by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
I read further into the book and came across a phenomenon that thousands of people had written about in the nominations we received for Crap Towns. Nairn showed nine pictures of suburban streets, listed the names of nine towns and asked the reader to decide which was which. The point was that this was impossible. From Carlisle to Southampton, everywhere looked the same. This has developed one stage further today with our uniform high streets and out-of-town shopping malls. Every town in Britain has become a sinister replication of the same place, and it’s getting worse.
At the end of his book Nairn made his call to arms, and it’s worth reprinting here because little has changed: ‘The action is needed NOW. So the attack must come from outside. That is a job for all of us, and the only qualification we need is to have eyes to sec ... if you think they represent a universal letting down and greying out; if you think that they should be fought and not accepted ... Use your double birthright - as a free-thinking human being and as a Briton lucky enough to be born into a country where the individual voice can still get a hearing.’ Don’t expect the answers to come from the ‘experts’ - they’ve had their way, and look what they’ve done. The answers will come from the opinions and thoughts of ordinary local people. The systems are actually in place to protect and preserve our communities, but we’ll never be able to use them until we start to reclaim our time from the world of work. After all, who can attend a public inquiry for months on end to try to save their local community if they have a full-time job? The way we live - the reason for the mess in our minds that’s reflected in our environment - will need a radical rethink if we are to stop things from getting worse.
Thankfully, some people are fighting against Nairn’s Subtopia. People like Dorothy in Derby, for example, who decided to camp on the roof of the bus station because she didn’t want luxury apartments and a casino complex built on top of a flood plain. She was a sign of hope, and I was desperate to meet her. I asked Mark Barrett to come with me so that I could find out why he’d been moved to protest, and because I knew he’d find Dorothy’s story inspiring.
Spontaneity is one of those wonderful things that has all but died in the professional world. A fellow Idler, Daniel Pemberton, bemoaned the lack of it in his life in Idler 36: ‘it has been extremely depressing to discover more and more of my friends unable to do anything without a three-week warning, preferably backed up by some typed confirmation.’ Thankfully for me, Mark was someone capable of being spontaneous. He may not have had much cash but, because time is so much more valuable than money could ever dream of being, he was able to decide on a whim to come with me on a little adventure.
I met him at St Pancras station. He was wearing a pink hat with tassels that hung down below his ears. I bought a cup of tea for myself and an espresso for him, and we headed off to platform 13 to get our train.
As it pulled away I asked him to tell me about his life and why he had decided to start the picnic protest. He was certainly driven, and unlike me, he wasn’t scared of getting arrested. For a revolutionary intent on reestablishing a ‘people’s commons’, his background turned out to be quite a surprise. Mark graduated with a first from law school and took up a work placement to secure the final part of his qualification. This involved working in Dubai for an enormous law firm he’d prefer I didn’t name. That’s the same Dubai that is now desperately marketing itself as the place professional footballers go on holiday. ‘It was so depressing, seeing all these brilliant minds spending every single day trying to find new ways of helping various billion-dollar oil and media corporations worm out of paying tax,’ he told me. ‘And the contrast in the way you were treated if you were white rather than local was hideous. It was the undiluted, untamed corporate world. I couldn’t bear it. I had to leave.’
He travelled extensively, lived in Mexico, where he fell in love (he got married in Vegas), then moved to Canada for a while and took part in the famous 1999 protest in Seattle, which gave him faith that a different future was possible. A period on a commune in Devon followed, he got divorced, stayed in monasteries for a while, then went to India and had an affair with a Bollywood film star and ex-Miss India who told him he was about to discover the ‘main course’ of his life. ‘I decided then that I wanted to stand for community. Human rights are always about individual rights, but why don’t we have the right to live in a community? The market doesn’t provide communities, it breaks them down, so when the market doesn’t provide something that humans really need, that’s when the government needs to step in and facilitate it.’
When he returned to England he began to take an interest in Brian Haw’s vigil in Parliament Square and felt compelled to get involved. ‘I began watching the situation because I knew that if they banned protest in Parliament Square I would have to fight it. I knew that. The law came into force on 1 August. There was a Stop the War event on that day which I didn’t go to because I don’t really trust the Stop the War/Respect organization, it’s hierarchical and undemocratic, but on 7 August there was a mass act of defiance planned. There was no ideology, it was just “this law is wrong whoever you are”, and that was more my cup of tea. It was like the anti-war march in February 2002. There was a spirit then that I recognized from back in North America, dealing with a serious issue like the war but with fun rather than aggression.
