Changing the narrative
Town & Country Planning, October 2009
One of the ineffable laws of public speaking, at least when I do it, is that any opposition always seems to come from the far right-hand corner of the room.
Why is that? I’ve often wondered. I speak in public quite often, with varying degrees of success, but the people who object to what I say always seem to sit in that corner. Not just difficult or aggressive questions, but the occasional gesticulation or vigorous shaking of the head.
The first time I got the head-shaking, the man actually turned out to have Tourette’s Syndrome, but he was still sitting in the far right hand corner.
I mention this because I faced another bout of head-shaking when I was talking about local money flows last week, also from the right hand corner. The head-shaker followed up by congratulating the speaker after me for his “welcome antidote” to my flaky idealism.
The questioner was chair of the planning committee from a southern local authority. I was talking about high streets, clone towns and how to make them thrive in the future.
It wasn’t a huge encounter, but it made me realise why David Cameron – assuming he forms a government next year – will probably not, in fact, institute the wide-ranging bout of decentralisation, as we used to call it, that we all need.
The reason is that we still have no narrative of localism that includes economics. We still have no widely accepted critique of centralisation, not just based on its democratic legitimacy – or its aesthetics when it comes to clone towns – but on its effects on our finances.
What are the costs of centralisation, for example? We don’t know. The research hasn’t been done. The costs of localism are clear, but what about the huge expense of the mistakes, inefficiencies and sclerosis of a centralised state?
What are the true costs of driving out small, local business from our high streets? We don’t know. The research, where it has been done, has mainly been done in the USA and more than a decade ago.
Until that work is done, we will remain in thrall to the old assumptions of the economics of scale, which are still pedalled around Whitehall by the IT consultancies. Most local authorities will still work on the old model that getting a thriving local economy means being supplicants to Tesco.
When politicians gargle with the rhetoric of localism, they may actually believe it. They may intend that, the moment they have been catapulted into office, they will organise a massive decentralisation of political and economic power.
But they are wrong. Without that economic narrative to explain why we will be better off local, those ambitions will not survive the Whitehall machine. Their roots don’t go deep enough.
So when my questioner accused me of idealism, when the ‘real world’ meant the ‘bottom line’, it seems to me to have been as much my fault as his.
We have managed to get across the idea that it would be nicer, more attractive, more fun, to have bustling high streets full of local names. That is accepted.
But we haven’t communicated the rest of the critique – that local economies that depend on a handful of brand names are less stable, less independent, less robust and less wealthy than those where local money flows stay circulating.
I am interested in rolling back clone towns simply because they are impoverishing, but I haven’t managed to put that across.
There are councillors and planning officers out there who understand that, and who use LM3 or other measurement tools to work out where their local earnings are going – and even trying to plan accordingly. But it is still a minority. The rest are the slaves, as Keynes put it, “of some defunct economist”.
This kind of shift in narrative, where it goes mainstream, tends to start and begin to thrive in local government. In fact, that is the testbed where economic hypotheses turn out to be useful or useless, because they can be tested in the real world.
But we’re not there yet. We won’t be until planning committees regularly ask themselves: “Is this really an anchor store is it actually intending to corrode the surrounding businesses?”
Or: “Is this scheme going to increase the velocity of local earnings, or is it just going to hoover them up?”
Until that time, the business of local economics will remain rhetoric, and I’m going to get vigorous head-shaking in the right-hand corner of the room.
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. His new books are Money Matters (Alastair Sawday) and The New Economics: a bigger picture (Earthscan). www.david-boyle.co.uk
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