Bread and Circuses - Tunbridge Wells & The Tour de France

Do you remember that mantra - act local, think global?  It was supposed to have some 'butterfly wings beating' effect on, say, climate change, as if putting our bottles in the right green bin was ever really going to have any tangible effect on Chinese industrialisation? Still, it all seems to have made a lot of people feel better about themselves and not believe that they had to engage in the much more onerous task of getting involved in political organisation in order to change anything truly material in the world.  Sweet, though.

Well, there is another version of the mantra - think local, act global.  Perhaps no more effective but worth considering.  Action to change the world might be more effective if we thought more clearly about the origins and effects of things that are happening to us as individuals and communities.  We might start to understand how we are managed and manipulated and just what little power we have to effect global change - unless, that is, we work with others collaboratively and collectively to do so.

So I make no excuse for taking a very parochial event in my world and seeing what it says about the arrogance of power and the powerlessness of 'we the people' who are expected to be spectators in a spectacle in which we are the spectated of ourselves (how very French of me!).

Under Community Arrest - Where's The Disaster?

Tomorrow, up to 50 streets in my area (Tunbridge Wells) are being closed off for several hours.  The 'natives' are under community arrest unable to move their vehicles.  A massive influx of people is being encouraged without any residential parking facilities in the inner town.  Some of the 'resident natives' will have their cars removed if they do not accede to a government order that they should not be on particular streets at a particular time.  Meanwhile, the local Press reports that we will see the largest ever police mobilisation in our County (Kent).

Ah, I hear you say (especially in America), this must be a response to the terrorist attacks on our country or perhaps this is a massive exercise to ensure that we can respond well to a natural disaster.  Do they expect the nearby Dungeness nuclear power station to go fizz or do they need to prepare for an outbreak of bird influenza?  Perhaps, given the Government's unpreparedness for the recent floods in our North Country, it is an exercise to help prepare us for some natural disaster like a major hurricane - our town is way above sea level.

No, none of these.  No act of war and no natural disaster.  It is a man-made local 'disaster' - the Tour de France which, as the 'biggest annual sporting event in the world', has been routed through our town without any local consultation whatsoever and with minimal direct contact with the very many residents affected.  In effect, a decision was made by Government to collaborate with a commercial organisation to hand over resources and freedoms for unproven economic benefits.  And thus we are under community arrest (in effect) for a day and our reward is to be the provision of panem et circenses (bread and circuses).

On the Decadence of Late Capitalism ...

How like the Roman Empire we are becoming - our legions fight in barbarian territory (and Iraq is merely an extended Teutoberg Forest), reality television is our gladiatorial blood sport and any spectacle that diverts the people from actually doing anything is promoted by Government as a substitute for real engagement in life.  The Tour de France is merely a passing phase in a long cycle of spectacular politics - the ridiculously expensive and round-the-houses East London regeneration project called Olympics 2012 is going to be a vastly more disruptive circus that will make the fons et origo of the politics of spectacle, the Millennium Dome, look like the mere bagatelle of idiocy that it was.

The argument for these spectacles is always economic but it is an odd sort of economic argument, an argument largely derived from a failure of power.  Instead of doing what Government should do, which is to identify a need and then, focusing on that need, either fulfil it itself or pay others (through tax incentive or straight subsidy) to do the job, economic politics in the UK has become an elaborate charade.  The game is to get the private sector to trickle down alleged community benefits through projects that are actually subsidised indirectly by consumers (through sponsorship and marketing budgets) and by tax payers (through the still-unpublicised cost of service provision such as the necessary police presence) rather than managed honestly and directly through tax.

The community arrest of the people in around fifty streets in one Borough for a day is simply a by-product of this sort of farrago.  Local people are treated like troublesome and awkward units of disruption, making it almost impossible for them to do anything else but make the event a 'success'.  This is because they are left with no alternative but to run away for the day or end up standing in a crowd to watch a bunch of cyclists in whom they have no intrinsic interest hurtle past without any of the information or commentary that they would get on the telly.  This is the sort of crowd mobilisation that you would expect in Pyongyang, admittedly done through a very different and less sophisticated form of manipulation.

But What Of the Economic Benefits to Our Town?

But if this local Government of Tory Councillors is behaving like that of North Korean communists, perhaps we should take at face value some of the 'economic benefits'.  Well, it is still unclear who precisely is paying for police overtime or the security arrangements across Kent and in London (made slightly more critical lately by the discovery that 'Al-Qaeda' appears to have infiltrated our public services). 

