And it’s not going to get any better in 2020 by the looks of it.

Instability as the new normal?

I hope not.

The economic instability has been one of the drivers of poor mental health. How can anyone plan for a longer term future if they don’t know when or where their next wage packet is coming from? And as someone wrote earlier, self-employment is a Tory con – a means by which to move thousands of low paid people off the registers and into a world where they don’t get sick pay and don’t get paid holiday. Ditto the growth in zero hours contracts for those that would rather be in permanent jobs with full employment rights and workplace representation. People on minimum-wage-level jobs don’t have the luxury of being able to negotiate with an equal level of power to their employers. (And not everyone can be in top-end jobs).

“So…what is the outlook?”

Things are going to get ***a lot worse*** before they get better. We’re two weeks behind Italy’s curve and they are at crisis point. Which is why ministers are ***really*** panicking. The Education Secretary Mr Williamson looked like he was haunted by death when he made his grim statement a few days ago announcing the compulsory closure of schools for all but the children of key workers. Irrespective of whether you rate him as a politician/minister or not (I don’t), here was the picture of a man absolutely broken by the scale of the crisis that is in front of him.

Furthermore, with all of the WW2 references in the media, they are (in my opinion as a historian) pulling out all of the wrong lessons. Talk of the Dunkirk spirit was rightly skewered by Richard Osman below:

Also a reminder that the Battle of Dunkirk was a catastrophic defeat for the British Army because not only did it sustain 60,000 casualties, it also left behind all of its equipment in various states of destruction. Which gave it very little time to be re-equipped for the coming onslaught. And don’t get me started on “The Blitz Spirit”. (Susie Boniface – Fleet Street Fox does it far better below)

Because that’s where we seem to be. At the moment we’re not nearly as good collectively as we’d like to think we are. Despite the collective social media outrage and the pleas from various ministers from the Prime Minister downwards, the panic buying continues. Despite the video footage from not just the UK but Italy and elsewhere, all too often the pleas for the public to stay in rather than go out to crowded places have fallen on deaf ears.

It was only a few days later that ministers took the decision to close down pubs, bars, restaurants, cafes, gyms and a host of other businesses open to the public. And expect more to follow.

“This won’t be over by Christmas – Christmas 2020…this is going to go on for much longer”

We’ve been given a timescale of 18 months for a viable vaccine to be developed – which is September 2021. Even if one were discovered tomorrow, the time it would take to produce, distribute and deliver the vaccines to immunise the population would take months. In the meantime the restrictions would have to stay in place. This means as a country we are going to go through a very intense and distressing collective experience that will inconvenience everyone. And that experience is going to have a massive impact on politics, society and the economy.

The longer the restrictions are in place the more likely the public will be examining and reading up on the background to the crisis and to what extent the country was prepared for it. The historical lesson from the world wars is that the public turned out to have a much longer memory than the experts at the time thought. Furthermore, a large number of political pamphlets and books were published and distributed which to put an umbrella term over it all was all about “What we are fighting for”. Fast forward to a point just before a vaccine is discovered and we might see future publications on the theme of why we are putting up with existing restrictions, and what are we going to do when the restrictions are lifted.

Household names being judged by their behaviour

A number of brands have taken an absolute pounding because of the behaviour of their firms and/or their owners. Top of the pile was Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic whose firm early on was reported to have called for a government bailout while asking staff to take a substantial amount of unpaid leave. His high media profile and vast wealth in a time of massive inequalities made him an obvious target – even more so following a year of climate-related protests. It makes me wonder how the public will respond once we’re through and the restrictions are lifted. Will there be consumer boycotts of firms and brands that were not seen to be doing their bit to support the country in this crisis? That example contrasted with former England footballer Gary Neville, an investor in a new hotel group in Greater Manchester:

Given the collapse of hotel bookings along with the seriousness of the crisis, the move by Mr Neville received widespread praise – not only for providing accommodation but also for absorbing the costs and ensuring that his staff would all keep their jobs in a time of massive economic uncertainty.

Closer to Cambridge was the case of the Cambridge Fruit Company, whose corporate market collapsed as conferences cancelled everywhere.

Yet by being a well-known local business in a city such as Cambridge, the domestic market was able to switch away from the empty shelves of the panic-buyer-stripped supermarkets towards local suppliers. Not only that, when local charities and community groups appealed, local residents bought supplies to be delivered to those groups – including a number for local healthcare workers at Addenbrooke’s.

Above – testimony from Cambridge’s Red Hen Project whose service users face the sorts of barriers in life many affluent people in Cambridge might not even know exists in such a city as ours.

And I put the above line very deliberately, because the time many of us will have in our involuntary confinement means many will inevitably find some time to think about bigger picture things that day-to-day working life otherwise doesn’t allow. This was one of the things that struck me about some parts of the policy-making model during my civil service days – some parts were badly under-resourced. Even during Labour’s time in office. With more time to do more research in our roles, would more of us have made better decisions? Undoubtedly. So in the midst of what will be an ongoing crisis, expect civil servants and ministers to make mistakes. And big ones. And be ready for when they are reported. They will all be investigated in excruciating detail in the inevitable public inquiry that follows.

In the meantime, it’s worth starting to think about what sort of society we want to be when we emerge from this once-in-every-X-generations crisis. That means learning the basics of our political system. (The University of Oxford has this accredited online course An Introduction to Politics starting in very early May for £280 if that suits your style and budget). Also FutureLearn has a series of more specific courses for free (if you don’t want to be accredited), including one on The history of women’s rights and suffrage by Royal Holloway.

In the meantime, the best way I can support those on the frontline, especially those in our hospitals, is to follow the new updated advice and stay put.

 

 

 

Summary: The Chancellor Rishi Sunak presented his Budget 2020 to the House of Commons today – and mentioned another ‘Cambridge New Town’ hot on the heels of Cambourne and Northstowe. But building successful new towns are far easier said than done – especially when stuck in an economic model that allows financiers to extract much of the wealth and value created. Combine that with an utterly dysfunctional institutional structure of local government in Cambridgeshire all bodes ill for his plans.

