Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,
And nothing ain’t worth nothing, but it’s freeMe and Bobby McGee Roger Miller (Grateful Dead cover version in link)
When movie directors want us to think of freedom, they often revert to one of two mechanisms. Which they choose depends on the characters. When we think of ET, the kids from Stanger Things, Butch Cassidy, the Von Trapps singing Do-Re-Me or the girls from Now and Then, we see them cruising through the countryside on their bikes. Now think of Rain Man, Thelma and Louise, Sideways, Wild at Heart or the final scene in Bladerunner. Here the car embodies the freedom the characters are all seeking or living.
However, there is an ugly truth at the moment – neither vehicle actually provide the freedom they promise. We cannot ride their bikes where they wish, and our cars are often stuck travelling at 7mph as our blood boils. I think about this a lot, and often am asked what the alternatives are. Over a few pieces, I look to explain the situation, and kick start a discussion as to what we can do about it.
As this is a blog in parts, each will contain links to previous parts.
Other blogs in the series
Sometimes, I feel I gotta get away
Bells chime, I know I gotta get away
And I know if I don’t, I’ll go out of my mind
Better leave her behind with the kids, they’re alright
The kids are alrightThe Kids are Alright The Who
In the first of these series of blogs, I look at how choices made decades ago are affecting our children.
Recently I attended a seminar on Healthy Routes to Schools. During the sessions, much was made of Meyer Hillman’s study looking into the independence of our children. The study was conducted over 40 years, with surveys in 1971, 1990 and 2010 and one of the key findings was that British children are, on average, 2.5 years later in their development of independent tasks such as crossing roads and walking to school. In the same time, Germany has not altered this age significantly. For a child leaving school at 16, that is 20% of their time that they cannot spend independently getting there.
This lack of independence is further brought home when we see the areas that children used to roam. Another recent example shows this in stark terms, looking at one family in Sheffield, comparing each generation at 8 years old. In 1919, the great grandfather used to cover distances as large as 6 miles. Within 100 years that distance is down to 300 yards. We see children this young walking the streets of our cities and we worry why, what is wrong with the parents, what will become of them?
How did we get to this state? Children were dying on our roads, so we undertook a campaign to keep them away from our streets. Those of a certain age will remember the “One False Move” campaign, highlighting the dangers on our roads. Make the kids fearful and they won’t die. This worked, child KSIs dropped, however at the cost of independence. Kids are not free anymore.
Yet in Barnet it hasn’t worked. We were one of only 3 outer London boroughs to exceed 10 children Killed or Seriously Injured in 2014 and our figure did not drop below 7 in the decade from 2004. These figures are way too high, especially in the current climate of Vision Zero (Zero road deaths per year) being adopted by so many major cities globally, including London.
You may say that this is just a factor of our modern society. Yet it has an effect. In 2015/16 1 in 5 children in reception were obese, rising to more than 1 in 3 by the time we look at year 6. We no longer use the term “late onset” with Type 2 diabetes, because it is common in children. Never mind the fact that the links between activity and educational attainment have been well proven – an active child has an active mind.
The school run also contributes to congestion in the Borough, and the city as a whole. This piece is not about the wider subject of congestion, however there is an interesting fact which directly affects our kids;
In 2017, Prof Stephen Holgate, an asthma expert at Southampton University and chair of the Royal College of Physicians working party on air pollution, stated that pollution is nine to twelve times higher inside the car than outside. Unless the traffic is flowing freely, a child in a car is more exposed and at higher risk of lung disease.
And lest we forget it is not just the children who suffer. An overreliance on the car to perform the “school” run leads to issues within our communities. In all too much of a hurry, parents park over drives of residents. This was an issue raised at last year’s Meet the Leader session at Hartley Hall and is continuously raised on social media groups such as Mill Hill Families. If parking isn’t done over drives, it is done on pavements, obstructing their use for the very families trying to walk, and damaging them, costing us all money to repair them.
Those who perform the school run are not selfish and they should not be demonised or ostracised. Some people have no choice but to drive their children. However, we should be conscious that the majority who do perform the school run by car do so because it is convenient and an easy option. Our goal should be to assist those parents who default to the car to consider other options.
It’s not just the school run where our children are held back. I have two friends who regularly go on long cycle rides with their children. One, living in Edinburgh, has a child who was riding from Scotland’s capital to its biggest city at the age of 9. The other takes his 6-year-old child from leafy Mill Hill to Kings Cross to pick up glasses. The fact that I can count these people show how far we have fallen. At age 8 I was riding solo to the local parks where I would muck around on the dirt tracks, and by 14 I was riding from the Garden Suburb to Elstree for rugby training. I was not unique by any measure. Now? Just go to Mill Hill Park on a summer’s day and just watch as parent after parent (myself included on some occasions) unloads a bike from a car.
Whichever way we look at it, we are doing our children a disservice with the design of our towns and cities.
Other blogs in the series
When I’m holding your wheel
All I hear is your gear
When I’m cruisin’ in overdrive
Don’t have to listen to no run of the mill talk jiveI’m in love with my car Queen
In the second of this series of blogs, I want to look at how we have become slaves to our cars and have lost the freedom and benefits they were supposed to give us.
There is a strange duality in our attitudes to our cars. Go to any public meeting, look at online forums, discuss with your friends or conducts studies and you will see a trend. People do not like congestion and pollution. They recognise that London is gridlocked, and any policy will be met with cries of “what about the traffic, it’s bad enough as it is” or “what about the pollution, you can hardly breathe here”. However, propose alternatives to the car and the cries turn to “this will just cause more gridlock and more pollution”.
Generally, we only complain about what directly costs us. We seem to accept hidden costs as they don’t come out of our pocket. For example, no one complains that:
- Congestion costs the UK economy £9bn per year in terms of wasted time, fuel and carbon emissions,
- Londoners spend 71 hours a year stuck in traffic
- Pollution can be attributed to 9,500 deaths per year in London
- 2,000 people are killed or seriously injured on London’s roads each year.
We all kind of know that we should do more to stop using our cars, but plan cycle lanes, take away parking spaces, pedestrianize high streets or add in filtered permeability and suddenly traders will lose money (it is worth reading the public comments here then the report linked later on), people won’t be able to carry shopping home anymore, high streets will die and we should be free to choose how to travel (the irony of the last point isn’t lost).
The reasons for this duality are fairly easy to understand. Transport planning is a long-term activity, it takes years to implement change. This is why few politicians want to take on significant change – the chances of them seeing it out within a term are unlikely and they may just give credit to an opposition party – and why they stand up at election time with bribes to the motorist (fuel duty freezes and free parking promises are both familiar to Barnet residents in the last general and current local elections).
On the other hand, most of us think in terms of convenience when it comes to our daily tasks. We want to go shopping as quickly as possible, and within that we want to carry as much as possible, so we don’t have to do it again. This has gone a step further now with internet shopping, which in itself is a major cause of congestion as we have delivery drivers all over the roads. This is just one example of how our desire for convenience has triggered the Laws of Unintended Consequences and created a perverse result.
