Like Gibbon

Oh dear, I seem to be on a declining trend. 

In October, my first full month as one of these new-fangled bloggers, I received 147 page views. In November, this fell to 118. So far this month, I’ve had 34.

I’m worried.

I’m not expecting to be the new Robert Peston, but it is only worth talking to the world if the world wants to listen.

I won’t be here next week (I’ll be cosily ensconced in the land of cold turkey) but what am I to do on my return? After all, there’s not much I can do to raise awareness of this blog myself. I don’t tweet (and, even if I did, I’d then have to find followers – which is the same job) and I’m too embarrassed to tell everyone I meet that “I have a blog”. It just sounds too postmodern.

So, perhaps, I need to accept a gradual descent into anonymity from the heights of 147 page views. On the current trend, I’ll be down to one view per month by April. That will be my mum.

However, there might be an alternative. If you, dear reader, could tell the world about my blog then, you never know, more of you might read it.

You see, while there aren’t many of you, I do know that there are a few. A couple of you have posted comments, a few more of you have mentioned it to me on the phone and I can see from my stats package that the 69 page views in the last month are not all the same person.

So, go on, tell the world! And while you’re doing it, wish it, as I wish you, a very merry Christmas and a joyful and prosperous new year.

Right place, right time

Do you recognise this church? Are you sure? Fair enough; it is a bit obscure. It is Dials Methodist Church, Gray Court, South Carolina. While you may not have known the name, the shape is probably familiar. A steeple rising from behind a pediment (that's the triangular bit) supported by columns and preceded by steps is a classic of American church design, repeated in thousands of small towns and big cities.

While these unremarkable churches are endlessly varied, they have one common ancestor; and it isn't American.

St Martin-in-the-Fields is one of London's finest buildings; and one of its most overlooked. Sitting in the corner of Trafalgar Square, it is the square's finest piece of architecture but without the celebrity sheen generated by lions, fountains, Nelson, the National Gallery and the fourth plinth. Goodness, even Admiralty Arch has acquired a certain grotesque glamour since becoming known for John Prescott doing the unthinkable with his secretary Tracey Temple.

While few Londoners now stop to admire St Martins (and very few could name James Gibbs as its architect), it was once the most talked about building in London. Gibbs combined the classic Italian temple front (columns and pediment) with an English baroque steeple. No-one had done this before, and Londoners (always conservative about church design) were sceptical anyone should have done.

However, if he had wanted architectural influence in what was to become the world's largest Christian country, he was building at right time. At the start of the 18th century, the population of the English colonies was 275,000 and the largest city, Boston, had a population of 7,000; a tenth the size of today's Walthamstow. St Martins was completed in 1724. By the end of that century, the newly-independent United States of America had a population of 4 million, and the radical design of Gibb's new church had spawned hundreds of imitations.

It's easy to take Trafalgar Square for granted, but don't. I was reminded of this on Sunday, at one of our family Christmas traditions. Every year, St Martins holds a blessing of the crib in the centre of the square. Standing in the cold and dark singing carols by lanternlight, surrounded by the noise and mundanity of the modern city, there is a magic in the layers of history to be found in the buildings of a square built for a long-lost empire. The names of some of the most prominent buildings speak directly to this history (South Africa House, Canada House, Uganda House) but so, much more subtly, does St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Money

Blimey, it's not easy being Chancellor, is it. No-one likes you, endless difficult decisions and everyone thinks they could do the job better. A bit like managing the England team but without a salary twenty-two times higher.

Having said that, I'm still not entirely convinced that George Osborne's got it right. The thing is that he seems to have misunderstood the nature of the problem he is trying to solve. Conventional wisdom is that "there's not enough money". But that's not right. Thanks to Sir Mervyn King's printing press, there's more money than there's ever been in history. The problem is that it's not moving about fast enough.

You see, "the economy" is simply a word we use to describe economic activity. The key word here is activity. If a pound is printed by the Bank, and promptly sits in the vaults of Barclays for a year then that pound has been worth a pound. However, if it is spent by an old lady on a bus fare which is used to pay a bus driver who uses it to buy some chips from a chippie who repaints her shop with paint from Homebase who pay it in corporation tax to the Chancellor who uses it to pay a teacher who uses it to pay his mortgage, then that pound has been worth seven pounds by the end of the year. Each time that pound changes hands, the great GDP-omiter clunks up another quid. The Chancellor's task, therefore, is to work out how to make Mervyn's millions move faster.