The Cambridge Independent’s Gemma Gardner examined the Budget 2020’s proposals for Cambridge & South Cambridgeshire.

“The government is also going to examine and develop the case for up to four new Development Corporations in the OxCam Arc at Bedford, St Neots/Sandy, Cambourne and Cambridge, which includes plans to explore the case for a New Town at Cambridge.”

…which will alarm councillors in Cambridge City (which stubbornly refuses to elect Conservatives following the party’s implosion in the 1990s after it’s decline in the 1980s).  Following the creation of the Greater Cambridge Partnership and the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority, the prospect of a third organisation being created by ministers to deal with planning/housing/transport issues is just…exactly. I can’t find the words for it.

Dysfunctional local government structures

I’ve stated my views repeatedly – we are long overdue a national restructure of local government – powers, funding, boundaries, the lot. Even the meeting formats. The last overhaul we had was in the mid-1970s. Technology has moved on, populations and demographics have changed, societal values have changed. As I state here,  I’d scrap the county council and create three or four unitary councils starting with the 1945 proposals as a starting point for negotiations (the coloured-in areas).

Above – from A history of local government in Cambridgeshire

Earlier this week the Conservative-run county council suspended consultations on city residential parking schemes using problems with the Greater Cambridge Partnership as a pretext – even though it is a voting member of said partnership. Hence this complaint by the Leader of Cambridge City Council Lewis Herbert, and also the petition here. As with previous issues, Conservatives stand accused of using the votes of councillors who don’t live anywhere near Cambridge and hardly ever visit, to overrule the wishes of people directly affected by an issue in their own neighbourhoods.

 

Development corporations and another Cambridge New Town?

A few months ago the Government tweeted this:

…which was interesting because at various points different developments have had the label of “Cambridge New Town”. One of the older Cambridge “New Towns” is in what most of us would consider as being in the centre of town. Authors and fellow Cambridge Antiquarians Peter Bryan and Nick Wise wrote a wonderful history of the part of town that sits between Hills Road and Trumpington Road. You can read it here.

The problem with that New Town was that too many of the houses being built were of such poor quality that debate in the pages of local newspapers was on the state of these new slums that had been built. But then in the decades before in the old Barnwell part of town where another notorious slum had been built. Ellice Hopkins survey and account published in the early 1880s (Digitised here –  it’s a cracking piece of work) describes the conditions and the challenges faced by affluent missionaries when faced with absolute poverty.

It was another member of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Save The Children founder Eglantyne Jebb (joined 1908) who in late 1906 published what I’ve described as the first social scientific study of poverty and multiple deprivation in Cambridge’s history. Cambridge: A brief study in social questions. She followed this up with a second edition two years later – which had an additional chapter as a ‘progress check’. I like to think that this piece of work contributed immensely towards the urban design of the interwar housing in Cambridge that was much more spacious, of a lower density, and also gave people access to parks and open spaces.

While the newly elected councillor Clara Rackham credits Miss Jebb’s work in an article in the 1920s, documentary evidence has been harder to find. That said, we know that the women who made modern Cambridge were driving Cambridge’s politicians and civic society to demand better housing standards for all. One of the most influential societies in Cambridge in the first half of the 20th Century was the Cambridge Ladies Discussion Society – later the Cambridge Branch of the National Union of Women Workers, and later the National Council of Women. Just over a century ago they organised this meeting:

Ebenezer Howard in Cambridge – from the British Newspaper Archive.

Ebenezer Howard was the founding father of the Garden City Movement of which Letchworth and Welwyn in Hertfordshire down the railway line from Cambridge are such named. Clara Rackham and Florence Ada Keynes, the twin pillars of civic and social reform in early 20thC Cambridge knew Eglantyne – the latter being something of a mentor.

The growth of Cambridge’s suburbs after WWII continued a pattern of low density housing built mainly around the needs of motor car use. Understandable given the continued slum clearances of properties built in the 1800s and before. However, there were some significant unforeseen consequences with this. One of them was that the population density was so low and people so spread out that it became hard to sustain community institutions.

Above – an old postcard (early 20thC) of Hills Road, Cambridge looking north, with the Hills Road Wesleyan Chapel in the foreground (demolished in the early 1970s) and Yolande Marie Lynn Stephens‘ Catholic Church in the background. (She bankrolled it – her biography is an incredible story of an horrific childhood before being married off to a wealthy man, whose fortune she inherited & used to build this mini-catbedral).

The red-bricked Wesleyan Chapel was bankrolled by one of Cambridge’s greatest ever townsmen – Robert Sayle. It should have been saved. A featureless identikit office block is now on the site off Norwich Street. The decline of church congregations in the 20th Century has been much written about. In Cambridge, this was probably the most prominent of the churches in South Cambridge that was lost.

The expansion of the city vs expanding the surrounding villages vs building new towns

There are a number of different models of expansion – I’ve listed three above. The term “Greater Cambridge” is one that’s being adopted by the local political institutions these days, though in the past “Cambridge & District” and “Cambridge County” (as opposed to “Cambridge Borough – the town before it got city status in 1951) have been used in the more distant past. New housing in villages is often politically justified as targeting the children who grew up in the village but cannot afford the house prices so have to move out. Cambridge has seen and continues to see piecemeal growth on its periphery – North of Cherry Hinton and East of Abbey Ward in East Cambridge, Orchard Park in the North West, and Trumpington are all examples.