No progress, however, will be made until we start to look at the truths around our highstreets and transport modes. Let’s look at some myths around our town centres
Reduce cars and our high streets die
In 2013, the GLA published its “Open for Business” report into London’s town centres. The aim was to discover why there were so many empty shops on our high streets and what we can do about it. This report revealed a surprising fact – cars do not generate the highest revenue for our towns. This is nuanced, so let’s look at the tables (tfl data from 2011):
Revenue per transport mode
| Mode | Per visit | Per week | Per month |
| Bus | £32 | £70 | £282 |
| Underground / Train | £38 | £59 | £239 |
| Walking | £26 | £93 | £373 |
| Cycle | £21 | £47 | £188 |
| Car | £41 | £56 | £226 |
Arrival by transport mode
| Mode | Outer London | Inner London | Central London |
| Bus | 37% | 37% | 24% |
| Underground | 5% | 4% | 52% |
| Train | 7% | 10% | 11% |
| Walking | 25% | 35% | 8% |
| Cycle | 2% | 3% | 1% |
| Car | 22% | 10% | 4% |
What this shows is both the reality and why the shop owners believe what they do. Human nature is that you notice the item that stands out and so a shop keeper will remember the car driver who comes in and spends £41. They may remember the car driver because they come in one and a half times a week, however they will notice the amount spent.
At the same time, familiarity breeds contempt. Conversely to the driver, the walker will come in over 3 times in one week and will have a chat with the familiar shop owner. The owner will probably be on first name terms with them, but they will not notice that they have spent 1.65 times as much over a month as the car driver.
Even the amount of people who arrive by car is misunderstood. We can even see from the second table that more people arrive by bus and foot in Outer London than by car. So, these two modes alone spend more per person per month, and there are more people arriving. Yet we worry about getting the cars to our high streets as if they alone will bring revenue.
Whichever way we look at it, a continued reliance on planning rules centred on cars will only make the problem worse.
Other blogs in the series
These excuses how they served me so well
They’ve kept me safe
They’ve kept me stoic
They’ve kept me locked in my own cellExcuses Alanis Morissette
So far we have seen that our transport choices have caused us all to lose the very freedoms they are supposed to create. Before we look at the potential solutions, I wan’t to have a look at the objections folk have to a reduction in car use.
You need a car to do the weekly shop
True, people can’t carry the 5 or so heavy bags of shopping created by the weekly shop. However, if they buy 5 heavy bags, they don’t come back as they have bought enough shopping to get them through to the next big shop at the supermarket. However our town centres are not shopping malls or supermarkets. They are places which thrive on small local businesses who need constant footfall. If we fail to do that, they are empty or they are filled with chain stores who can bear the burden of fewer customers (until the store is uneconomical then they close it, leaving it empty again).
So, if we reduce cars, yes people will bring shopping home buy buying slightly less per visit but they will perform more visits. We saw the effect of that in the previous blog. This isn’t new, my grandmother used to walk to the shops daily, using a little shopping wheelie bag to carry her goods home in.
And there are huge knock on benefits of this; we buy smaller amounts of perishable goods and so don’t throw away as much food for example; Shops sell more units and hence throw away less; People are more likely to reuse bags, meaning less plastics and less recycling burden on our councils; Shops can stock a more diverse set of goods as folk won’t simply buy the same item each time fearful of wasting a new item; We have a larger number of independent stores, such as greengrocers, butchers, bakers, cheesemongers, as these types of store can survive because the pie is bigger (we may even need pie shops!!).
Not being able to carry 5 bags is a good thing.
Parking should be free
This is a myth. We have seen in the previous piece how little of our footfall arrives by car. Again, the perception is that the 22% is vital because they spend the most per visit, perception maybe an individual’s reality, but it is not fact.
In his seminal “The High Cost of Free Parking” Donald Shoup, the highly respected US urban planning professor, highlights that “every transport system has three elements: vehicles, rights-of-way, and terminal capacity.” What this means is that rail has trains, tracks and stations. Sea has ships, oceans and seaports. Automotive has cars, roads and parking spaces. The costs on the individual are either a per use fee for the entire package when the transport is not owned by the individual or for the vehicle and terminal capacity if it is. In terms of the car, we pay for very little of our parking in suburban London. Most new developments contain generous off-road parking allowances and older houses tend to convert front gardens to drive ways. Out of town shopping areas provide generous free parking lots, and only our town centres and CPZs charge.
Many will tell you that on-street parking costs, and free parking will just be transferred elsewhere. This is not true – once a road is build, on-street parking is there and ready. Shoup, outlines it perfectly when he says that on-street parking is a commons issue. This derives from the shared resource of common land in villages. If the villagers let too many of their cattle use it, they would have no grass to feed any more. It is the same with on-street parking. If we allow it to be free, we it will be over used, and we will have traffic issues as folk drive around in search of a space. This, in turn has knock on effects for the local economy and environment. It is also the reason why we should never provide free parking, the town centre will simply become clogged up, polluted and folk will not want to shop there.
The elderly and disabled
Often I am told that the elderly and disabled can only travel around by car. I feel that those who claim this are doing a disservice to those groups. When we make these claims, we project our own fears of age and disability and wonder how we would cope. However, when we look at the facts, we see that a different picture emerges.
I used to go spend summer holidays with my grandparents in Israel. As I mentioned earlier, my grandmother used to walk into town to do her daily shop. Along the way she would stop here and there and interact with people. I was not able to attend her funeral, but my mum told me that these people who she spoke to all turned up – hundreds of them. Somewhere along the line we have robbed ourselves of these interactions by focussing on perceived convenience.
Recently the BBC highlighted a study into the effects of exercise on the elderly. Conducted by Paul Lazarus (82 years old himself), it showed that those participating in regular exercise (in this case long distance cycling) had the fat level and immunity of adults in their late teens and 20s. In The Netherlands, it is all too common to see adults in their 80s walking to the shops using a bike as a rolling walking stick. For them, they have reached the point where they can no longer climb on the bike, but rather than be trapped inside, reliant on outside help, they get up and walk.
What about the disabled? Well in Cambridge, 26% of disabled commuters cycle, compared with 32% of all commuters. Disability does not have to mean you can’t be active, it means you may need a different machine to help you.
By forcing our elderly and disabled into cars, we rob them of these interactions, which can be so valuable to their daily lives. They are less independent and travel from point to point looking out a glass window, watching the world go by and not participating in it.
I can’t walk/ride that far
We don’t actually move that far in London. 2/3 of London’s car journeys are less than 5km, with half less than 2.5km. Most people can cycle a 5km journey in 20 minutes, now just think about how long it will take you to drive to, say, Brent Cross from Mill Hill. Obeying the speed limits, it is a minimum 8-minute journey, but usually 15. Not a huge delta on your day. Cycling from The Ridgeway to The Broadway is likely as long as taking a car, and you don’t have to find a parking space at the end.
Even beyond this, people in the Netherlands think nothing of cycling 20km to visit friends. Sure, they may not do it for shopping purposes, but they still take 30-40 minutes exercise just to visit friends. And it will surprise many to know that The Netherlands as a higher car ownership rate than the UK. The two are clearly compatible and can live side by side.
Others
There are many many other excuses that are made. Common ones all have reasonable counter arguments. They can be found here
Other blogs in the series
I’ve been a victim of a selfish kind of love
It’s time that I realize
That there are some with no home,
Not a nickel to loan
Could it be really me
Pretending that they’re not alone?Man in the Mirror Michael Jackson
Up to now I have shown we have a problem, we have some objections, but not proposed any solutions. In this final piece are just some suggestions as to how we, the parents, residents and council, can help alleviate this problem. What this needs, though, is the will power to change.
Liveable neighbourhoods
At the heart of all city design should be the concepts of liveable neighbourhoods. This is essentially redesigning our town centres to prioritise the needs of walkers, cyclists and public transport users. For example, over in Crouch End, they are redesigning the town square to remove the traffic and improve the walking and cycling links around it. Areas like North Finchley, Golders Green, High Barnet and Mill Hill will hugely benefit from this.
