In The Republic, Plato proposed an ideal state ruled by philosopher kings. Banned from owning property and accruing wealth, so free from conflicts of interest; trained in philosophy, so able to determine the truth in all matters; they would govern wisely. He contrasted this with Athenian democracy, in which the masses were easily misled by talented orators trained by sophists – those skilled in making clever and compelling, but insincere and false, arguments. Central to Plato’s argument is his idea of ‘truth’ – that there is a ‘true’ form for all things, whether something tangible like a table or contestable like justice. Through the philosophical method we can get closer to the truth. Today we might recognise this idea in the popular understanding of the scientific method. There is an objective nature to be found through testing hypotheses against evidence. Is there a true, or ideal, form of urban and…
Category: <span>Blog</span>
If you think the system is broken, but you can’t wholly transform it, how do you engage with it? That’s a challenge I see politicians grapple with all the time. After the recent round of local elections I tweeted a hope that new Green Party councillors who were in power – as the majority in Mid Suffolk, or coalitions elsewhere – might find answers to that question in the area of housing policy. Many had just been elected opposing new housebuilding. It would be great if @TheGreenParty could find a way to articulate a *feasible* and *radical* alternative way to give young people some housing hope. I do fear it risks following the Lib Dems with a Janus-like NIMBY face at the local level and pro-housing face nationally. pic.twitter.com/JX3ryv85yv— Tom Chance (@tom_chance) May 5, 2023 We know (or should know) that it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to square…
There is an unhelpful tendency in the social/community sector to focus on a narrow number of highly marketable community projects and say – they’ve proven the concept, let’s replicate them! To view replication at scale as a matter of sharing compelling case studies so that others can follow their example. But it rarely works like that, at least not at any scale, and especially not in domains like property development and housing where projects take at least 5 years and must contend with a system hostile to any kind of new entrant. (When we talk about scale, we rarely define what we mean. Do we want 100 similar projects? One in every city, town and village? 5% of the market share? The unspoken ambiguity lets us off the hook, permits us to celebrate small-scale success with challenge.) Often, these success stories have been enabled by specific local factors – the…
Modern English, George Orwell wrote, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. In his wonderful essay Politics and the English language he took aim at a number of common faults he saw in his time, chief among them a staleness of imagery, metaphor and phrasing. One phrase I wish we could avoid is ‘being on the right side of history’, a phrase that is not only stale but that points to a kind of antipolitical thinking I wish to avoid. It was an article by contenders for the Green Party leadership that got me thinking about the phrase. The authors promised that a Green Party led by them would be on the right side of history on trans rights and anti-racism. I’m not naming them or making this about them because the phrase was…
This blog provides data and information about air pollution levels in Crystal Palace, where I live. Like many urban places it suffers from high levels of air pollution, which has a significant impact on our health. Nitrogen Dioxide pollution is bad for our health. It reduces life expectancy, and makes lung and heart conditions worse. The government’s Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) estimates that between 28,000 and 36,000 people die as a result of all forms of air pollution every year in the UK. There was a lot of local concern about air pollution after Croydon Council introduced its ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhood’ policy. This blog post doesn’t pass any comment on the policy, but I hope helps people to discuss policies armed with the available facts. There are two sections to this post: Monitoring conducted by Bromley Council on Anerley Hill. This shows pollution levels on…
Is Dominic Cummings anti-democratic? That’s the charge many level at him as he tells his tall tales of Westminster intrigue. But I think they miss the point. Cummings’ stories aren’t really about how our political leaders are elected, so much as how they are selected. It’s fun and scary to imagine Cummings and his dozen-or-so co-conspirators darkly manipulating British democracy. A uniquely malign and undemocratic influence on our body politic. Getting Boris Johnson – a person he believes is unfit for high office – into Number 10, pulling a con on the nation. But Johnson was elected as the leader of the Conservative Party (and become Prime Minister) after a ballot of 139,318 party members, from a shortlist of two whittled down by 313 Conservative MPs. Johnson was re-elected Prime Minister when 32 million voters turned out in December 2019 and elected a huge majority of Conservative MPs. He was…
In his classic 1918 lecture, Politics as a Vocation, Max Weber described politics as “a strong and slow boring of hard boards”. He was counselling students of Munich University on how to achieve change, speaking in the aftermath of the First World War, and with the rise of reactionary and venal politics across Europe and the United States. Faced with such perilous times, he continued: “Certainly, all historical experience confirms the truth that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a person must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now,…
I’m going to take a silver lining from the commotion that the small pilot Low Traffic Neighbourhood in Crystal Palace has caused – namely that a lot of people are now talking about traffic levels and air pollution. One of the two campaigners trying to remove the LTN measures has said their second aim, after removing those measures, is to improve local air quality. Assuming all the interest is genuine, I’ve written this blog to set out some facts about traffic and pollution and some options to try to address the longstanding problems blighting Crystal Palace. By the way, the pictures above were taken in 2014, when I last wrote about traffic in the area. Congestion and pollution is nothing new, here! Traffic in Crystal Palace Let’s zoom in from the national to the local, to understand this properly. Road traffic in Great Britain increased from 255 billion miles travelled…
This question is one I have been asking myself in recent weeks. How do I – as a white person who enjoys various kinds of privilege – respond to the challenges the Black Lives Matter posts? After weeks (or years) of listening and reading, I’m now going to try to write something that picks up some aspects that worry me, and some challenges I’ve set for myself.
Writing a garden diary each month gives me a rhythm and frame. But sometimes plants unfold and live in quite different timescales.