The broken planning model in a broken economic model

The problem with all of these developments in my experience is that developers are extremely reluctant to fund essential community infrastructure. There’s no money in it for them. One of the failures of the current model of development is that the big developers have no ongoing relationship with the places they build in. The model is minimum cost, maximum profit, cut-and-run. Inside Cambridge City all too often it feels like the profits waiting to be made are not in building innovative and exciting places where people want to live and stay for a long time, but in acquiring a site that doesn’t have planning permission, hammering local councils and local communities until they give up, and then pocket the land value uplift by selling the site once planning permission has been granted. (Which then means whoever finally builds on the site claims very slim profit margins to get out of any community infrastructure requirements).

Unless the Housing Secretary’s much-trailed new planning policies overhaul this model, the political fights between him & his ministerial team vs backbench Tory MPs representing rural constituencies could become one of the defining features of this Parliament. (Large parliamentary majorities make it safer for government backbenchers to cause trouble for ministers!)

A new town in Cambourne

Controversially damned by a former newspaper columnist and politician as “Crimebourne”, the town has had more than its fair share of challenges to overcome – most of which are not the fault of the people who live there or who moved there. You can read about the planning history of the town on the community website here. All too easily written off as Cambridge overspill, the transport infrastructure was not built before the housing, and no natural ‘civic centre’ for the town was built from the start. Despite South Cambridgeshire District Council moving its headquarters there, it’s an anonymous office block stuck out at the end of a business park awaiting a future phase of housing to be built nearby (see here from 2017). As an evaluation by Stephen Platt from 2007 states:

“But the design of some of the civic buildings is mediocre. The High Street is unfinished five or six years into the development and this creates a bad impression on visitors and new arrivals.” (S Platt for CARL)

Over a decade later and in 2020 we had the announcement that the proposed East-West-Rail linking Oxford and Cambridge would stop off at Cambourne. Much welcome, long, long overdue, and the people deserve nothing less.

Bourn Airfield – and local opposition

The growth of Cambourne is part of a wider set of developments that incorporate Bourn Airfield. Previously the hastily-constructed RAF Bourn that was built in 1940, the site has been identified as a site for development in the current Cambridge & South Cambridgeshire joint local plan.  And not without controversy as a number of people from surrounding local villages opposed the plans.

A new town at Northstowe…and Waterbeach…and what to do about Papworth?

The long-delayed development at Northstowe, a few miles North-West of Cambridge has finally started building. It was scheduled to be one of Gordon Brown’s new ‘Eco-towns’. Remember those? How long ago does that feel?

Then there are the plans for Waterbeach New Town – again on former Ministry of Defence property (the old Waterbeach Barracks). Finally, just north of Cambourne is the old Papworth Hospital site. Plans for a luxury health farm fell through.

What the developers want

Mike Derbyshire of Bidwells wrote this blogpost calling for development corporations to have developers sitting alongside councils as equal partners in planning decisions. Should ministers go ahead with this they may find their strongest opposition will come from their own back benchers and constituents as mentioned above. Note that housing policy is one of the most heavily-lobbied parts of government.

Building a new town in a climate crisis, an ecological crisis and a water crisis

There is a water crisis with our chalk streams. The tributaries of the River Cam in particular are struggling. So where the water supply for these extra homes will come from is something that needs answering – and soon. In September 2006 a report by the Environment Agency recommended against large-scale transfers of water from west to east. That covered up to the year 2030. Yet by 2018 the National Infrastructure Commission was arguing for a new National Water Grid. Such a grid won’t come cheap – and the energy costs of pumping water over an extended distance will require further investment in a renewable source – will ministers have to look again at projects like the Swansea Lagoon?

Avoiding making past mistakes

Before planning for any further new towns, ministers need to ensure they don’t repeat the errors of past developments. At a bare minimum that should involve working with people in the recently-constructed new towns to find out what worked and what didn’t. Furthermore they need to deal with the water crisis lest they design in more extreme water shortages in the face of the climate emergency.

 

 

 

 

My generation was barred by law from learning about this in school – the toxic legacy of Section 28, which makes it all the more important that we learn about a history denied to us by the politicians and religious clerics. 

I was still at primary school when Section 28 came into force, so was completely oblivious to the huge campaigns that sprang up against that this toxic piece of legislation from Thatcher’s Government brought in. It was compounded on my side by having to go to church every Sunday throughout my childhood.

Sex education church style in the 1980s/1990s.

The really sad thing about that legacy is that an entire generation was brought up to be ignorant – that ignorance being a specific aim of government policy. It’s a legacy that the Conservative Party in government is still yet to reverse – whether through public health campaigns (public health spending has been slashed anyway by their austerity policies) or something else that might at least attempt to make good the damage that specific policy caused.

A new audio tour in Cambridge – and why LGBTQ+ history is important 

Debbie Luxon, a local journalist here in Cambridge has written a number of articles on local LGBTQ+ history, and contemporary issues, wrote this interesting piece. It features a number of items sourced from the Cambridgeshire Collection and the Cambridgeshire County Archive. I was in the Collection earlier and spotted a number of items on one of the desks. They related to one of the social groups around in the 1990s and listed things like news updates, summer parties, swimming sessions and contact details for support groups and helplines. It was like peering into another world – a world before the internet, where individuals risked persecution with the support of the law. Remember this was still a time when the military was expelling members of the armed forces for their sexuality. And not just expelling: “Dismissed in disgrace” was the term I remember seeing repeatedly in the newspapers as one human being after another was effectively outed in national newspapers.

With those risks in mind, I think about the huge amount of courage it must have taken the named individuals in those leaflets to have agreed to have been listed like this, or those who lived at the addresses listed to have agreed to become meeting hosts. There was one address on Glisson Road that particularly stood out.

Moving from 20thC Cambridge to 21stC Brighton

One of the reasons I moved to Brighton for university was that out of all of the places I visited, this was the place that was the complete opposite to what Cambridge was and had been for me throughout my entire childhood – a boring and stale place oppressed by the forces of social conservatism (with a small c). If you looked like me your job was to sit down, shut up and not complain. And do well at school. It certainly wasn’t your place to kick up a fuss about anything.