Segregated cycle tracks
Constantly when surveyed (both academic and polls), 70-80% of people say thew would cycle more. The key blocker for them is safety perception. The only solution to this is to stop believing that bikes are some hybrid of walkers and cars. They are too vulnerable to be on the same surface as cars, and too dangerous to be on pavements. They deserve their own space, and the only way to do this is segregated tracks. If we want a modal shift, we must stop pretending that bike users do not want to use the most direct routes.
Sure, where possible, parallel tracks can be used. For example the disused rail that runs from Allianz Stadium to Mill Hill East tube would make a great cycle track. If this can’t be achieved, the only solution for that area is to take space from cars on Pursley and Devonshire Road (there is room).
STARS
TfL’s STARS (Sustainable Travel: Active, Responsible, Safe) scheme is a great start for creating modal shift. Credit to the council, in 2016 100 of the 132 schools in the Borough were signed up to the scheme, however only 40% of these achieved a gold status. Gold status is only awarded to those who are actually achieving modal shift away from cars. Parents can help with this – if your school is not participating, ask why and get them to start. If they are, find out what their current status is and push for it to be improved if it is not Gold. If it is Gold, see if there are awards that can be gained – is the school running an exceptional public transport scheme, or a cycling one for example?
School streets
Hackney council has been trialling the concept of school streets. These are timed closures of the streets around schools, locking off the traffic. Measures vary in cost, from something as simple as bollards that can be raised and dropped, to automatic camera-based solutions. If this is something you would be interested in, write to your councillors ahead of the election – find out why Barnet is not considering them. And if they will, find out what the process will be to implement.
Route Planning
Why not take the lead from Dulwich? The village has the highest school density in the country (if not western Europe). To help promote and link these schools, a group of parents formed Dulwich Safe Routes to School. If you are interested in forming something like this, please let me know and we can see how many schools we can get up and running.
Filtered permeability
A more permanent solution is to close some roads to cars, but allow walking, cycling and busses through. There are many ways to do this – automatic bus gates for example. Waltham Forest has implemented schemes which create soft verges of flowers and a tree in the centre of the road. Pupils can still ride and walk the road; however, cars cannot use them as rat runs. They add to the environment and look darn nice as well.
20mph
Quite simply, 20 is plenty. The effects of city wide 20mph limits in Bristol have been enough to save 4 children’s lives per year. There is no need to go faster than 20mph on our suburban roads. The environment becomes less hostile to children, it’s safer and the public health benefits are enormous. As of November 2017, 43% of all Londoners were living within a 20mph limit, with 10 Boroughs having 20mph limits on all or almost all of their roads. In terms of Outer London Boroughs, Croydon, Hounslow, Ealing and Waltham Forest have all announced major schemes for part or all of their areas to be 20mph. Barnet is simply lagging behind in this area. And this is despite schools being able to request a 20mph zone in the Borough.
Parking allocation
Developers should be rewarded for not using their full allocation of parking spaces. However this should also come with earmarked funds for redesigning the roads in and out of new developments. The ever controversial Pentavia Park has a signifiant allocation of cycling spaces. However the developers have totally ignored how people will get in and out by bike, putting lives at risk.
Bike hire
I am a big fan of bike hire. The schemes work. The requirements of the “Boris Bikes” means that we can’t have them in most of Barnet for some time (if you’re interested, the docks need to be a certain distance apart to ensure that certain journeys can be made within the 30 minute free period. We can’t just get them in Mill Hill). However the dockless hire companies can easily be brought on board within the borough. This should just be done.
These are just some ideas, there are many more out there. The question is, what are you going to do to help?
Other blogs in the series
Oh well Hampstead is a place and not for revolution
Hampstead, Adam and the Ants
This week I had a conversation with a friend of mine. He was recently present at a local meeting by London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith where, as happens so often with Mr Goldsmith, the subject of CS11 was raised. Mr Goldsmith was asked if he thought the money was better spent on a massive car park on the outskirts of London than on cycling infrastructure.
My friend told me that Mr Goldsmith responded stating he believed cycling provision needed to be improved, but it doesn’t work where you overrule existing communities. He claimed that the mini-Holland schemes in Enfield and Waltham Forrest were wildly unpopular, stating there was no consultation. He highlighted that the meeting in Camden was with 200 furious local people. This is the crux of his campaign on these issues, localism, listening to the views of the people.
Clearly residents are indeed affected by large scale infrastructure changes, they need to have their voice and they need to be listened to. However these voices are worrying when they are shouting without listening, about subject they have only perceptions on.
Let us delve deeper….
I am a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. In it he explains how we should work less on over analysing and more on trusting instinct. He explains that these instincts are tuned by years of practise, so that in certain situations analysis is not required. This is “the zone”, that moment when you are so aware of all the inputs that you are unaware of why you make the decision. Something doesn’t feel right, my gut tells me this is the case, I just know.
The Camden meeting mentioned by Mr Goldsmith was part of a series throughout the area north of The Regent’s Park. These have been organised by coalition of people, one of whom has made repeated statements that the traffic down Finchley Road is driven by the M1. When questioned on the statistics behind this, the response was that the route was personally driven and the traffic is obvious. Something did not feel right to her, her experience of driving the roads told her it was wrong.
Yet something also did not feel right to me. This statement seemed wrong, I couldn’t put my finger on why. I tried to explain in a series of unpublished posts, but I couldn’t. So I thought about what this meant.
I wanted to see who had the correct instinct, where the facts actually lay, so I did my research.
Brent Cross and North London
The M1 junction referred to has been the subject of an analysis as part of the Brent Cross Redevelopment. Planning permission was granted in 2010, and the documents are still available online, including a 4 volume traffic assessment. Before we even get into statical analysis, the Volume 1 report contains the following interesting piece of information:
The M1 is underutilised in this area as it has never been extended further into London and the M25 relieves this section of much orbital traffic.
Indeed we can see through other sources that some 47,000 cars per day used junction 2 of the M1 at the time of the report, compared with 35,000 using J1.
Volume one contains the following table on the roads around the development:
| Intersection | AM Peak (0800 – 0900) | PM Peak (1700 – 1800) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cars/LGV | HGV | Bus | Cars/LGV | HGV | Bus | |
| M1 / A406 | 4,858 | 378 | 52 | 5,873 | 156 | 49 |
| A5 / A406 | 3,998 | 353 | 61 | 4,250 | 145 | 58 |
| A5 / A407 | 2,138 | 108 | 107 | 1,946 | 48 | 100 |
| A41 / A406 | 2,885 | 179 | 6 | 3,417 | 105 | 6 |
| A41 / A407 | 3,493 | 200 | 41 | 4,476 | 76 | 41 |
| A407 / Claremont Road | 1,421 | 52 | 61 | 1,309 | 15 | 58 |
These are total flows out of the junctions. Already we can see that all of the traffic flowing from the M1 to the A406 (and vice versa in the evening) is higher than the A41/A406. This doesn’t even include that some of the traffic leaving the A41/A406 junction must by nature be going or coming from the north. Equally, some must be coming from the A406 to the east (Henley’s Corner). So all 2,885 vehicles (am) or 3,417 (pm) simply cannot be going to or coming from the Finchley Road. And equally all of those vehicles cannot be going to or coming from the M1.