OK, so how do we do that? Well, if you want money to move faster, you need to get it into the hands of people who will spend it. A pound in a pocket is of no value to the economy: a pound in a palm is. By far the people most likely to spend all the money they're given are the poor. It's obvious when you think about it. Money given to the poor is valuable to the economy, money given to the rich stagnates; especially in a recession when confidence is low and everyone who can will hoard cash for a rainy day.

This is why "we're all in it together" isn't just about fairness, it's about economic necessity.

So how did George do? Well, despite the pain there were a few tax cuts in today's autumn statement. Increases to the personal allowance, tweaks to inheritance tax and a headline cut in corporation tax make sense. Companies now exist in a global marketplace, and it makes sense to attract firms to Britain. The reason Starbucks pay no tax in Britain is because they'd pay less by pretending their coffee shops are in Switzerland. Cut their taxes, and they might actually pay them.

There was also a cut in planned fuel duty. This seems a shame. 50% of the poorest fifth do not even own a car. The one tax cut we've got and 50% of the poor won't get a penny from it. Conversely, the continued squeeze on both benefits and tax credits will significantly reduce their real incomes. Taking money from the only group certain to spend it might not be the best idea for growing the economy.

So what is to be done? Well, perhaps instead of taking money from the people most likely to spend it, we should give them more. By all means make the structural changes to welfare that need to be made (and some do). But provide transitional support to get the poorest through the change. Good idea, but where will the money come from? Why, from Sir Mervyn, of course. 

Britain’s Quantitative Easing of £375 billion is worth £6,000 per head or £24,000 per family. Directed at the two-thirds of households with incomes below average (yes, most of us!) and that works out as a transitional payment of roughly £15,000 per household. Assume it's paid over three years, and that's an extra £5k per year to adjust to the pain of reduced public services.

That way, the Government gets to stick to its austerity plans while the poor kick start spending in the economy. Let's call it "trickle up". Unlike trickle down (the economic creed beloved of Thatcherites) it might even work.

Defoe's playground

On Sunday, I climbed a sixteenth century tower, toured a tudor manor house built by a courtier to Henry VIII, took tea in a National Trust teashop and strolled down a Georgian market street. I also watched the leaves fall in a Georgian  square and wandered through green space originally a sixteenth century common (vaguely reminiscent of Cambridge's Parker's Piece).

Where did I do these things? That's right: Hackney. 

An area of London I grew up slightly fearing, famed for its Murder Mile and sink schools, the place I have discovered since moving to East London is entirely different to my childhood perception. It is far more clearly the chain of ancient villages (Hackney, Homerton, Clapton, Wyck) than the cliche I thought I knew.

If you haven't visited in the last few decades, I strongly suggest you prepare yourself for a treat. 

Identity

I've just got back from taking part in a film campaigning to save Walthamstow. 

OK, perhaps that's a bit dramatic. The context is the review of constituency boundaries currently taking place (which, thanks to Nick Clegg's hissy fit over Lords reform, may never be implemented). It has proposed abolishing Walthamstow.

Up until now, constituencies have been designed to reflect the natural boundaries of local communities. This is amorphous, but the boundary commission seems, generally, to have got it right. The consequence, though, has been wildly differing numbers of electors in different seats. The Isle of Wight crams 111,000 voters into its self-evident borders, while at the opposite end of the country, Orkney and Shetland's 32,000 voters are outnumbered by sheep four to one.

This is changing. From now on, every seat (except, as it happens, the Isle of Wight) will contain 76,641 electors; with a 5% variance permitted. This means the boundary commission's longstanding respect for natural borders must be cast aside. It is for this reason that Walthamstow, a clearly defined single community with a thousand-year history and a powerful sense of identity, is to be lost. Half of Walthamstow is to be merged with Chingford; the other half with Leyton.

Does it matter? I passionately believe it does, but I haven't really got any evidence. Perhaps we shouldn't worry at all about natural borders or communities and just divide the nation into perfectly equal sized boxes: the population equivalent of the back cover of the Ordnance Survey map. It would be easy, but surely an MP should represent a place that voters recognise, believe in and identify with? Rightly or wrongly, I am sure democracy will be weaker if that tradition is abandoned.

The case study is local authorities. Over the last fifty years, successive Governments have weakened the bonds between councils and people as local authority borders have become more logical and administratively convenient; but less relevant to the people the councils are meant to serve.