The impression I got from sex education from both school and church was that it was for the purposes of procreation only, and if you ‘did it’ while not married you risked overpopulation, environmental degradation and general global armageddon if you deviated from said path. So when I moved down to Brighton – which was also where I switched from a world where there was no internet to one where using the internet was an essential part of studying and research, you can imagine the culture shock I got. That plus Brighton in the late 1990s having the label of the UK’s Gay Capital as both Brighton & Hove combined to become one of the Millennium Cities. “All Things Brighton Beautiful” was the strapline – a wonderful welcome from what had been a staid city in Cambridge. There’s a book waiting to be written about those brave individuals who broke that oppressive atmosphere in Cambridge during my teens & years away.

So how was it that I completely missed what was happening in different parts of Cambridge during my teenage years?

The only thing I knew about LGBTQ+ Cambridge in the mid-1990s was the Dot Cotton Club at The Junction. In 1996 – not long before our GCSE exams we heard that Mike Flowers – then recently at Number 1 of the UK singles charts with a cover of Wonderwall by Oasis (back then a very big deal) was going to be headlining a night at that club. Some of us wanted to go because bloke off the telly who was at Number 1 was coming to Cambridge. But we didn’t know if we’d be allowed along with a whole host of other back then unknowns which I’m sad to say were based on ignorance – though we were not to know at the time that teaching staff were banned by law for saying anything that could be seen as promoting anything other than straight heterosexual Christian marriages. The only reason we knew about this club night was because The Junction was, as far as we could tell, the only established organisation that would advertise it – thus it would get into local newspaper listings. Remember that other groups had to be careful about who they advertised to and where because at the time people could be dismissed from their jobs if their sexuality was made public.

Picking out a diary entry from 1997 and I had met up with someone who I had not seen since early primary school – a good decade had passed. There was this great new up-and-coming band from Canada coming to The Junction and we all had to go and see them. At the time I couldn’t see what the big deal was other than the lead singer seemed to be this raven-haired woman with striking eyes. “No, that’s Brian” my friend told me. The band’s name? Placebo. Four months later they were on Jools Holland.

I’m still convinced it was the worst gig I’ve ever seen at The Junction – the acoustics were appalling, but I did go crowd-surfing for the first time at a gig. Not that I wanted to. Two friends from college tapped some huge blokes in front of us, pointed at me, pointed up at the ceiling and that was it.

It’s only now that I realise the significance of booking the band to play in Cambridge. This was the first time I can recall having in-depth conversations with friends at school/college about homosexuality and gay rights. But again, this was at the bitter end of 18 years of Conservative governments where public services had been run into the ground, so unfortunately we did not know where we could go to that we knew of to continue the conversations further with people who were far more informed than we were.

One of the reasons that I am one of the official supporters of The Junction today is because they played a huge – and I think under-appreciated part in helping Cambridge overcome prejudice in our city. Hence why its continued presence in Cambridge is ever so important. (See here for more details of its membership, supporters, and patrons options).

Section 28 was only repealed in 2003 and it was only more recently that a number of proponents of the policy of Section 28 expressed regret at what they had done. Recall Francis Maude in 2012 here.

“So what was different about 20thC Cambridge compared with 21stC Brighton?”

Where do I start?

I remember telling my younger brother shortly after moving down that the stuff that was normal in Brighton was the sort of stuff you’d get arrested for or scolded by the local priest for back in Cambridge. My mindset on moving down to the seaside was that ***everything*** was going to change and to go with the flow. By that time (late 1999) I was itching to leave Cambridge, telling myself that if I did not leave by the end of that summer, I never would. In my mind at the time this was to be a permanent departure: I had no intention of ever returning. (As it turned out, the only reason why I did return – twice, the other time from London, was mental ill-health). Then in the summer of my first year of university, an Australian band called Savage Garden released this incredible number:

And it was like a political awakening.

The tragedy from a personal perspective was that the university I was at was so ill-prepared to deal with what were the first two years of fee-paying students that they had few support mechanisms in place to support students going through what I could only describe as identity crises. As a result I never had the experiences I was told I was going to have when I got to university – i.e. meeting a new friendship group that would stick with me for life.

I ended up spending the next 18 months hanging around with a group of environmentalists outside of university, a number of whom would become prominent in The Green Party. In 2001 many of us could see that in the next decade or so, Brighton would be the most likely city to provide The Greens with its first ever Member of Parliament. Following the 2019 general election, Caroline Lucas MP – that first Green Party MP, will be celebrating a decade in Parliament.

I returned to Cambridge because of mental ill-health in 2002, and it was at that time the first family friends of my generation came out. I had a number of bitter arguments with family friends who tried to make the religious case for keeping Section 28. I remember continually restating the point that I would not condemn people who loved each other just because they happened to be of the same gender. This was also around the time that Labour removed Section 28, the party having incorporated its removal into their 2001 election manifesto. The House of Lords blocked the previous attempt, thus creating a very strong incentive for Labour to create more Labour-supporting peers in the House of Lords.

LGBTQ+ Cambridge pre-dates the campaigns of recent decades

In a separate article, Debbie Luxon writes seven reasons to celebrate LGBTQ+ history month. Reason 3 is to learn about histories we were never taught. As well as local histories, GCSE modern history spent more time studying interwar Germany than interwar UK because nazis and communists. Being taught in a mixed ability class in a run down mobile classroom with tatty aged books printed a decade-or-three before was hardly the stuff inspiring courses were made out of. It was only in later years that I found out how socially liberated interwar Weimar Germany was. Yet the course and the textbooks only mentioned that homosexuals were oppressed by the nazis in passing. Even if some of us wanted to query more about this, teachers could not go into much detail because the law prevented them.

In pre-WWI Cambridge itself, two of the most well-known women in town were in a secret relationship – Eglantyne Jebb and Margaret Keynes. Their story is told in Clare Mulley’s award-winning biography of the founder of Save the Children.