I was actually going to stop there, thinking the flows were clearly not what they were claimed to be. Then I realised the fuss that would be made over the age of the statistics, so I dug deeper. I wanted to see what other data there was, and what it could tell me about the historical trends.
Hampstead
Wonderfully the DfT provides average daily traffic counts on every junction to junction link on the nation’s A roads on the internet (http://www.dft.gov.uk/traffic-counts/). The counts go back to 2000 and show 15 years of statistics. I looked at the A41 between the A598 and Adelaide Road junctions and found the below snippet, covering Pedal Cycles, motor bikes, cars/taxis and light goods vehicles.
| AADF Year | Pedal Cycles | Motor Cycles | Cars & Taxis | LGV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 300 | 1,370 | 45,998 | 4,989 |
| 2001 | 218 | 896 | 42,582 | 5,429 |
| 2002 | 717 | 1,548 | 44,750 | 4,836 |
| 2003 | 488 | 2,440 | 42,856 | 4,982 |
| 2004 | 252 | 1,190 | 48,267 | 3,791 |
| 2005 | 419 | 2,004 | 44,917 | 6,421 |
| 2006 | 1,278 | 3,222 | 42,317 | 6,798 |
| 2007 | 770 | 2,721 | 42,723 | 7,307 |
| 2008 | 493 | 1,662 | 41,464 | 5,797 |
| 2009 | 610 | 1,923 | 45,941 | 7,103 |
| 2010 | 673 | 1,902 | 45,206 | 6,975 |
| 2011 | 542 | 1,202 | 43,754 | 5,408 |
| 2012 | 308 | 731 | 29,435 | 4,806 |
| 2013 | 1,162 | 1,983 | 35,745 | 4,784 |
| 2014 | 1,250 | 2,034 | 36,275 | 4,875 |
I dug deeper and found the same dataset for the A598 just north of the A41 junction. I say dug deeper, I changed to Barnet and clicked two buttons. Then I progressed up the A41 all the way to Mill Hill…
| Road (Junctions) | Pedal Cycles | Motor Cycles | Cars & Taxis | LGV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A598 (A41-A407) | 172 | 286 | 9,479 | 1,515 |
| A41 (A598-A407) | 73 | 668 | 37,239 | 5,372 |
| A41 (A407-A406) | 27 | 1,268 | 52,619 | 7,519 |
| A41 (A406-A504) | 62 | 1,100 | 57,172 | 7,105 |
| A41 (A504-A5150) | 61 | 615 | 54,386 | 5,166 |
| A1 (M1-A5000) | 24 | 783 | 47,357 | 6,814 |
What conclusions can we draw from just this set of data? With the caveat that this is not a complete flow model, it is a rudimentary count of the vehicles on the routes mentioned by the person making the claims listed above.
We can agree that the majority of Finchley Road traffic comes from or goes to the A41 north of the junction with the A598. Fairly obvious really, a large three lane road feeds a large three lane road.
However we can also see that 20,000 cars or light taxies and 2,400 light goods vehicles cease or start to use the A41 between the A598 and the A406 junction. These vehicles are trying to access the A406 or A407, one of which is the major trunk road in London.
Interestingly, the bulk of cyclists (almost half) come from Golders Green. Again this makes sense, the road which is currently least dangerous for cyclists is the one running to Finchley. North West London is cut off from adequate cycling provision, with riders forced to drive east and then south over hills to get into town.
Some will cry that these stats are 11 years old. This is a consequence of the nature of the comparison with a junction only analysed when it is critical. We do, however, have the stats from 2000-2014, so lets look at the initial table above for the A41 between the A598 and Adelaide Road.
From these, there is shown a near 9,000 reduction in cars since 2012, after 12 years of fairly static traffic numbers. We can see similar reductions in every junction up to the A406 starting at different points on the 14 year curve. This reiterates the point that people are, slowly, stopping using cars to get around in central London.
Finally, the Stop CS11 group say who would want to cycle down the Finchley Road? Well, since 2005 the daily average has only dropped below 500 twice, and has gone over 1,100 on three occasions. That is on a road that is dangerous for cycles and has no segregation. Imagine, just imagine how it could change.
London
So where does that leave us? It is the old adage about my perception is my reality, but let us return to Gladwell;
The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
The Stop CS11 group have a lot of knowledge, they have lived in the areas, they have observed and discussed, they are organised and intelligent. They do not, however, have the requisite understanding about traffic, nor have they invested time in gathering it.
Localism fails when it is not backed up with a larger view. One can kick up a fuss about consultations, petitions, lack of information. One can do this until a mayoral candidate hears the shouts and makes promises. Yet one cannot do so on a foundation built of sand.
If elected, Mr Goldsmith can no longer hold to both his duty and his promises. Which side he falls on will define the man who he is.
Edit:
A couple of points have been made to me in response to this piece;
- At current values, motorised traffic excluding HGV and Bus is just over 1/3 of the annual 32 million quoted by Stop CS11 and affiliates.
- The reduction in traffic over the period of DfT data should be compared with traffic levels in Hampstead. The stats show this traffic has not gone into Hampstead instead of down Finchley Road. So why did it go to Hampstead four years ago when levels were higher?
So much has gone and little is new
I guarantee you I will screw this post up.
I’ve been sitting shiva. I’ve immersed myself in that which was lost, trying to get it out of my system. Somehow I can’t shake this feeling that the wider world, that which exists outside of my day to day, will not longer be the same. Something has passed on, and for the first time since I was 14, I was’t expecting it.
During my shiva I have explored as many of the pieces out there I can find, both old and new. I’ve absorbed people’s words, comprehending what he meant to others so I could see what he meant to me. In doing this I have been rekindled with music I haven’t listened to for years, but new emotions and facts. Even in death he is surprising me, getting me to question.
What this has crystallised is that there has never been a time when he hasn’t been around. I wasn’t born when Ziggy Stardust was strutting, indeed I was only just about alive when he died. The first time I heard his creator’s voice wasn’t even through song, but as a narrator. I think my ma would have loved for me to have grown an obsession with Prokofiev and classical music, but indeed it was that voice that struck me not the music. The way he paused between words, toyed them around his tongue, letting them out to sound exactly as he meant them to; the wolf was terrifying, and Grandfather was severe but loving, Peter was a joyous innocent boy. All of this against the distant crackle of twelve inches of black spinning disc, I felt enveloped, played with, emotional and drawn in. In one swoop, I fell in love with image, purpose, vinyl and David Bowie.
And he stayed there. He was interwoven into my life. Key moments are backgrounded by Bowie, and I never noticed how much this until this week.
At 15 I wanted to impress a girl. Dating until then had been a mixture of meeting your mate, who happened to be female and attractive, for a milkshake or cinema. This was different, we were going to Docklands, we were going to see Bowie. I remember walking in and seeing him stood alone black suit, white shirt, looking like something distant, far away. I can’t listen to Life on Mars without that image.
Seven years ago, after 36 hours in the hospital I came home to an empty house with a wife and new daughter in hospital, knowing that this would be my last moment of solitude and silence for 20 years. I poured a scotch and listened to Kooks. I cried tears of exhaustion and pride. I finally understood it.
Just last week I was listening to Ziggy Stardust and reading Frankie Boyle’s thoughts on Bowie. I hate Boyle, he’s a waste of a great intellect, reverting to crassness when he could cut through. Then I saw him laid out and bare, crying in the shower, vulnerable like me. And I reevaluated him, realising the crassness is a shield, and that like Bowie I never new the real Boyle.