London can bear the cost but we seriously doubt whether Kent can, let alone our cash-starved local Council.  Kent County Council is certainly paying for the costs of closing the roads 'and making the route safe' [i.e. the massive police presence].  As for economic benefits, these appear to be going to the organisers and the sponsors but not necessarily to local small traders.  Here are two quotations from Tunbridge Wells Borough Council's guidance notes on the Tour:-

* There are strict rules about advertising along the route of the Tour since official sponsors pay many thousands of pounds for the highly-valued privilege of being associated with the race.  No other commercial concern is able to attach its own brand to the Tour de France or any of its logos.  An advance party of Tour personnel travels ahead of the race and will take down any advertising material that breaches these rules.

* (To businesses who have to close on the day because of the disruption)  Compensation is not payable in cases like this.

So, there we are - if you are a small trader, no one can park near your shop, you cannot show support for the TV cameras without having the 'sponsor police' on your back, crowds of people are going to be blocking the street outside your shop (good for newsagents and eateries, bad for everyone else) and there is no compensation for lost trade.

To rub salt in the wound, it seems that the village of High Halden near Tenterden may be under community arrest for longer than elsewhere 'dependent upon requirements for [the] VIP area'.  Oh, can't you just see the local dignitaries and corporate executives sweeping in and out slightly the worse for wear after a good day out in their Zil limousines?  So like our dear departed Soviet bloc where Moscow motorists would wait behind traffic lights to let the Second Assistant Deputy Commissar for Light Bulbs through.  Plus ca change.

Back to Panem et Circenses

We are told that a 'huge' publicity caravan precedes the riders, giving out sweets (so much for the newsagents benefiting), hats, toys and other souvenirs to the people lining the route - the panem required to fuel the circus.  This is, in short, private/public partnership community fascismo.  But there is a much more serious aspect to the case.  Globalisation has created massive transnational sporting and cultural events, many of which have grown organically from quite small regional bases. 

For example, the economic value surrounding a community football club has quietly increased so that, as a club becomes an international force, its economic power begins to dictate how a locality will be structured for its ends.   Every traditional football fan knows that this economic power is double-edged.  The fans don't 'own' what they think they once owned.  An unwritten understanding that the club is a community/private sector hybrid is shown to be not worth the paper on which it has failed to be printed.  The club moves on and up to a level where it is a private sector player demanding collaboration with Government from a position of relative strength.  

The scandal over frequent strip changes in order to create a planned obsolescence in each generation of school kids is yesterday's news, but massive televised football hides the reality of a national spectacular sports culture designed to fuel the media's insatiable demand for content.  And so we see an increase in Western obesity as community sports decline in favour of passive spectacle.  As facilities are made available for 'development', we switch to a world where citizens and subjects become passive objects outside the spectacle (watching) instead of active participants inside the spectacle (doing).  At least North Korean mass callisthenics keeps the poor buggers fit.

Local Government as Standing Joke

The local Council in this case ('think local') is pretty well a standing joke (just look at the abandoned Odeon site in the dead centre of town as the cyclists whizz past).  In some respects it is worse than others (the Audit Commission has been crawling over it for some time) but in other respects it is pretty well typical of the collapse of strong representative government in Middle England. 

There is a malign conjunction across Southern England of good old boy Councillors with no incentive to exist as other than as big carp in tiny garden ponds, second rate Officers starved of resources and with appalling morale, and a tax-cutting mentality in which serious problems in the inner towns are overwhelmed by the refusal of middle class people in villages and suburbs to contemplate anything that digs into their retirement income. 

And so we end up with weak leaders endorsing a commercial spectacle at our expense and at cost to our freedoms and with no proven local benefit other than a bit of freebie entertainment and an extra burst to day's shopping revenue for the multiple retailers - entertainment, that is, if a few tawdry street giveaways and the chance to watch a bunch of cyclists go by is to be classed as entertainment. 

The answer, of course, lies in strong elected mayors who are responsive and accountable to the people and who are checked by smaller and tougher groups of councillors elected under STV  [Single Transferable Vote]. 

We need people who can stand up to Central Government, The Mayor of London (the main source of patronage in this saga), the Council Officers and predatory commercial interests in support of our people.  If an accountable elected mayor had signed off on a deal, I would have grinned and borne the inconvenience knowing that the electorate could have judged him or her on their decision at election time ... and that the benefits would not merely be theoretical but would more likely to have been proven and concrete.  Our public spaces, if it is in our interest to do so, should be sold (and not given away) to these commercial interests with the full consent of the people.  If they do not buy access to public property in the community benefit, they can go elsewhere ...