Eglantyne Jebb, the spark who launched my research into the women who made modern Cambridge. She wrote the first social scientific study into poverty & multiple deprivation in Cambridge’s history, published in 1906. Photo: The Cambridgeshire Collection.

At the same time, Margaret’s older brother, the economist John Maynard Keynes was also in same-sex relationships. One of the important parts of our social history was the proposal from Archibald Hill to Margaret Keynes just before the First World War. Margaret had said she always wanted to have children some day, and that her engagement to the future Nobel Prize Winner and musketry instructor of the Cambridgeshire Regiment meant her relationship with Eglantyne had to end. Shortly after this, Eglantyne left Cambridge for good, heading off to Macedonia in 1913 to assist in relief work during the Balkan wars. Would history have been different if say Archibald Hill had planned his proposal for late 1914 – resulting in its postponement until after the war? (In which case would Eglantyne have stayed in Cambridge and become a far greater force in local democracy?)

Because let’s not forget that in winter 1910 Eglantyne Jebb ran the Liberal Party’s campaign in Cambridge for the second general election that year. Fast-forward to the end of the First World War and could Eglantyne have stood as the pacifist that she was for this fast-growing Labour Party in Cambridge? (Her sister Dorothy Buxton joined the Labour Party – Dorothy’s husband Charles switching his allegiance from Liberal to Labour and ultimately serving as an MP for both parties). I’d like to think that Eglantyne Jebb was the best MP Cambridge never had. But then I’m biased!

Summary:

Some thoughts on how the adults should respond.

The excellent presentation by Nico, Harry and Luana speaks for itself – watch the video below:

This was to 300 people in the Cambridge Corn Exchange on the first consultation of the Greater Cambridge Local Plan.

Unlike the last local planning round, this time around there are dozens of community activists – mainly in residents associations and local campaigning groups who now have experience of what it’s like going through this very intense process. There are a list of videos on the Youtube Page of the Federation of Cambridge Residents’ Associations which kindly commissioned me over those years to film a number of those meetings. At those meetings there were council officers, planners, consultants, and very expensive barristers who were experts in planning law all sparring with each other.

For anyone who wants to get involved in the local planning process, my main advice is simple: Don’t do it alone.  

The huge amount of documentation and paperwork involved is incredible. You have to work as a team. The next question then is which team to pick. That depends on what your interest is. If it is geographical, a residents or neighbourhood association is your best bet. Your local councillor can provide you with details of your local residents’ association (see http://fecra.org.uk/links/).

Civic groups and campaigning organisations that scrutinised the last local plan included:

• Cambridge Cycling Campaign
• Smarter Cambridge Transport
• Cambridge Past, Present and Future

Your community group can also commission a professional (grants are available to help with costs) from the RTPI – see https://www.rtpi.org.uk/planning-aid/bespoke-support/workshops-and-training/ for details. Personally I’d like to see the local town planning community getting together to organise some workshops or even a series of evening classes for residents. Given that 300 people rocked up to the Corn Exchange this evening – and that was on top of events in Queen Edith’s Ward (See the extended video of the local plan talk from Paul Frainer here) and Abbey Ward earlier this week – with Romsey Town to follow later this week. You can’t fault the councils for effort. This was one of the big pieces of feedback many of us gave to the councils from last time around: engage with local communities early. I’m glad that it’s not just ‘the usual suspects’ who are getting involved.

Quash the trainwash

I also found out about a new piece of train washing infrastructure being built next to the end of gardens in Romsey Town. So far no problem…until you see that the facility is over 9m tall and will be washing trains throughout the night. Hence local residents getting together to Quash the Trainwash. My initial instinctive response was to wonder why the train companies involved didn’t build it somewhere where unemployment was higher, but also on a railway junction – such as March, near the railway recycling facility there. But then what do I know about running railways?

Standoff between the Greater Cambridge Partnership and the County Mayor

I remain of the view that both institutions were ministerial fudges to avoid going ahead with a long overdue restructure of local government – boundaries, powers, finances – the whole caboodle.

This was on the back of the announcement on the Cambourne-Cambridge busway .

Me? I still want the Cambridge Connect plan.

And finally…

I still don’t think Cambridge or South Cambridgeshire have the legal and financial competencies to deliver what people were asking of them at the Corn Exchange. Accordingly, I think it’s worth crowd-sourcing the city for anyone with an understanding of planning policy, housing, transport, and local government policy to identify which things will require changes in existing government policy, and which ones will require changes in the law – and specifying what those changes need to be. That will allow people to decide if they want to campaign in that direction.

I also think the councils should think about facilitating meetings between competing interests to find out to what extent the land owners and developers are persuadable when it comes to building communities rather than simply building for maximum profit, minimum cost. Because if developers and the professional service firms that work for them want to improve their industry’s reputation with the people of Cambridge & South Cambridgeshire, now’s the time to stand up and be counted.

Summary: In fact dividing opinion is something of an understatement, but the situation today is not without historical precedent in Cambridge’s history. We have been here before – in 1912.

I’ve been out of the loop on Extinction Rebellion and pretty much everything else since the general election because of ill health & exhaustion. (I was at the doctor’s earlier today following a 2 week wait for an appointment – Johnson’s return in that compromised general election did not make the NHS’s problems go away).

The easiest/most popular thing now would be do to a hatchet job on the local collective of Extinction Rebellion. The next easiest thing would be to do the opposite, or sit on the fence with the “both sides…etc”. So I’m going to do none of that – and instead report some observations, plead illness/tiredness and/or say “I don’t know”.

“Coward!” 

Actually, over the past couple of days I’ve been laid up in bed shrugging my shoulders either at the latest news update (whether locally or nationally), or the response to what has happened. When you’re ill & exhausted like that it’s hard to get emotionally aroused/angered by anything. Ditto with the side effects of the mini chemistry set of medication that I’m still on.