These moments repeat throughout my life; I can’t listen to Absolute Beginners without thinking of my wife and how i felt on our wedding day, I can’t think of evenings in my flat at uni without being drawn to my flatmate flicking though the guitar on Andy Warhol or a life long friend belting out the vocals in a spot on Bowie drawl and I can’t imagine a world where these moments don’t exist.
I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact these won’t be new moments any more. I worry that there aren’t new Bowies popping up and that the X-Factor generation won’t preserver like he did. I am concerned when we applaud Adele for repeating what she is good at rather than stepping outside and reinventing. We applaud mediocrity rather than turning and embracing the strange.
That is the legacy of Bowie, that whilst we have come to expect someone else to perform the extraordinary changes, he really won’t be there to do it for us. We, his children, need to move on from our grief, get out our make up kits and shake things up. After all, if Bowie’s death can make me like Frankie Boyle, the world has changes that can be made.
I’ve sat shiva, I can now start to move on and breathe again. There will always be a little hole where Bowie sat quietly in the background, but now I am aware of it and what created it. I can smile a crooked smile.
Goodnight David. Thank you.
The daily grind, the moral wealth
A portrait of the national health
The National Health, Maximo Park, (The National Health Live)
I brief commentary, in that I have arrived at the belief that the NHS is not saved by taxes or fiscal cuts, but by cuts in the areas we spend. Namely, prevention not cure.
So here is an open letter I wrote to the Hendon Prosepective Parliamentary Candidates. With their permissions, I will update with responses as they come in.
Candidates:
- Mr Matthew Offord (Conservative)
- Mr Andrew Dismore (Labour)
- Mr Alisdair Hill (Liberal Democrats)
- Mr Ben Samuel (Green)
- Mr Raymond Shamesh (United Kingdom Independence Party)
Dear Candidates,
Firstly, I would like to thank you, and the MHRA, for an excellent hustings last night. You all participated in a respectful manner, and provided critical information.
I am writing an open letter to you all, as I strongly believe that a major point was missed, and unfortunately we did not have the time or the opportunity to have an open audience debate. For the record, I have added this open letter to my occasional blog. I ask only that when you respond to this email with your thoughts, you cc in the MHRA for transparency,and that you indicate whether you are happy to have it published. I leave it up to you whether you wish to include the other candidates.
Last night we had a significant question on the future funding of the NHS. The exact amount is subject to discussion, with figures between £6billion and £17billion stated by the national media and candidates in the Hendon election. To some extent, this is moot, as the figures are so large as to be incomprehensible to actually work out.
So let’s accept that we have a hole in the NHS. It’s large, it’s billions, and we need to fix it.
The choices you all presented us with last night are:
- Make cuts to fix this hole
- Raise taxes to fix this hole
There is an ongoing national debate on where these cuts will come from or who will pay these taxes. To me, this is a debate we, as a nation, have been undergoing for nearly 20 years now. I see the solution as firmly in the first option, making cuts.
I see that we should cut the amount of money the NHS spends on treating people.
Let’s look at four major impacts on the NHS annual spend:
- The £470 million we spend on immediate treatment of road traffic accidents
- The £750 million we spend treating the effects of obesity
- The £1 billion we spend treating the effects of asthma
- The £7.8 billion we spend on treating cardio-vascular disease. (This figure is unbelievably hard to pin down, but I have gone by the BHF statistics)
These are not figures to the wider economy, which are even more startling (heart disease is estimated at £30 (THIRTY) billion). Nor have I included diabetes, stroke and breast/colorectal cancers, all of which are significant diseases we suffer from as a nation. Finally I have not included mental health here, something which we should have all been aware of last night given the cause of the delays to the trains.
I put it to you that the solution is not to cut services, administration, management costs, nor to raise taxes, but to reduce the amount of money we waste treating diseases that are preventable. Last night did not discuss the fiscal benefits of promoting a healthy nation, of encouraging our children to participate in active sport, of implementing transport and infrastructure changes to reduce our most common health issues. We are a sedentary nation, that spends time in cars and at desks, and our NHS is creaking because of it. Perhaps it is time we addressed the real burden on the NHS and allowed it to focus on healing the diseases we can’t prevent?
Please allow me to take a look at one topic which was raised last night; Transport
Most of you mentioned or focused on the issues with Thameslink, and responses aside from this varied from incredibly pro-motorist to pro-public/alternative transport. There was some mention from two candidates of the viability of alternative
Focusing on one alternative methodology, cycling;
A simple, national, investment in a true cycling infrastructure of £400 million a year will have significant benefits on the burden of the NHS in all of the four areas above. It won’t eliminate the problem, but it will reduce it, and just a 20% reduction in each of those figures produces a two fold return on an annual investment. Granted that won’t occur immediately, however additionally that excludes the benefits to wider society.
£400 million, that’s not even £10 a head. We currently spend £15 a head stuck in traffic jams every year.
I wrote to you all last week on cycling, and received one response (with a commitment for another last week which did not appear, and a commitment to receive one today). Cycling, to me, is one obvious cog in solving our economic problems. I don’t believe it is a silver bullet, and I don’t expect you to share these beliefs.
I will ask you to make three commitments:
- For the remainder of the campaign, when you debate the costs of our country, you look not only at cuts and taxes, but also to alternative and effective investments to produce the savings required to get us back on even keel. If you feel you have done so, please, reply and let me know.
- Should you be elected, you work with the community and Parliament in promoting such a holistic view of the country.
- Should you be elected, you commit to coming on a commute or group ride with me, to see how the constituency looks from the point of view of a cyclist.
Thank you for your time in reading this email, and I look forward reading your views on the above.
Jonathan Klaff
Update 02/05/2015 15:50
A response from Andrew Dismore, the Labour candidate.
Dear Mr Klaff
I’m glad you felt the hustings were worthwhile, and thank you for writing to me. I have copied in Mill Residents Association as requested and am happy for this to be posted on your blog.
I entirely agree that we need to take a holistic approach to our health and wellbeing, and consequently, NHS spending. You have already received my response on cycling, and so will know that I am a great supporter.
Labour will work to promote healthy lifestyles and public health, tackling vested interests to support parents in protecting children from commercial pressure and the harm caused by alcohol, sugar and smoke. Physical activity will be at the centre of public health policy with new, easily understandable recommended levels of physical activity and a new national ambition to get people more physically active.
We will reintroduce the goal of all children doing at least two hours of PE a week, and support the delivery of high-quality sports activity after school, so that every student will have the opportunity to do at least three further hours.
Better health and wellbeing will not only save money, but improve people’s quality of life.
Thank you again for writing to me.
Best wishes
Andrew Dismore
For transparency, the email on cycling referred to in the response.
Dear Jon
Thank you for taking the time to write to me about cycling.
1. Leadership and ambition to increase cycling levels.
This is vitally important. During my three years as London Assembly Member for Barnet and my thirteen years as MP between 1997 and 2010, I have championed cycling, and will continue to do so if elected on May 7.
The Mayor of London has totally failed to provide leadership. Despite being elected in 2008, it has taken until 2015 for him to show any real interest in cycling and cycling safety, and only then with the prospect of the 2016 London elections round the corner.
The introduction of the substantial Cycle Super Highways scheme and the Safer Lorries Scheme are a step in the right direction, however Londoners have waited seven years to see the Mayor live up to his promises. In this time London has seen huge cuts to funding forcycling.
Barnet Council under the Conservatives has been woeful on the issue: they have not even taken up the funds that were on offer for cycling initiatives.
