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.

Engagement

So, did you see it? What do you mean you were out at work? Well, so was I, actually. But I bet everyone else tuned in. I imagine the streets of London were deserted as families and colleagues huddled round their TV sets to watch the keynote conference speech by the Leader of the Opposition.

Well, perhaps not. Political disengagement is the watchword, nobody cares, our politics is going to hell in a handcart. Certainly, that's the narrative in the broadsheets. And it's clearly true that people are disengaged from politics - turnout in every election for twenty years has been lower than in every election for the preceding thirty. The result is that it took Neil Kinnock 11.5m votes to come second in 1992, but David Cameron was able to top the poll in 2010 with 10.7m. Apathy rules - what are we going to do about it?

Before getting too panicked, however, should we just ask ourselves whether it matters? Perhaps political disengagement is a sign that, deep down, the public knows that the system works OK. High levels of political engagement, after all, are generally negative. The Jarrow marchers did not come to London to congratulate the National Government on its outstanding performance; the Peasants' Revolt was not a marque of acclamation, while neither French nor Russian revolutions were a vote of confidence in the ruling aristocracies.

After division and oscillation in the 1970s and 1980s, the last two decades have been characterised by consensus. Both parties are offering market economies, but with high levels of public spending on services. Unlike the vicious oppositionism that now defines American politics, the British parties tend to adopt and adapt the legacy from the previous Government. Mrs Thatcher curbed the unions and privatised those elements of the state that could join the market economy. Tony Blair kept the economic legacy but modernised our attitudes to race and sexuality. David Cameron has accepted the social change, but is seeking to cut spending on welfare. Ed Balls this week acknowledged that many Tory spending cuts would stay. A virtuous circle, perhaps?

When people complain that they're "all the same", it might be because the parties have become good at understanding the instincts of the population and adapting policies to suit. This doesn't mean that the public are not fearful of our economic position, and frustrated with our institutions. But it might mean that they temper their frustration with a recognition that, broadly, the parties are delivering sane and sensible policies. This may seem a strange thing to say on the day of the great Virgin Trains fiasco, and it is certainly true that sometimes Governments get it badly wrong (invading Iraq and dismantling the NHS, for example) and in these cases you see large protest movements emerge very quickly. However, on the key objectives of Government (keeping us safe and money moving), people are perhaps content enough to devote their energies to raising their families and keeping their jobs. Greece shows what happens when that ceases to be the case.

Most people ignore things that work. Every few years, I become very engaged with our kitchen boiler, but only when it stops working. My current disengagement with the boiler, and comparative engagement with the dishwasher, should not be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the dishwasher.

Turnout in the last US election was the highest since 1968, as the American system showed dangerous signs of instability. If I'm right, turnout this time will be higher still. By contrast, perhaps we should hope for a bit more disengagement. The opposite may be a symptom of suffering, and that's sadly all too likely given the upcoming cuts.