In the meantime, ages ago I took the advice from one of the local activists involved at the start who said the principle of XR meant that people could get involved in the actions they wanted to, and not get involved in the ones they did not. Those that undertake specific actions know what the consequences are – hence so many people getting arrested over Easter 2019 in the full knowledge of what it entailed. The documentary on Channel5 is also worth watching from the autumn 2019 protests – covering both the organisation and the police responses.

I was vaguely aware of the plans for the week-long road block & my first instinct was that this was *very ambitious* – not least because of the time of year & the weather. And that was before the announcement of the storms. The other actions I was completely unaware of because I haven’t been able to get much further than the end of the road, let alone to any meetings to express any view one way or another.

It’s easy for me to say “Oh, I wouldn’t have done that” or “Why don’t they do something else?” after seeing the public reaction. Just as the protests of Easter 2019 caught the imaginations of many – and perhaps were sustained far longer than many had expected, so perhaps the scale of the opposition here is unexpected. For the record obviously I wanted the city council to pass its budget because of this item:

2020 is the centenary of the swearing in of Cambridge’s first women magistrates. I should also thank Cllr Anna Smith for securing this. As for anything involving gardening, well I’m the worst gardener – I don’t have the stamina for it. I planted a cherry tree in my old back garden back in 2003. It’s still there. That’s as far as I’ve gone. I’m a lightweight, I know.

“So…where are we now?”

Party-political reaction has been unanimously opposed to the latest action at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Above – Cambridge Green Party, and below, Cllr Lewis Herbert (Lab – Coleridge), leader of Cambridge City Council.

…and Cambridge Liberal Democrats

Each of these parties is in a slightly difficult position having been at least sympathetic to the aims of XR protesters throughout 2019, including having had some members and elected representatives taking part in meetings, events and actions in the past 12 months. I have too – and one of the things I’ve noticed is that the strength of feeling of those speaking out against some of the recent actions in Cambridge has come from those who have taken part in actions in 2019.

Personally I take with a pinch of salt those Conservatives calling for the police to come down hard on the protesters – their party spent the past decade cutting police budgets all over the country, resulting in a cut of 20,000 police officers between 2010-2019. And you can’t call for the full force of the law to be thrown at protestors when your political party has driven the legal system into the ground.

The question that I’d like to see senior police officers answer is whether they think they have the resources and personnel to reopen the roads currently blocked. Because if they answer that they do not, then one of the unforeseen effects of the half term roadblock action is that XR protesters have unexpectedly exposed just how deep the cuts to local police forces have gone.

Some groups breaking off working with XR Cambridge

I’ve not been party to conversations between political parties and activists. It remains to be seen what the medium/long term fall out is. The Cambridgeshire Climate Emergency Network has just announced it is cutting ties.

Note former Green Party candidate for Cambridge, Dr Rupert Read, who is a prominent media spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion over the past year or so, posted the following:

One of the things the documentary on Channel5 revealed was that a social media poll of activists during the autumn protests showed a 96% opposition to any actions targeting the London Underground.

…and that was before the small group of activists that targeted Canning Town got going.

“Has anyone been supportive?”

Absolutely – activists are still out there camped out. The symbolism of targeting Trinity College, one of the wealthiest colleges of Cambridge University, has been mentioned by some. Ditto the targeting of Barclays Bank – supporters calling out the corporation’s extensive record on financing big oil. Some are also questioning why there seems to be more outrage at the actions of the protestors than of the actions & policies of the institutions they are protesting against.

Risk of an anti-environmentalist backlash

One locally-based FB group has already formed with over 600 members. One of the unforeseen impacts of the police allowing the actions to take place is that inevitably there are those who will want to take the law into their own hands, or use the excuse of a lack of police presence as an excuse for mindless violence.

At the same time, one of my former councillors here in Coleridge ward, Labour’s George Owers, started a petition calling on the police to take down the roadblock. In some Labour circles the backlash has been particularly intense – not just because Cambridge’s Labour-run council was prevented from passing a budget that had a host of funded policies to deal with climate change, but that it is working class staff who are left to pick up the pieces from some of the actions. That is not to say activists who are Labour Party members haven’t been defending their fellow XR protesters – they have.

History repeating itself? Cambridge may have been here before

There has been a huge amount of heartfelt and passionate exchanges online over the events in Cambridge. One group from history that has come up on several occasions is that of the Suffragettes. Which reminded me of the last time a prominent group of activists were split – in 1912 when MPs voted down a bill that would have led to the first votes for women. Cambridge at the time had a much stronger Suffragist movement (Suffragists – the law-abiding ones under the leadership of Millicent Garrett Fawcett), and a much smaller movement of Suffragettes (the ones that smashed windows). Margaret Heitland, President of the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association (CWSA) was absolutely furious.

“The window-breaking campaign of non-constitutional suffragists, working on a policy not in harmony with that of the National Union to which our Cambridge Association belongs. This event, occurring less than three weeks before the second reading, gave some members of Parliament an opportunity to turn votes against us; and it is ascribed to this cause that 16 Liberals and 10 Conservatives, pledged to support the Bill, voted against it” Margaret Heitland, 30 March 1912.

But her final message was this:

“My chief and final counsel to myself, not less than to others, is Concentrate! Do not let us dissipate our energies. There are many subjects, many interests which are good and useful in themselves. But if time given to them is not also given to this one prime cause of freeing women, we must obey in preference the more urgent duty.” Margaret Heitland, 30 March 1912.

(There’s a research project for early career historians/researchers to transcribe the set of manuscripts held in the Cambridgeshire Archives in Ely).

So…what happens now?

I hope there can be a peaceful and negotiated end to the standoff. Inevitably there will be some very difficult conversations and debates to be had.  Beyond that, I don’t know – not least because the national and international political picture is so bleak and depressing.