2. Sustained funding commitment from the national transport budget.
The Transport Select Committee recommended that at least £145m be spent by TfL on cycling between 2012 and 2022, but TfL have said that only £91.3m will be spent – £54m less than recommended.
It is shocking that Conservative Barnet Council has failed to take up the funding forcycling that TfL has made available to them. As MP, I would campaign to ensure we made use of all available resources to promote cycling.
3. Cycle-friendly design standards for all new highway and traffic schemes.
Designers should think about cyclists when they are designing new roads and traffic schemes. There is no reason that the roads can’t work for everyone – pedestrians, drivers andcyclists alike.
4. Improved safety for cycling through strengthening road traffic law and revisions to the Highway Code.
I was pleased by the introduction of the Safer Lorries Scheme this February. Between 2008 and 2012, HGVs were involved in 53% of London cyclist deaths, despite only making up 4% of traffic. However, these provisions should have been introduced much earlier.
The Mayor has confessed that in the year to March 2015, only £29m had been spent out of the £82m cycling budget, a budget that had been cut from £107m in the first place. The price we have paid for cuts and underspending is a massive increase in pedestrian andcycling casualties.
5. Positive promotion of cycling including funding of cycle skills training.
With my Labour colleagues at City Hall, I have been promoting the London Cycle Network Plus scheme that will result in 900km of routes for cyclists across the whole of London. In 2008, the Mayor cut the funding for this scheme, but in 2013 decided it was a good idea. If he had listened in 2008, the project might have been complete by now. I will continue to campaign for its completion.
I hope this answers your questions. Thank you again for taking the time to write. I hope I can count on your vote on May 7.
Best wishes
Andrew Dismore
Update 30/04/2015 22:36
A response from Alasdair Hill, the Liberal Democrat candidate.
Hi Jon,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you! Cycling and alternative transport should be much higher on the agenda at all levels of government and I think we can take a lot of inspiration from other countries in Europe.
If I had all the money in the world I would invest in orbital light rail to improve connectivity around Barnet/Enfield/Harrow as it is a nightmare getting around. It would be great to have a system seen in Croydon with open carriages for cycles, step free access etc. But like we talked about at the MHRA hustings these projects are expensive. Nevertheless our population here is going to boom and there are more people travelling in N.London than Croydon so I don’t see why we shouldn’t put pressure on the Mayor to invest in better public transport here.
Barnet (especially MH) is criss-crossed with massive trunk roads and motorways which make it hard for cyclists. I would like to see better cycleways to navigate around here and all new developments should, by law, have statutory cycle transport, storage and safety provision (this will be part of a Liberal Democrat Green Law).
With an increase in injury and fatality linked to HGVs in urban areas I think we need to regulate design of these vehicles to reduce blind spots, include camera technology and modify clearance to protect cyclists. As more people take to the roads on bike there needs to be greater emphasis on safety in the HC and perhaps investigate tougher penalties on incidents involving cycling.
To drive forward cycling we need to encourage children to cycle but parents need assurances that the routes to school are safe. I would like to see better cycleways and dedicated road space and I think we should prioritize school routes.
I hope that starts to answer your questions. I’m a non-driver and public transport is my lifeblood; I will always defend its provision and work towards getting people out of cars improving their and their community’s health.
Kind regards,
Alasdair
Update 24/04/2015 13:05
A response from Ben Samuel, the Green Party Candidate:
Jon,
I got good feedback and it was a pleasure to talk to you about:
-Housing-NHS
-Local libraries
-Europe
-Free schools
-Public transport and road infrasturucture
Climate change is my stated top international priority more threatening than terrorism. That means cycling is needed. Cycling has the added benefit of cutting air pollution. 4000 people a year die in London from air pollution one of the biggest causes of death after smoking.
Cycling has huge benefits to mental health as well; I was careful when talking about this. Yesterday’s train disruption was a nightmare but we have to be careful talking about suicide methods in the media, not to give people ideas.
In Mill Hill, the more underground and above ground parking is provided, the more space we can reclaim at ground level for active transport. Rail infrastructure such as crossrail, Thameslink, and orbital light rail, generates pedestrians; so would a bus network. Offord was right to demand that Andrew Dismore should have more to show from serving on the TfL chair’s transport committee.
Yes I pledge those 3 commitments! I am really sorry I missed the cycling email. I try and respond to all emails and was waiting for my party to produce a top notch policy. I am a volunteer in a non target constituency therefore it is impossible for me to live up to expectations. You would expect the Green Party to have the best cycling policy. As it happens I am personally very much a believer in cycling and am considering giving up and moving to Amsterdam where it is not treated as the poor cousin of the micro scooter.
As it happens I have met with one cycling group in Barnet and would be happy to go on one of your commuter rides when I have time.
As I mentioned in the hustings, I really did, I have been cycling since the age of 16 when the tube fares went to adult fares. I have a piece in the Press coming up and I will mention cycling in my biography. I also wrote to Offord about this; he dismissed the email because he said Cat Hill is outside the constituency. I was concerned about the safety of the roundabout and would prefer a cutting edge dutch style elevated roundabout.
I mentioned cycling in the university hustings; Barnet has zero miles of cycle lanes and is getting some soon.
I’ve lobbied Hugh Rayner on the subject; not enough progress has been made on 20mph. As a Green my strategy is to unite cycling and pedestrians; this is called active transport.
I totally agree with your point about the NHS and my stated policy is to save 20% by having healthier life styles all round. I have been criticising for pulling that number out but it is totally plausible to project numbers to give you an idea to the nearest 1 decimal place, the nearest billion.
However we have an ageing population and even a 20% saving plus £10bn saved by improving the service ethos, we still have to accept that NICE will have to say no to some cancer drugs if they are not affordable.
Ben
I was just a boy when I sat down
To watch the news on TV
I saw some ordinary slaughter
I saw some routine atrocity
My father said, don’t look away
You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now
He said, that in the end it is beauty
That is going to save the world, nowNature Boy, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Nature Boy Live)
This occasional (it’s been a while since my last piece hasn’t it?) blog has always started with a lyric. I have struggled to find something to fit the mood and tone of what I want to write here.
I started out with Mark B and Blade’s Bad Day – “They ain’t professional, they left a pen, in other words they’ve given me reason to strike again”. It seemed to fit the initial nature of the attacks we saw in France, this was about free speech after all wasn’t it?
But the nature of the attacks, well they seemed routine, and as I watched the words of the media, twitter and Facebook unravel I came to realise this was more than just free speech. The reactions seemed predicable. Over three days we went through the phases of grief, denial, anger, bargaining. When I first started writing this, we were three days after and 20 deaths into the events and it seemed all in the midsts of depression.
Now the weekend has passed, the wounds are a little less raw and we’ve had the Unity March, we are full flow into the final stage of acceptance, with world leaders assessing their own security forces, the potential for further laws to combat extremism and our own subconscious movement to watching the next news cycle (there are 1,000 new jobs being created by Jaguar as we speak).
We, the people, those in the front line of terror threats, have not taken the time to analyse properly. We haven’t actually looked at what this means, we’ve simply consumed the news like a homemade Subway. What are the key things we need to consider, and try to resolve going forward? In business speak, what are our next steps?
#jesuisunsloagan
Play The Game, Fight The Fight
But What’s The Point On A Beautiful Night?
