Grit, imagination and snow ploughs

Town & Country Planning, February 2010

“The Afghan, amidst the winter snows, is as much under the eye of Almighty God as you or me,” said William Ewart Gladstone in his famous speech of 1874, and I keep thinking of him as I trudge to work each morning at the moment, wondering if the same applies to me.

Because I am also living temporarily amidst the winter snows, in Western Massachusetts – in the early stages of launching the New Economics Foundation in the USA – and it snows all the time. I have, in fact, become completely sick of snow. It holds now charm for me any more. Ugh.

I am living in a rather remote and mountainous area known as the Berkshires, pronounced as in ‘quirk’ or ‘Dirk’, rather than in the English ‘bark’, and it has given me a completely new perspective on the localism debate back in the UK.

I happened to be hanging around the till in the pharmacy yesterday, as the locals were discussing the latest blizzard warning, as the subject emerged of the three feet of snow which – as I write – is crippling the federal government in Washington.

“Oh, I’m so sad for them,” said the lady behind the counter. “I’m joking, right.”

The truth is that so many people here hate central government with a practised bitterness that goes beyond most similar sentiments in the UK.

You can see why, of course. The state I am now living in, Massachusetts, is a sovereign body with almost absolute power to order their own affairs. From the high street of Great Barrington, the federal government seems short of an obvious purpose, except perhaps to spend money – something they have become so practiced at that they have flooded the world with dollars.

But the opposite is also true, and we should never forget this as we push for greater autonomy in England. The story of the civil rights movement during the 20th century was enough to flag up a vital purpose for central government here, which is why liberal America still suspects localism. The word ‘Alabama’ springs to mind.

I heard recently of a local library committee, also in the Deep South, which banned Anne Frank’s Diary from the local shelves, on the grounds that it was “a bit of a downer”. There are perils of localism, let’s not deny it.

The downsides of localism and centralism could be characterised by the contrast between handing local life over to the stupidity and ignorance of individuals and handing it over to the equivalent stupidity and ignorance of systems.

The latter is a much more powerful force than the former, but that doesn’t mean there is no threat from local ignorance.

But then, when the snow comes, as it does most days round here, the whole idea of local autonomy seems hugely attractive, as the snow-ploughs dash about, sorting out the roads – all the roads, not just the main ones. Three inches of snow are nothing much here.

It is an amazing contrast to our experience of south London in the snow before and after Chistmas. A few centimetres fall, everyone seems to dash out in their cars, the buses get stuck, the traffic builds up, the schools close and everyone searches for salt and grit.

Snow ploughs? Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen one in Britain, yet they are not exactly expensive pieces of equipment to bolt onto the front of local authority vehicles as the snow looms.

The story goes that a failure to clear the streets of Chicago of snow, a generation ago, was fatal to the fearsome Democrat administration of Mayor Daley. Ever since then, political folklore in the USA suggests that – like collecting the rubbish or burying the dead in Britain – the one thing elected government absolutely has to do is clear the snow.

I have witnessed the streets of New York City, under Mayor Bloomberg, waiting for snow, with the ploughs revving their engines at every junction, frantic for the signal to start.

It is easy to forget, all the way across the Atlantic, that one of the most attractive and exciting features of life in the United States is the sense that things are possible. They have their streets cleared of snow before your average council leader can even say ‘pass the grit”, and so much else besides.

The influential director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, David Morris – one of the key figures in the localism movement in the USA – wrote a generation ago that most cities “have far too much government and not enough governance”.

He was right, but it has been changing here ever since. The bureaucracy is hopeless, but it may be changing, thanks partly to a series of initiatives by Vice President Gore a decade ago.

But the sense of imagination and possibility in local government is manifest, not quite everywhere, but it is a good deal widespread than in poor centralised, disempowered, disempowering Britain, with its potent cult of local government impossiblism.

ends