‘So on 7 August I turned up in Parliament Square in bare feet giving out flowers to people, and I persuaded a load of strangers to throw teabags into the Thames with me, like the Boston tea party. It was a demonstration of support for the Tobin Tax, which is this idea that if you impose a 0.01 per cent annual tax on the trade of buying or selling currency, just in Britain it would create three billion pounds a year that you could ring-fence for international development, famine and so on. Forget Geldof’s “Give us your fucking money” nonsense. All these millionaires telling us to make poverty history by offering to cancel Third World debt, but only for countries prepared to sell the family silver by privatizing their infrastructure and the basis of any future economic power to western corporations - forget that. Three billion just from the money exchange! Imagine what you could do with it! That was where the tea party idea came from, which became the picnic for protest itself, rather than just being my protest that the government won’t implement the Tobin Tax. The Independent ran a big feature about the picnic a month or so later, and you know what the quote in the paper said about where the idea came from? “It started as a joke for Mark Barrett.” The media is so frustrating. Anyway, my friend Sian, who was also there that day, suggested we hold a picnic every week to protest against SOCPA’s exclusion zone, but for me it’s also about reestablishing the people’s commons. Because our commons is just not there any more. It’s gone.’
Mark now had a part-time job as a guide for American tourists visiting Europe. He worked during the summer and spent the winter doing his own projects. He was planning to train as a citizenship teacher the following September.
The train picked up speed.
‘I’m convinced that everything will work out in the end though,’ Mark concluded. ‘I’ve got this theory that the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions.’
Mark was ‘for real’, as Manic Street Preacher Richey Edwards would carve in his arm. I think a legal expert who wears feathers in his hair is just the kind of person the world needs more of.
We arrived in Derby and walked down towards the town. It could have been any town in Britain. It was full of elements of Nairn’s Subtopia - uninspired, grey and functioning only as a place to work and shop. The footpath signs leading from the station constantly contradicted themselves so we spent the first half-hour wandering around in circles. Then we came to a roundabout and the pitifully ugly Eagle Shopping Centre. It contained an empty covered market with huge ceilings and odd Christmas decorations. No doubt at one time it too was heralded as the answer to modernizing Derby’s shopping experience. We then walked down a claustrophobic passage that led us out towards the high street. The usual
suspects were there. Again, it looked like any other high street in Britain. If you looked up you could see beautiful buildings above the shop fronts, but lurid branding obscured anything worthwhile.
I rang Dorothy to find out where exactly the bus station was. She gave us directions to the Court House, which had a huge Make Poverty History banner hanging from the entrance. The bus station itself was surrounded by fences and signs explaining its imminent closure. The road adjacent to it was full of temporary bus stops and miserable people waiting for buses that never seemed to arrive. We had planned to get up on the roof with her, but she explained that it was far too windy for the ladders so we’d have to do the interview from the ground up through the skylight. We walked round the side of the station until we spotted a gap in the fence. We clambered through and saw Dorothy’s tent on the roof above.
The bus station had fallen on hard times but the building itself was solid with faultless brickwork. Art deco architecture is beautiful. If it was in a town that had vision, or any appreciation of our architectural heritage, it would be preserved and celebrated, but it had been neglected for so long that it looked run down and out of date. Allowing a building like that to rot for a few years is a good way of avoiding complaints from the public when the council finally suggests pulling it down so they can sell the site for millions to a developer. People get so sick and tired of perfectly good buildings falling into ruin that a nice illustration of glass and steel seems far more appealing than preserving something that’s been left to die. It also makes a developer far more money than they would get for simply repairing the existing building.
Dorothy peered down through the skylight and handed down a bit of rope she used for hauling up provisions. I sent up the bag of cashew nuts and white chocolate buttons. ‘Oh, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ve lost so much weight up here because it’s so cold.’ Then she paused. ‘Oh, you naughty boy, these are Nestle.’ But she was too hungry and cold to throw them back.
In Derby’s local press, opinion was divided between whether Dorothy was a local hero or an insane eco warrior, but Dorothy’s objections to the development stemmed from the lack of local consultation and the fact that the proposal was simply unsustainable. ‘For a start there was no public inquiry,’ she told me. ‘Outline permission for this was given ten years ago and we’ve been fighting it ever since. There was no public consultation about this development. There were models in the town and in the market telling us how it was going to look, but that was it. The planning application was made, which went through with a nod, and then we were told what was going to happen and that was that. It got to the point where the bulldozers were moving in and the only way we could make our view heard was by taking non-violent, direct action. I’ve now been up here for eight weeks.’