Until 1965, Walthamstow was a borough in its own right. Now it is part of Waltham Forest; an entity that merges the leafy suburbs of Chingford and the northern tip of the Olympic park in gritty Leyton. In the half century since local council borders were redrawn in the name of convenience our local authorities have become the weakest in Europe. Led by people we don't know, in elections we don't care about, they have no power and little influence. Just perhaps, who knows, Walthamstow council might have been able to keep the power and influence that its larger successor has gradually lost.

I don't know; perhaps I'm mad. Just 17 of us turned up to take part in the film, out of 65,000 of us in the constituency. Perhaps this simply doesn't matter. Does it? Do you think your council or your constituency should be designed around the place you feel you live in? Maybe you don't.

But two final thoughts. If we do this with councils and constituencies, perhaps we should do it with nations? There are 503 million of us in the European Union, and 27 nation states. Well, 27's a stupid number - let's make it 20. It's neater, and means that each

country could contain 25 million people. Fine. Let's start in the West. 6 million live on the island of Ireland. Group Ireland with Wales, South West England, North West England and the West Midlands and we've got our 25 million. Now let's start in the north. Scotland, the North East, the East Midlands, the East of England and London also make around 25 million. Good. The final region would then combine the South East of England, Nord-pas-de-Calais, Picardy, Upper Normandy and Ile de France. Blimey, combining the commuter heartlands of both Paris and London, this country would be the world expert in commuter train travel. Bit odd that most of the population would need to cross a national border to get to work each day, but we can't let these things get in the way of logic. After all, much better that every country is a nice, neat average size...

If we're going to be like this, then let's take it to its true extreme and simply have the Government divide us randomly like the teacher did when splitting us into groups at school. "You're in 1, you're in 2, you're in 3..." and so on to 600, then back to the beginning. I might end up voting with a farmer in Falkirk, a teacher from Totnes and a builder from Birmingham. We'd all get together on Facebook and form our own, new community untrammelled by the false proximity of disregarded geography. It sounds rather romantic.

If you have an opinion on the boundary review (especially if you live in Walthamstow!) visit http://consultation.boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/

Life

The world divides into two distinct tribes: those that have (successfully or otherwise) attempted to become parents, and those that have not. It's a division more fundamental than any of race, class or gender, with procreation bringing its own distinct language to ensure the parental elect remain aloof from the barbarians. When, last week, I was forced to tell people that my wife was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy, their reaction instantly identified the listener's alignment. 

Those in the know reacted with horror: their eyes widened, their mouths opened and they expressed sympathy, sorrow and support. By contrast, the rest looked puzzled. Several said congratulations, but their furrowed brows revealed their fear that the "ectopic" caveat must, in some unexplained way, partially negate the benefit of the pregnancy.

As it is perfectly possible that you, my reader, forms part of this second group; let me explain. An ectopic pregnancy is a pregnancy where the fertilised egg (and, yes, I'm sorry, we must use this kind of language when we talk about this topic) implants in a part of the female reproductive system that is not the womb; typically the fallopian tubes (and, yes, sorry but there are tubes involved in all this). In rare cases, it is fatal. In a large minority of cases, it costs the woman her fertility. In all cases, the potential baby is lost and the woman feels dreadful. The expressions of sympathy were deserved.

My wife, I'm glad to report, did not need to have surgery and is starting to recover. However, to get here has involved several trips to our local hospital, and specifically the early pregnancy unit (the reason, incidentally, for my silence last week is that I was there). The early pregnancy unit is one of those strange "joy and sorrow" places that you only visit if something wonderful or desperate is happening. Registry offices have the same atmosphere.

Growing up in Camden, the only two occasions I visited our rather forbidding local registry office in Kings Cross were for my brother's wedding and to register my father's death.

Like the early pregnancy unit, the Camden registry office had that downbeat public sector aesthetic. Notices handwritten or badly typed are taped to the walls; furniture is mismatching but not in the Shoreditch style and the decorative scheme is impossible to date even to a broad era, clearly having accumulated piecemeal over decades. It is as if the human stories within need to be diluted by an environment as bland as they are momentous.

Registering my father's death was odd. I was there to do the worst job I've ever had to do, and I was standing surrounded by ecstatic young couples there to register the child that - to them that day - was the only thing in their world. Wrapped up in their own cocoon of neo-natal bliss, they probably didn't notice the mourners in the queue. 