Arm In Arm, Hand In Hand
We All Stand TogetherWe All Stand Together, Some bloke made famous by Kanye West and a bunch of frogs (Sigh, I’m Quoting Macca and the Frogs)
To me, the most amazing part of Wednesday 7 January 2015 was the immediate response by the French. Not only did they stand tall in their defiance, but the effect of social media meant that this could be encapsulated and spread in a manner not seen before after a European terrorist attack. If we remember that the last major attack of a European capital occurred in 2005, when Zuckerberg was cavorting around a Californian swimming pool trying to monetise his nascent Facebook, we’ll see that this is a new kind of response.
In London we felt harmed and shattered, we felt there was no way to stand up and respond, relying on the responses of the Mayor and Government to lead us unto the light again. Personally, I found more solace through attendance of the funeral of one of the victims and the subsequent organisation of a minor march to one of her favourite London spots. We had no idea how the rest of London felt, let alone that someone thousands of miles away, someone affected by repression, terror or fear, felt in exactly the same way.
So the #jesuischarlie struck a chord with me, and I got behind it to show I stood with the Parisians, I had been affected by terrorists both at home and personally in 2007, and even prior to that through the Balfour House and Harrods bombs. I was moved beyond words by the gatherings in other cities in France on that evening. It was fitting that the first social media response was in France, the nation who’s revolution migrated us from the thought experiments of the Enlightenment to the current era of liberalism and progress.
But (there’s always a but isn’t there?), this euphoria at the response dwindled quickly as I saw other reactions unfurl. First, on the actual day, there were the usual poorly assessed accusations floating around the place. The best example I can give was the exploding car outside a synagogue in Sarcelles (Report Here). Rightly, in a state of heightened tension, people immediately thought this to be a subsequent attack. The Mayor of Sarcelles, also rightly, moved swiftly to quell the fears, stating it was a mechanical fire. So by mid-afternoon we knew two things:
- A car had blown up outside of a synagogue
- The mayor and police had investigated and both saw no reason to claim this was relate to the events
Yet there remained cries of a conspiracy and of purposeful targeting of Jews (more on this later). There is no doubt that it is possible this was a terror attack, that the mayor was trying to keep calm and that Jews were targeting. There was also no evidence. The terrorists win when we create a panopticon in which we only see attacks and remove any ability to assess and deconstruct events. Bin on fire? Terror attack. Dog walking down the street towards a Synagogue? It may be a bombdog. Teenage athlete carrying a javelin to a track meet? He’s about to massacre a whole community, not stopping until he’s dead.
The other sad deviation was the dilution of the hashtag. #jesuischarlie was as brilliant in the level of simplicity as #putyourbatsout was in the aftermath of Phillip Hughes’ death. It was our “I am Spartacus” moment. We were all Charlie, and you were free to proclaim this or not as you wished. Then, immediately, came #jesuisahmed, proclaiming that we don’t forget the brave policemen and women involved in the attacks, this was followed on Friday by #jesuisjuif, showing solidarity with those targeted in the kosher deli, and from there a whole plethora of other tags.
This culminated in this tweet by @hodgehilllabour, since deleted and apologised for.
The theory goes that Anitia Ward was typing the tweet and used Twitter’s autocomplete, thus proclaiming support for the Kouchi brothers in the same tweet as for those they killed. Of course there was outrage, indignation, demands and blame. However the issue is not that she was, as one friend put it, an idiot or incompetent, but rather that she divided the communities into individual pieces that needed support.
Anita Ward is not to blame, she was foolish and has hopefully taken the steps to correct. The problem with this is we all missed the point of #jesuischarlie. We are all individuals, yet together we are all a group. We are all Spartacus, and you can’t kill all of us. By showing solidarity with Ahmed, with the Jewish community, with the police, with the Muslims who stand up, with every individual group, we allow the terrorists to divide and conquer.
There is no doubt in my mind that the kosher deli was deliberately targeted because of it’s customer’s birth circumstances. There is also no doubt that the aim of this is to divert from the atrocity and to migrate the agenda into a discussion on Israel/Palestine. That we haven’t allowed this is credit to humanity. The best quote I saw on this entire subject was an @ianaustinMP (if you don’t follow, he’s well worth your time and attention) retweet of @mattforde: “France opposed the Iraq War and the UK went into Kosovo to save Muslims. This isn’t about foreign policy“.
Then we made it about foreign policy. We held an amazing march throughout France and elsewhere. An estimated 3.5million French men and women took to the streets, close to 5% of the population. Jaw dropping, bravo, this is utterly awesome. You know what is coming next though: BUT…
But, but, BUUUUUUT, we ruined the narrative. The debate became about who attended and who didn’t, about who was in the front row and who wasn’t, about the hypocrisy of Netanyahu or Abbas* (*delete name as appropriate depending on your view of the Israel Palestine situation). This wasn’t about the leaders and their photo opportunity. They reeked of the famous relative at your grandmother’s funeral, the ones who, because of their achievements, everyone want’s to sit next to and have in the front row, whilst you, the person who nursed them through the cancer, cry inconsolably at the back, not being able to say goodbye as you wished.
We started so well, we were humans banding together, yet somehow, somewhere though all this, we have gone from from solidarity to:
- This is about Islam
- This is about free speech
- This is about offence
- This is about rights
- This is about foreign policy
- This is about the pursuit of happyness
- This is about me and my agenda
No. This is about death.
The only other hashtag we should have had was: #jesuisvivant
The only people who should have been marching were the people
The only thing we should be defending are our rights.
Rights
Know your rights
These are your rights
All three of ’em
It has been suggested
In some quarters that this is not enough!
Well…………………………Know Your Rights, The Clash (Know Your Rights Live)
So much of the talk in the aftermath was on freedom of speech giving us the right to offend and be offended. To some extent, this is true, for we have built a society based on supposed free flow of ideas. At the same time there were compelling arguments stating that we should not offend for the sake of offending, implying that if you poke a hornets’ nest, don’t cry when you get stung. This is wonderful, we have a society in which we can debate the very foundations of the society in an ongoing attempt to improve it.
We know that freedom of speech is undeniably a fundamental pillar of our society. As I write this, I do it in the hope that people will read it, safe in the knowledge that if my ideology and thoughts are way out there, my hopes will remain unfulfilled or if they are not, I will either be deconstructed or ridiculed. Within this, I firmly reserve the right to claim that, should this blog remain unread, it is not because I am an idiot, but rather because I have no concept of how this will get out there over the net.
Where does this freedom come from? To me it’s encapsulated in the struggle of humanity, and the establishment of three fundamental principals or, using popular parlance, rights;
- The right to life
- The right to freedom
- The right to express
There are no more rights than the three above. That fundamental has not changed from the moment that Strummer penned the lines above (I disagree on the right to food money – that is an outcome of being free). Everything you need to get on with anyone else is encapsulated in the above. Don’t cross those boundaries and you end up living in harmony. In a free and equal society, one should not need laws to tell you what you can do, and if we don’t all have moral alignment, any laws telling us what we can’t do will be unenforceable. I AM equal to everyone else, I don’t need a law telling me because I am Jewish and a child of immigrants that I am any more equal than someone who’s family has been here for centuries.
These rights are hierarchical, there is no point to communication without freedom and there is no point to freedom without life. Central to it all is life. Our early days were simply about the struggle to live, tribalism evolved to ensure no other community impeded on this. Once we in Europe were generally safe, we moved into Enlightenment and the struggle for freedom from persecution, which reached it’s zenith in the 19th and 20th Centuries. From there, we layered on the freedom to express, to say, to be who you are and what you want. When combined with the other two layers, it is known as “freedom of speech”.