The Riverlights website talks about ‘city-living style on the waterfront’, a ‘relaxing atmosphere’ and ‘more choices’. Presumably that’s more choices in how to spend your money. But because of Dorothy’s protest the developers were having problems making these claims a reality. ‘The developer has to build a new bus station first, which will be on the bit of road you’ve just come past,’ Dorothy explained. ‘The development is supposed to be made of steel and glass, and as you know the price of oil is soaring and the price of steel is soaring as well. So the developer isn’t too keen to start building the new bus station if he’s got no takers for the rest of the site. They can’t open bars now because there are no liquor licences. There were twelve that were originally granted, which had to be renewed every year, but we appealed against them and won. So now the whole project is becoming a white elephant. Now no-one will be able to open a bar.’ Dorothy’s protest wasn’t about halting Derby council’s plans to enhance its citizens’ shopping and leisure experience; she was more concerned with the practical implications of what they were trying to build. ‘I’m not just up here because I love the bus station,’ she said. ‘It’s about sustainable development. Where we are now is an air quality management area. Thirty-four thousand cars a day use this area here and it’s also a flood plain. The River Derwent is right at the back of us. It’s flooded three times in the last thirty years. In 2000 it almost broke again, and in 1965 it flooded most of the city. They want to have a casino, nightclub, bars, apartments for about eight hundred people, and underground car parking as well. They haven’t told the potential investors that when the river floods all their nice cars arc going to get a bit wet.’
I asked her why the council was so keen on pushing the development through. ‘A lot of the time I think the councillors are just told by the planners that something will be good for the econoiay of the city, and good for jobs, and therefore that makes it the right thing to do,’ she replied. ‘The economy is what they serve, not the community, and it’s not the same thing. In a lot of other cases they are simply ignorant and don’t know what they’re talking about. I mean, there are still officers and councillors here who don’t believe in climate change.
‘We did lots of demonstrations, we went through all the “proper” channels before we got to this point, but why should they care what we think when we don’t have any actual power? I’ve written to most of the big brewery chains that were thinking of moving in to show them a copy of a letter from the Environment Agency, which recommends emergency evacuation procedures for all the establishments on the development in the event of a flood, which would have made something of an impact on their decision to invest, I’m sure. But the hypocrisy of the council is astounding. The block of apartments is supposed to be built on an area our own Environmental Health Department has said is not suitable for residential use. It’s dead noisy at night -1 can confirm that one - and you’ve got the weir, the cars, the lorries at night and the guildhall clock, which chimes every quarter of an hour. I have to wear earplugs and ear protectors at night to get any sleep.
‘Of course, this could all have come out if the people had been consulted. There is a new planning thing the council have to apply in eases like this called the “statement of community involvement” but it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. We had to nag the council to put the word “participation” in it, and even then it’s like Kryten trying to lie in Red Dwarf. They just can’t say the word. “Par ... parti... partici...” Yet the new strategic environmental assessment directives say that they have to allow the community to participate well before they get in touch with the developer.’
Participation is one of those words politicians don’t like to use because everyone is absolutely clear about what it means. If you have to promise someone participation then they will assume they’ll get the chance to participate. If they subsequently don’t get a say, faith in the system understandably begins to break down. ‘A lot of the time you discover the council have been discussing something with the developer months and months before even the councillors get to hear about it, let alone the actual community,’ Dorothy added. ‘That happened with the incinerator we are also campaigning against. The developer was being consulted eighteen months before the local people were told anything about it! The future doesn’t get a voice, that’s the problem, which is why things have to be sustainable. The government pays lip service to the idea of sustainability but their actions prove they don’t know what sustainability means. Why was the Sustainability Commission set up? Why did they define sustainability? What is the point of all these commissions, all this legislation, if all they do on the ground is act against it? We have a City of Derby local plan, for goodness’ sake, which states that buildings like this bus station will be reused! Recycled! Refurbished! As if! It also says that wildlife corridors, like the one at the back here that’s going to be ripped up to make way for a casino, should be protected! At the moment the council is consulting on its natural history strategy! They wouldn’t know their natural history if a branch whacked them in the face!’
Despite the odds stacked against her, and the fact that people regularly referred to her in the local news as a lunatic, Dorothy was con
fident that her protest would work. ‘Eventually I think the developer will drop out, make a new agreement with the council to modernize and refurbish this bus station and hopefully turn this into a social enterprise and give it back to local people. The people who care about it are the people that use buses. No-one on the council uses buses, none of the planning officers use buses. They don’t care about public transport.’
I told Dorothy that I thought she was a true patriot, and she looked at me in a strange but thoughtful way. ‘That’s a funny thing to say. I’ve never really considered whether or not I’m a patriot. I’m actually of Polish extraction. I love living here. I don’t want to do what I’m doing but it’s got to be done. Someone’s got to stand up and fight these things. This development takes no heed of what will happen in the future. The Deputy Prime Minister’s Planning Office’s statement says that every new development like this has to calculate its carbon dioxide-producing potential. This development is huge. This area, the bus station and the coach park, is enormous. But the new bus station will only fit into a third of the area that it takes up at the moment. The rest of it’s going to be underground car parks, flats. It’s town cramming not town planning, reverting back to the dubious designs of the seventies.’