At the time it seemed rather insensitive to put us together; let alone with a wedding taking place outside the door. However, births, deaths and marriages are the stepping stones of life and it's probably a good thing to be reminded every so often that these are the big things and, actually, they are the only things that really matter.

Excuses, excuses

Oh dear, I’ve only been writing a month and already I’m making excuses.

The problem is, I knew what I meant, but I forgot to tell you.

When I said that I’d post every Wednesday, what I meant was that I’d post every Wednesday when I’m in London.

I’m treating this as an adjunct to my job, and I’m quite happy to take time off – but only when I’m away. Trouble is, I didn’t tell you that at the time, and now I feel I’m letting you down.

Not, of course, that I know who you are. The rather limited stats provided by Google tell me that I’ve had 88 page views so far. Of those, 65 have been generated in the UK (not surprising), 10 in the US (gee, hi), 6 in Russia (glad I learnt Russian as a kid – привет to my Russian reader) and a few each from Germany, Spain and France.  I didn’t expect to be so cosmopolitan. Who are you all? Lovely to meet you, all the same.

Actually, I’m guessing that the vast majority of you stumbled here by mistake, and pretty quickly moved on. Nevertheless, it is nice to make a passing acquaintance.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I’m not here. I’m away this week and next week.

I’ll be back the week after, so you’ll next hear from me on Wednesday 7^th November when I’ll tell you where we’ve been. I'll then be posting every Wednesday until Christmas. In the meantime, enjoy Halloween, enjoy Firework Night and, for my Russian reader, I hope the Day of People’s Unity on November 4^th is a blast.

Speak soon.

 

Borders

How funny. On the day I devote my blog post to a discussion about the importance of political borders representing a true sense of place, the boundary commission announces the abolition of where I live.

 

If they have their way, the constituency of Walthamstow will be no more, divided down the middle between Labour Leyton and Tory Chingford. I am horrified. Constituencies work if they reflect places people believe in, and recognise. Walthamstow must be saved!

Big Cities

Do you know which is the largest city in Europe? London, isn't it. It’s obvious.

Well, I thought that too. It's been said so frequently and is demonstrably true. Just google "Europe cities population" and you'll get a raft of league tables, virtually all of which put London at their head. It's obvious: but not true.

I was reminded of this last weekend. My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary with a trip to the Kent coast. The London we whizzed through on the High Speed line (normally used by Eurostar) is very different to the London most of us live in. It feels bigger, more industrial and more sprawling. The landscape is dominated by large factories, major roads and estates of cheap housing. The city spills to an end around the Medway towns; the green belt doesn't seem to apply here. It all feels so unlike the normal London boundary (an abrupt transition from fifties semis to rolling fields) and rather reminiscent of the Paris banlieue.

It was being on holiday in Paris last year that made me realise that there was something wrong with my traditional assumption that London is the largest city in Europe. After all, when you leave Paris by train (in almost every direction) there seems to be a lot of sprawling city to travel through, long after the périphérique has been passed.

In fact, if you didn't know, you'd think you were passing through a very large city indeed. Larger than London? Surely not; London's the largest city in Europe; isn't it?

Well, no. It is if you define the city as the population of its political area. However, if you use the rather more human definition of the number of people who live in the same, contiguous urban area, then it definitely is not. Paris is the largest with 10.8m people; London has ony 8.5m (believe it or not, just the 34th largest city on earth).

What is fascinating, however, is how close the population of London's urban area is to the political population. i.e. the vast majority of people that live in the London urban area, also live in the political entity we call London. Yes, there are a few anomalies. The poor folk of Watford, Rickmansworth and Ewell are clearly residents of London, but don't get to vote for the Mayor. Like them, the citizens of Staines, Shepperton and Dartford avoided the tax precept for the Olympics but get to live in the host city.

However, these people are exceptions. There are 8.2m people in the political London; not far off the 8.5m in the urban area (Watford ain't that big).

By contrast, the urban area of Paris contains 10.8m, but the political Paris contains just 2.1m. The city of New York contains 8.2m people (wow, they're so like us!) - but the urban area contains an astonishing 20.4m. The world's largest city by urban population is Tokyo (37.1m!) but only 8.9m of them actually live in Tokyo. There are 16 different places on earth in which more than 15m people live together, but only one city has an official population of more than 15m (Shanghai - unlike Western cities, Chinese cities' geographies tend to be larger than their urban area, not smaller).

