Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy
When the authorities aren’t throwing their weight around in a popular pub in Chartham, they are extinguishing any scintilla of initiative within their areas of responsibility. Just before Christmas the Kentish Gazette reported how lights engineer Robert Howell, who is contracted to work on behalf of Kent County Council, used social media to identify which street lights needed repair. As such, he was able to fix nearly 60 across the city in a week. Residents who have had lights out in their streets for months hailed him a hero. KCC leaped into action as well. It “advised” Robert that this was not how to repair lights and said he should follow the council’s procedure. This involves reports going through the KCC website, meaning a wait of up to 28 days before the repair is done – rather than the day or two of Robert’s method. It shows that bureaucracy simply begets more bureaucracy, its purpose becomes itself. I cannot think of anything worse for people who pay through the nose for their public services only to see common sense, initiative and efficiency crushed by form-filling and procedure.
The highlight of 2016 has been meeting so many of you, dear readers. It seemed like every week I was introduced to someone in Canterbury who would say: “I read your column every week and very much enjoy it.” You are the gentle, quiet folk of Canterbury, able to see things as they are and not as others say they should be. And it is to you that I dedicated my 2016 Kent columnist of the year award. And if this column had a motto, it would be those famous words of George Orwell’s: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
What do you call a sausage with a Burberry pattern on the skin? A chaveloy.
The people who occupy the spacious comfort of four-, five-, even sixbedroom homes in St Augustine’s Road, Ethelbert Road, South Canterbury Road and the New and Old Dover Roads have no need for 4,000 homes.
These affluent streets are not places where people live in cramped, unsuitable, sometimes “temporary” accommodation or who find themselves languishing on the council’s housing waiting list, or who are unable to gain a foothold on the property ladder.
They don’t need the 4,000 houses which the city council’s planning committee approved in December in the form of the Mountfield Park development at Barton. And even if others need them, then the burghers of south Canterbury and the surrounding villages certainly don’t want such developments anywhere near their own highvalue homes. No, no, no.
There’s nothing unusual about the situation Canterbury finds itself in. People have for generations objected to things happening near their homes – often for good reason.
Those who say the scheme will exacerbate traffic problems across the whole city will be proved right. Those who say this population increase will place unmanageable extra strain on services will be proved right. And those who bemoan the loss forever of countryside and prime agricultural land are right, too.
But directing their ire for Mountfield Park towards Canterbury City Council is naive and misplaced.
When the city council first revealed its Local Plan, the planning blueprint for the years up to 2031, people turned up at the Guildhall to point out how stupid the councillors and officers were to have drawn up a madcap scheme for 15,600 additional homes across the district. Privately, people whispered in my ear and told me how the government’s “independent” planning inspector would tear the plan to shreds.
And yet they had apparently overlooked the single most important word: government. The inspector duly raised the number to 16,000.
Local authorities are simply the handmaidens of central government rather than functioning local democracies carrying out the will of their voters. And at present our government wants to build one million new homes across the country by 2020. That’s more than 2,500 for each of the local planning authorities in three years.
It is not just prime agricultural land which is at risk of development. At Pease Pottage in West Sussex, planners last month gave the nod for 600 houses plus a hospice in an area of outstanding natural beauty.
The government is schizophrenic on the matter. On the one hand, the Conservatives cosily promised in their manifesto that such places would be protected from development. On the other hand, due to massive population growth, their government pressures planning authorities to favour development.
Communities Secretary Sajid Javid has already said he is satisfied with the Pease Pottage decision and that no special ministerial scrutiny need be applied to it. It is difficult, therefore, to see how the government will come to the rescue of the anti-mountfield Park campaign.
Moreover, the rapid increase is precisely of the government’s own doing. For it to arrest the increase it needs to do two things: end free movement into the UK from Europe and actually bother to tackle illegal immigration.
If you thought that with Christmas and New Year now passed the fun was over, then let me disabuse you of this notion. For next week, right here in Canterbury, will be an event titled Let’s Talk About Fidel Castro, hosted by the Cuba Solidarity Campaign of East Kent.
I welcomed Castro’s death last year not just because it finally rid the world of an odious and decrepid tyrant, but because I am working on a long essay about the psychology of modern political activism – an absolutely fascinating subject.
His death allowed me to register the reactions of political activists mesmerised by Castro mythology. After the revolution, Castro, like every other socialist ruler, merely succeeded in running an impoverished police state.
In terms of his place in the minds of political activists, however, Castro must be seen as a figure of towering religious significance.
For Western intellectuals, the cult of Castro bears close resemblance to the Messianic fantasies of Medieval Europe.
Following that tradition, Castro appears as a warriorsaint – even adopting paramilitary garb as his daily costume – sent to smite the capitalist Anti-christ (America) and establish an earthly paradise where food is limitless and happiness guaranteed.
For the children of monied Westerners Cuba itself became a kind of socialist playground in which they could frolic away from the corrupt, selfish and decadent societies they are forced by the accident of birth to shamefully call home.
Following Castro’s death, even the BBC struggled to conceal its reverential adoration of the bearded icon. It reported: “Critics saw him as a dictator.” Critics? Not the actuality of history, then?
So long as he acted in the name of socialism and antiAmericanism Castro could be absolved of any horror – including repression, torture and murder. So, yes, let’s talk about Castro. Let’s Talk About Fidel Castro takes place at the Friends’ Meeting House, The Friars, at 7pm on Tuesday.