One event that hit the entire environmentalist movement from leftfield (or rightfield) was the disastrous decision by opposition party leaders to agree to a general election in December 2019. None of the essential legal safeguards that many people and organisations had been calling for were put in place before the election, and Johnson still in his leadership honeymoon period managed to dodge any serious scrutiny (including the Andrew Neil TV interview), and managed to avoid releasing the so-called Russia Report in the run up to the vote.

Less than two months later and the headlines were dominated by this:

…said aide has since resigned, but not before this dark period of scientific history was splashed all over the media.

In the meantime the results of the leadership contests for Labour & the Lib Dems are not due for another two months at least – the latter waiting until after the local elections in May. So it feels like there’s been something of a vacuum in opposition – not least because Johnson one way or another forced out his internal party opponents and for now at least has a loyal group of backbenchers able to rubber-stamp legislation at will.

My overall feeling is one of real sadness – sadness that on this ever-so-important issue my city is polarising. This week there are some important public events on:

• the Cambridge & South Cambridgeshire Local Plan.
• East West Rail – Bedford to Cambridge (part of the Oxford-Cambridge rail link)
• The proposed Trainwash that has come out of nowhere (but quite local to me)
• …and that’s before looking at
  • The Greater Cambridgeshire Partnership Board (19 Feb 2020)
  • The Cambs/P’boro Combined Authority Overview & Scrutiny (24 Feb 2020)

…because this has just happened.

…and not everyone agrees.

Summary:

Responding to world record consumption of resources and materials

It was on the back of this article that reinforced my view that current consumption patterns are unsustainable.

And it’s alarming not least when you consider the weight and volume of materiel that must be shifted and processed to get to precious and rare metals and minerals.

“A metric tonne of ore yields just six and a half grams of gold”

From The Discovery Channel on industrial scale gold mining.

Compare that with the equivalent from just one group of manufactured products – mobile phones. That’s not to say all the gold mines should close and we should just reuse mobile phones – demand for gold would still exceed what disposed of mobile phones could provide.

“Have we seen any signs that economies and societies are switching to more sustainable ways of living?”

I’m not seeing it locally – but that’s just anecdotally. While Cambridge’s first two electric buses are welcome, it’s a drop in the ocean that doesn’t deal with the massive infrastructure changes that need to be made. The current structure of our institutions along with the political culture is – in my view – simply not fit for purpose to deliver the changes necessary.

[TV in background]

ITV News at Ten:

“Emma Piercy’s Birmingham to London commute will reduce to 45mins with HS2”

My first reaction was:

Should it even be possible to do a daily commute over such a long distance? 

But then she’s not the only one with a very long commute:

“Gary Whitham, who uses Flybe to commute to Exeter for work from his home in the Netherlands, said…“

The above is a commute by air – which has all the issues about taxation on aviation fuel.

In the grand scheme of things though, neither as individuals can be blamed singlehandedly for the climate crisis we are facing. We are where we are because of some very big decisions taken not just by the politicians of today but also previous generations of politicians, business people, financiers, academics, scientists, royals, revolutionaries, and rich people.

The legacies of previous town planning regimes

20thC town planning continues to have a huge impact on our environmental footprint – many a traffic jam can find part of its source in car-friendly suburban sprawl.

The above Cambridgeshire Regional Planning Report by Davidge in 1934 covered what is now the geography of Cambridge & South Cambridgeshire District Councils. His conclusions make for interesting reading:

Note the importance Davidge makes of open spaces – and the roles of civic society organisations including the Cambridge Preservation Society (today Cambridge Past, Present, & Future), and the Cambridge Antiquarian Society.

Note the relationships between local government and central government was also very different to what we’re familiar with today.

So why aren’t more of us reducing, reusing, repairing and recycling?

Where to start with this one! I’ll leave that for others to answer, only noting that anecdotally the more sustainable habits seem to be the exception rather than the norm. For example in Cambridge we have a welcome number of repair cafes – see http://circularcambridge.org/repair-cafes/ for more. Yet these can only go so far if the global manufacturers do not design and build their products to be made repairable – whether it was me being told my old ipod was so old when it broke that it was officially classed as ‘vintage’ and that Apple no longer made the parts that would make it repairable. Ditto for my old laptop. On the outside there’s nothing wrong with it, but I was told by the repair shop that they stopped making the parts that enabled it to be repaired. It’s a frustration that led this group of activists to form The Restart Project.

There’s the transition towns network – something quite big here in Cambridge but one that is completely undermined by the structure of local government in the county – in part polarised by housing and transport accessibility to shopping and employment in Cambridge. Again, the structure of our towns, our transport networks and our institutions seem to have polarised the county at a time when we need to be working with each other in the face of an environmental catastrophe. But I’ve not yet seen any burning desire to overhaul local government whether here or elsewhere as part of the response to the climate emergency. It’s almost as if it is in the ‘too difficult to deal with’ pile or is too abstract an issue in the face of things like floods, forest fires and heatwaves.

The community spaces to do the repairing and recycling

In a world where we are using fewer resources without significantly compromising on living standards, and one where we are reusing and repairing what we already have made, I turned my attention to this article about online auctions, in the FT. In the grand scheme of things the website The Sale Room is sort of an alternative platform to eBay. It allows lots of smalltime auction houses dotted all over the country & beyond to make their auction catalogues available to online bidders. Given that the premiums paid to the auction houses are generally in percentages, there’s a strong financial incentive for such houses to get online to bigger audiences.

One of the services many of these auction houses offer is house clearances for families of deceased persons and/or executors of estates. I can only assume that due to the volume of cases the industry has to deal with, quite often items of low value are bundled together and sold off to people with the time, the means, and the desire to disassemble the bundles, upcycle and sell on the items. Old books are a classic case.

Another common example is the sale of musical instruments. Take a common example – the violin. At any one time, dozens will be coming up for auction, from the eye-wateringly expensive, to the mass-produced one missing a string or three. One social enterprise just outside Cambridge – Emmaus at Landbeach, is one that upcycles furniture and household goods. Such is the state of Cambridge’s house and land prices that they don’t have a city centre premises to sell their goods, or one that’s easily accessible by public transport. Hence their (at the moment limited) ebay virtual shop. (Oxfam also has its own online shop).