Does freedom of speech mean the freedom to insult? Of course it does. The French are exceptionally brilliant at insulting, and we, the Brits, are as good at taking the Mickey out of them for it. Put “Monty Python Holy Grail Video” into Google and the number one hit contains “your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries” (Video Here). What Frenchman in their right mind is going to be offended by that? If they were, well, surely they’re no better than the British being taunted?
Does freedom of speech mean obligation to insult or support insults? Of course it doesn’t. Those calling for the pseudo-compulsory publication of cartoons in the aftermath of January 7 missed the point. The editors should have printed them if there was an editorial reason. Once they have made this decision, there should be no other deterrent factor. They, as a press, have an obligation to print what they feel is right regardless of the threat to their liberty or safety. What they do not have to do is to print because you or I say they must print. I can express that I want to see something, but I can’t force someone to show me it. It’s just pointless to try.
The Aftermath
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you awayBuffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth (Led Zeppelin Cover For What It’s Worth)
I suppose the question is really where are we now and where do we go from here (I so nearly threw in some Megadeth above…). To some extent we are nowhere new. We have been here before, and we will react and go back to running our daily lives. Yet there are some differences this time round.
Firstly, there is the triumphalism seen in the deaths of the Kouachi brothers and their accomplices. Clearly I am not in the security forces, and I have no idea as to how it is possible in incapacitate people, and I know that those on the ground had no other choice, but there was an element of celebration amongst those civil observers on the social media platforms. With Lee Rigby’s murders, we celebrated their capture. Somewhere, in Britain, we have shifted to celebrating the destruction of rule of law. How can we celebrate death, even if it is the death of our enemy? We came thorough this, we’re better than that, or we’re a dead society.
Then there is the racist blame games that are being played out. That somehow a single group of people is responsible for this. Let’s just speak plainly – that group of people encompasses approximately 23.4% of the world’s population. We have difficulty in Britain getting the 5.3 million population of Scotland to agree on a single direction for the future of their country, what bloody hope does a global population of 1.6 billion spread across the entire globe with no formal power structures have of directing a coherent for world domination?
Fuck. Fuckty fuckity FUCK FUCK.
Ach Man, No One Ever Learns
And nothing ever happens
Nothing happens at all
They’ll burn down the synagogues at six o’clock
And we’ll all go along like before
Del Amitri, Nothing Ever Happens (Video)
I had a wonderful piece about how there was going to be harmony in the world, and how the march, as odious as the leaders were, showed that the scales had lifted from our eyes. It was about how the Israelis would show and be shown restraint, how Abbas would come to realise that the extremist elements he aligned with wouldn’t stop at the destruction of Israel, about how we would see this as our watershed in the Israel/Palestine situation. It was to explain how, clearly, the initial massacre had nothing to do with the Middle East, but it showed how everyone would be targets. It was going to end “after all, in the end it’s beauty that is going to save the world now”.
Then, then, THEEEEEEN Tim Willcox happened, and I looked online. I saw the same old bullshit exposed by both sides. I saw British Jews fawning over themselves to get their point in, and British Palestinian supporters doing the same to explain how Willcox was just leveraging his freedom of speech. I had a brief conversation in which the woman expressing fear was called a “Bitch” and Willcox should have told her to “go fuck herself” (@ElizabethHobso6), and to which the response by a couple of people was to pick on the fact that she had had some form of breakdown previously. I saw
I have suffered personal racism. I have known friends who have been vilified for their sexual orientation, their race, their beliefs or their sex. I have never felt scared of death because of these things. Looking on twitter last night, I felt scared. Not because people were saying anything new. It’s because they weren’t.
Did not one person learn from last week? Did no one notice that EVERYONE murdered was murdered because of nothing other than the fact they believed in something, a religion, no religion, freedom, rights, something. This is NOT about Israel. This is NOT about Palestine. This is NOT about freedom. This is NOT about rights. This is NOT about something.
This is about life.
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fallBob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (Pete Seeger)
But you who philosophise, disgrace
and criticise all fears,
take the rag away from your face,
now ain’t the time for your tears
Last week I was angry. Actually, angry isn’t the word; livid, apoplectic and enraged come closer to describing how I felt. I was moved to these feelings not by the events you would think, but by the reactions of people to the events. I felt helpless at explaining yet again why certain things were not acceptable in a modern, liberal society.
Then on the weekend I went riding. It never ceases to amaze me how the simple act of turning your legs in a circle can allow your brain to filter out the clouds and crystallise what is actually the problem. Why was I angry? Because people should have known better.
Hillsborough, 1989
I only need to type those two words for everyone reading this to realise what I mean. Hillsborough was a watershed moment in British society. It clearly marks the return of the football fan as the everyman and it also marks the start of true investment in safety and infrastructure.
For at least 2 decades, the hooligan had usurped the football fan. Hillsborough allowed us to remember that the vast majority of fans were parents, children, grandparents, brothers, sisters – people who wanted to do something as simple as watching a game, or even just have a day out. We have not forgotten this, and now if you are not a football fan, you are looked upon as some sort of oddball – “what do you mean you don’t care about the Champions League?”
For much of those same two decades, we had the warnings of Hillsborough in Bradford, Heysel and Ibrox. Time and time again we had warnings of the effects of closed stands, unallocated tickets, poorly created escape routes, lack of proper policing and provisioning. Yet all the time the answer given was “they’re just football fans”, a view some may say is understandable from the usurping by the hooligan.
Belgium, 2014 and Oxford, 2014
Dates and places not so synonymous with disaster, yet they should be equally as watershed in their changing of attitudes. The first refers to the death of Amy Dombroski. Now I never knew Amy, in fact I vaguely knew of her. I knew she had a bright future, and I knew she was much loved by those heavily into the sport. I was amazed by the outpouring of love and shock at the news of her death. I was angry that someone could die simply training for their sport. What made me angrier was being told that if you mix in the traffic you cannot control other people. So Amy must die because, in the words of Vicomte de Valmont, “It’s beyond my control”?
Meanwhile, over in Oxford, Helen Measures was cleared of overtaking two cyclists and in the process killing another riding the opposite way. The anger over this has been heavily documented, and I don’t need to say much. However again the reaction was very much “what do you expect when there are red light jumpers”. The fact that someone can take a life without it being in self defence or defence of a weaker human, and walk away is beyond me.
1989 Vs 2014
So here I am, left feeling angry. I’m angry because we are repeating the same mistakes. We had Bradford, Heysel, Ibrox and we ignored them until 96 fans died doing something they loved. We’ve had Amy, Bradley, Maria Karsa, Chiara Luisa Giacomini, Clive Richards, Alan Neve, Paul Hutchinson, Dag Linberg, Katherine Giles, George Orrey, Hillary Lee and many others.
The police walked away for two decades, not being blamed for their part in the Hillsborough disaster. Every time a driver kills a more vulnerable road user, we are doing the same. To say that every death is justified because some people jump red lights is to say that the fact there may have been one hooligan in the throng at Hillsborough justifies the the way the police treated the fans. It simply does not hold water in our society.
Every time you argue that infrastructure does not need change, you are arguing for Leppings Lane. Every time you claim it’s down to red light jumpers, you are claiming Hillsborough was due to hooligans. Every time you let someone walk from killing another human being, you are freeing the police from their guilt.
It took 96 deaths at Hillsborough for us to change the way we viewed football.
Nationally in 2012 we had 122 bike deaths.
Will we ever learn?
Now you who philosophise, disgrace
and criticise all fears,
bury the rag away from your face,
now is the time for your tears
Sur La Plaque 