There are obviously thousands of reasons why London has been so successful, but I would hypothesise that one of them is that it has ensured that, roughly, the political city is kept up-to-date with the human city it is designed to reflect.

London is full of relics of past borders. Bits of the old Roman wall remain around the City of London that for centuries constituted the political city. Read Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year for some evocative descriptions of the "Liberties" - the various areas of urban London that fell outside the City boundaries in the seventeenth century. By the 19th century, these anomalies had been swept away, as the border caught up with the growth of the City. Walking on Hampstead Heath recently, I came across a rather overgrown boundary post, marking the then edge of London and the start of Middlesex. Today, the Heath is entirely in Zone 2.

You only have to walk the streets of St Denis in the underprivileged Paris suburbs, or witness the extraordinary deprivation of Newark, immediately across the Hudson from Manhatton (the most valuable island on earth?), to realise why this matters. Londoners really are all in it together; we vote for the same Mayor, we pay the same taxes (much of your local council tax is actually a GLA precept) and we appear on the same maps. You look at any map of Paris and New York, and you'll find the banlieue or Newark aren't even shown; there's a dotted line and then blank space. There be dragons, perhaps - or poor people.

We don't have no-go areas, unlike both those cities. When things do go wrong (as they did last year), it is recognised as a problem for the whole city, not just for the lawless others. I very much doubt the affluent of Paris or New York would feel a sense of ownership or interest if there was a riot in Aubervilliers or Union City, despite both being just a couple miles from the cities known from the tourist guide books.

Perhaps I'm being overly idealistic, but I am sure that one reason why London works (socially, economically, politically) is because it's one city. I can’t prove it, but if you’re reading this in London, and you don’t live in Ewell, then we are common citizens of one community – and that wouldn’t be the case if this was Paris.

Change

Have you heard of the Turing Test? Coined by the great Alan Turing, it is the ultimate test for a computer; that a human should mistake it for another human. At the time he came up with the idea, the washing machine was the big thing in technology and the very thought must have seemed incredible. Turing was in the news last week, when the Director of British intelligence-gathering operation GCHQ, made a speech calling for a new generation of Alan Turings. Turing, famous as the great codebreaker of Bletchley Park, was the founder of modern computing. He created the blueprint for the first recognisable computer, created the first algorithm and developed the concept of a computer programme. Arguably, through his work at Bletchley Park, Turing did more than any other single individual to win the war, and then did more than any other single individual to create the world in which we now live. It is almost impossible to overstate his legacy.
 
And yet, less than ten years after the then 33-year old Turing left Bletchley Park, he was dead. In 1952, he was burgled by an accomplice of his male lover. Rightly, he reported the crime to the police. Turing was arrested and charged with gross indecency.

It may seem incredible to us today, but his sentence (offered as an alternative to imprisonment) was a course of synthetic oestrogen, designed to prevent reoffending. It worked. He became impotent, and suffered the humiliation of growing breasts. He lost his security clearance and was fired from GCHQ. Two years' later, he was found dead, killed by cyanide poisoning. The inquest reported suicide. He was 42.
 
Just imagine what might have happened had he lived? Perhaps aged 64, he would have met the young Steve Jobs on a rare visit to California and formed a bond with the man who would do more than anyone else to popularise his invention? Perhaps aged 78 he would have kept a paternal eye on the two young founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who would set as their mission the task of decoding everything for everyone. And, had he lived long enough to receive a birthday card from the Queen, perhaps the centenarian Turing would have taken his place alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee as part of Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony; the two great (British) pioneers of computing united in unaccustomed acclaim.
 
Who knows? We will never know, because he died sixty years ago. One of the finest minds this country ever produced was cut down by some of the smallest.

In one sense it is a mark of how far we have progressed that this story is as shocking as it is. In a week which has also seen the exposure of Sir Jimmy Savile's child abuse (some of which dates from the same decade), it is clear how much society has changed. The Tory Mayor of London, writing in today’s Evening Standard says he “can’t see what the fuss is about” with the legalisation of gay marriage.

To those of us in the metropolitan, liberal capital it feels like we’re on an inevitable path. We’re not. There’s no such thing. As the generation that remembers 1950s Britain ages, it is the responsibility of all us to make sure we don’t go back to it.