Where to learn craft, recycling and upcycling skills

For my generation, my take is that we were artificially funnelled down a system of learning that put artificial barriers between not just different skills and subjects, but different methods of learning. Looking back at my college and university days, it strikes me how there were no opportunities and even less encouragement to do things that were far outside the humanities subjects that my fellow students were studying. I’m not going to pretend things are the same today – not least because of the very different and far more punitive financial regime the post-2010 students face. In my Brighton days, the closest I got was hanging out with environmentalists at a time when I was living on the other side of the city to the university campus. But a combination of spending two hours a day on the bus commuting, combined with my poor mental health state meant that the term Permaculture remained the name of a curious magazine on the rack of an environmental community centre rather than a lifestyle I felt confident enough to quit university for and throw myself into.

My point? We need the community spaces and community institutions to make sure that “Reduce, reuse, repair, recycle” doesn’t remain an empty slogan or something that only the hardcore environmentalists do. Because I quite like the idea of having a sideline of working to source, upcycle and sell on old, unwanted and tired musical instruments to give them a new life – ideally as part of a new music project for adult beginners.

Unfortunately I can’t see that happening without some big picture things changing in the structure of local government as well as on housing and land prices. The community workshop and warehouse space simply isn’t there in this market.

 

 

 

 

Summary:

One of the more quiet parts of Cambridge gets some long-overdue attention from the city council.

The profile of Coleridge Ward is embedded in this document. In one sense, the lack of serious competition at election time has meant that there’s no party political incentive to pour huge resources into a ward that has grown in affluence in recent years.

As Phil Rodgers’ graph from last year’s city council election results show, with the exception of 2015 most of the other parties put up paper candidates – candidates who did not campaign or make any effort to make themselves known in the local media or at hustings. (With Puffles I took part in two city-wide hustings and a couple of newspaper features). Despite our 89 votes in 2014, it’s worth noting that a number of policies in our manifesto have since been adopted by Cambridge City Council. You don’t actually need to win an election to have your policies implemented.

The Coleridge Residents Survey delivered by the Hunts Forum was the result of many conversations councillors and council officers had with a number of people – myself included. I rocked up late due to the launch of Reproduction at The Guildhall – an emotionally moving project on the life experiences of women in the workplace during pregnancy, birth, and childcare.

This is a wonderful and imaginative case study of how local trade union branches can sponsor and commission local artists to raise local awareness of important issues far beyond trade union and political circles.

A cold night on Lichfield Road

The small community centre that I’ve only ever used for voting at during election time was once occupied by a pre-fab house or three post-WWII. (It’s on the bend in the road on the left hand side of the image below from the Cambridgeshire Collection.

The old Nissen huts to the right give a hint of the more recent darker days of WWII – to the top left of the photo is a concrete pillbox that was for one of the local ARP wardens. And with good reason. We lost ARP wardens Petica Robertson and Lucy Gent in WWII not far from the other end of Cherry Hinton Road by the railway bridge – the only two women service personnel in Cambridge Killed in Action during a nazi air raid that saw the town part of Hills Road hit by incendiaries.

Just under 30 people showed up on a very cold night to see the results of the survey.

Above – Lichfield Road Hall, which for county council purposes sits within Queen Edith’s Division, hence the presence of Sam Davies of the Queen Edith’s Forum, and Cllr Amanda Taylor (Lib Dems – Queen Edith’s) who is the county councillor for this part of town following county council boundary changes that vanquished Coleridge Division in 2016. 

Selecting just a few of the graphs on the handout – I’m awaiting a link to the full report online, traffic, congestion and crime will come as no surprise. Other parts of Cambridge will show similar concerns.

While the response rate could have been higher, it’s a useful starting point for discussions – and there seems to be a critical mass of interested people who are willing to take this forward.

Not surprisingly it was church groups that came out on top in the survey – the council needed a ‘quick win’ and the local churches built at the same time as the original neighbourhood are inevitably the longest-established civic society institutions.

The findings I didn’t expect were the low scores for The Junction and the Folk Festival. People said that neither had sent them publicity for tickets or invitations to community events even though they were on their doorstep. This is a big missed opportunity for both institutions – the Folk Festival having been around for about twice as long as the now 30-year-old Junction – oh, and ***come to The Junction’s Birthday Party!***

In the grand scheme of things, local outreach and marketing should be quick and fairly easy wins for both. It’s far less effort to get to and from the venues – it’s walking distance. For the Folk Festival, you get all the benefits of a festival with the comforts of home – showers and a warm bed! From a financial perspective it’s all the more important for the city in the face of intense competition from other festivals. Having that reserve of local residents willing and able to go to it means more revenue can be reinvested back into the city in the years when tickets are harder to sell outside the city.

Could The Junction host a Cambridge Societies Fair? (Like a university freshers’ fair but for town people?)

I first blogged about this in 2012, and it evolved via Puffles’ election campaign in 2014 into the now annual and very successful Volunteer for Cambridge Fair. As well as bringing people into The Guildhall to see what volunteering opportunities are available, it’s also become an annual gathering of volunteers and activists to catch up with each other and find out who is doing what. It is also one of the few joint town-gown events in the civic calendar – the students’ work in organising and setting up being essential, and quite frankly giving it the sort of buzz that only young people can give it.

The Junction is ideally placed to host something for South Cambridge because as its name suggests, it sits on (not just a railway junction but also) a road junction – with bus routes from the south and south east stopping by. Furthermore, with so many newly-built houses and flats within walking distance, such an annual event will inevitably benefit people and families who have recently moved to Cambridge. Given that the city is due to grow from 130,000 people this year to 160,000 by about 2035, there’s a strong public interest to host such events that bring people together.