Training | 2010.03.15
The painful limits of localism | Julian Glover
As the high-speed rail plans prove, the latest Tory attempt to distinguish between the national and the local is essential
Every field of endeavour produces its classic conundrums, the tough nuts it never quite cracks. For centuries, engineering sought the secret of perpetual motion. Applied physics keeps looking for an efficient means of storing electrical power. In democratic politics our age is not the first to struggle to devolve decision-making without throwing sand into the wheels of big national plans: to reconcile bottom-up with top-down.
To listen to the rhetoric alone, you\'d think localisation was the spirit of the age. At times the political future sounds like a Google Zeitgeist conference, all open-sourced and self-reliant; but a country is not Wikipedia and cannot be built without a guiding hand. There are things that benefit a large number of people, to varying and perhaps unknowable degrees, but damage the interests of a smaller group seriously and immediately. The liberal dilemma is how to balance the harm against the gain. The smaller group is likely to have a more urgent sense of its own interests. The concept of collective democracy always falters at this point. Even Rousseau had to invent a lawgiver to bang heads together in his idealist city state.
The other day the Conservative party issued a document which ran hard into this problem. Its green paper on planning belies the myth that the party has nothing interesting to say. It set out, in detail, the case for a collaborative planning system, a charter for active and concerned individuals. "Sheringham citizens", we might call them, after last week\'s brave vote by councillors in Norfolk to refuse permission for a new Tesco store – backing locals rather than bureaucrats and lobbyists. But the Tory document falters in the face of unavoidable conflict between local and national.
What if Sheringham had voted no not to a supermarket, but a windfarm, or a nuclear plant needed to meet low carbon targets? Courageous locals would be dubbed obstreperous nimbys instead. The townspeople would still be right to make their objections felt. But the nation might be right to overrule them.
"Disenfranchisement leads to antagonism," says the Tory document, and who could disagree, except at some point someone will always say no. When the Romans built Watling Street woad-clad tribesmen probably resented it, and when Thomas Telford drove his Holyhead road in a straight line from London, landowners were upset. But both pieces of construction were nationally necessary. Both are still in use today.
The only reasonable response is to admit, as the Tories do, that some projects should be declared local – and so separated from the central state – and others national necessities – and so, in large part, decided by it. This is a more effective trade-off than we get now, with the supposedly local part of the planning tangled up in bureaucracy and targets. But who decides what is national and what is local? New housing is a national necessity in Labour eyes, but a local issue to many Tories. Government is needed to split the difference.
All of which takes us to the transport white paper, which comes out on Thursday. The document – perhaps the last important act of the Labour government – will detail to within a few metres the route of a high-speed railway from London to Birmingham, and less precise plans for two lines beyond that to Manchester and Yorkshire. People in Buckinghamshire are in for a shock. An unavoidably visible and noisy rail line is to be built through the Chilterns, with huge likely benefit for the national economy and environment over centuries, but little today for the people in Buckinghamshire affected by its construction, since the trains will not even stop during the 31-minute journey from west London to Birmingham airport.
At this point localism goes out the window. "Very major linear projects like high-speed rail," the Tories say, should be built by an act of parliament. Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, has already got this process under way, announcing a hybrid bill that – in the hope an incoming Conservative government might stick with his plans – avoids deploying the new Infrastructure Planning Commission , a body the opposition has promised to abolish. The IPC is the ultimate expression of Labour\'s commitment to national need above local desires, but any government will soon discover that its centralist work will have to continue in some form.
The political lubricant in such frictional interfaces between national and local is to promise "consultation": code for saying we are going ahead, but first we will allow you to tell us why we shouldn\'t. The Tories – who backed high-speed rail before Labour – are indeed promising to consult on the new line\'s route. They will refuse to sign up to Adonis\'s plans on Thursday, in part because they are fixated on the idea of a station slightly closer to Heathrow. Despite appearances, neither party is planning to send trains underneath the airport – unaffordable – and both expect passengers to change to another service for a transfer to Heathrow\'s terminals. Both also accept that, on one alignment or another, the line will run through the Chilterns, cruelly exposing the limits of what can be changed by discussion. A future government could tweak the route – any of us could, offered a marker pen and an OS map – but only to shunt it into someone else\'s backyard.
There\'s something arbitrary, and brutal, about all this. But if we are to respect what is local and what is national, then someone, somewhere, is going to have to grit their teeth and designate the dividing line.
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