Of man and nature

This week: a response to every predictable NIMBY argument I can think of. Also, a map of British rail journeys; and why don’t the clocks go forward for another six weeks?

Some ~personal news~: I have a new column! In Nimby Watch, every week or so on CapX, I will be celebrating the way our planning system is working to save the country from the blight of affordable housing or decent infrastructure. First up – the story of the Bethnal Green mulberry tree, a fight over whose existence has left a former hospital next to Victoria Park sitting derelict for nearly a decade. The site should, by now, be providing around 300 homes, a third of them affordable. It isn’t.

The column has had a bigger response than anything I’ve written in some time, which is pleasing. But one of the things that’s been exhausting about it has been replying to the same predictable dozen or so replies that greet any piece about NIMBYism, and have been doing so for as long as I’ve been writing about housing.

Obviously you, best beloved, would never be either predictable, or exhausting. But an infuriatingly high number of people are. And since I’m likely to get the same sorts of questions every week, I thought I’d just save time by putting down my responses to all the main lines of criticism, and explain exactly why it is I find this debate so frustrating.

“Couldn’t they just… move the tree?” That was the plan which campaigners opposed. Nobody is obligated to read anything on the internet, but it’s perhaps polite to do so before you commence arguing with it.

“Okay but why couldn’t they work with the tree.” They tried! That’s what moving it was about! Coming up with a version of the plan that left the tree where it was has been possible – but doing so has reduced the number of homes planned, and delayed the scheme’s start for years, and as things stand nothing is happening. Because of a tree.

Also worth noting that nobody gave a crap about the tree before someone proposed building homes near it, which is why the developers didn’t think more about all this in the first place, but that’s by the by. 

“We need homes but also need nature: we need a balance.” Yes, we do: literally everyone agrees we need both some homes and some nature. This is an argument about where that balance lies. Some people think one tree is worth denying 300 homes for years on end because it is quite old; some of us do not.

“But climate change-” The earth is burning, yes. But have you seen the tree? Do you really think it’s this guy that’s singlehandedly going to save us? Really? He can’t even stand up on his own.

Image: Peter Coles/Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 4.0.

“Okay, but why this site? Can’t they just build somewhere else without a tree?” Because there’s always a bloody tree. There’s always a tree, or a much loved field, or a view, or a petrol station a small community relies on because the nearest alternative is a five minute drive away, or something. That’s the point of this column: to highlight the way all these somethings add up to years of delay and not enough homes.

Anyway, I’m not convinced those people are always being honest about the nature of their objections. To whit:

“There’s be fewer objections if this was all social housing.” Well, that’s not on the table, because councils are broke and the Treasury doesn’t care and we still need homes so you work with what you’ve got. Nonetheless, and call me cynical, but I’m not convinced the people worrying about the new homes besides their conservation area would suddenly find it in themselves to support them if only we promised them a lovely new council estate instead. 

Moving away from this specific case:

“Normally I’d agree with you, but with this particular proposal...” Hey, maybe you’re right, and this case is different. Occasionally, they are! But that argument has the exact same structure as every argument used by every NIMBY campaigner who ever lived, so I’m probably going to start out a bit cynical

“But have you considered this incredibly specific issue which means I don’t support homes on this specific site near my house?” Well, probably not specifically, no. But I have been writing about this stuff for a decade, and while it’s possible you’ll be the one to make the scales fall from my eyes, it feels equally possible that I’ve considered roughly the same facts as you and simply come to a different conclusion because that’s how the world works.

Also in the case of the Bethnal Green mulberry tree, I am a local homeowner, I think it’s bloody shocking a huge site like that has been left to rot for a decade, and that it is absurd we haven’t built on it.

“Incomers like you are ruining the area.” So you’re comfortable saying that people who move to a place should have fewer political rights than those who would live there already, are you? Interesting rhetorical choice. 

(Also, while I bow to no one in my belief I’m some kind of poncy East End hipster, I would note that I once traced my family tree and got as far as my great great great grandfather, John Elledge, who christened his kids in Shoreditch Church in the 1790s. So, yah boo sucks.)

“Why aren’t you writing about this completely different issue instead?” I’m sorry, did I miss the memo that you were now my boss? Why do you, a stranger on the internet, imagine that you’re entitled to set me homework? Bloody hell.

“But if we reform planning, landowners will make money.” You know what? They probably will, and some of them have quite enough money already, and we should maybe look into that. But at risk of coming over all Peter Mandelson about this, I am less bothered by rich people making money than I am by non-rich people not having enough housing.

“The only people who’ll benefit are developers.” Well firstly, you want to get anything done under capitalism, someone is going to make money. People make money from building schools and hospitals too. That is not a case against building hospitals and schools. 

Secondly, this is absolute nonsense. The people who’d live in those homes would benefit. The people who’ll live in the homes previously vacated by those people would benefit. The parents whose adult kids will finally be able to move out will benefit. The people whose rents will come down will benefit. The people who live in the area and are sick of walking past a derelict site every day – hi! – will benefit.

You know who might not benefit? The people who stand to financially benefit from limited housing supply. Or who live in the big houses nearby and don’t want to deal with the noise and dust of construction work. Or who don’t want any new people moving to their area. Those people, it’s just possible, might face some downsides. 

Well… sorry, them’s the breaks, we live in a society and you don’t get everything your way. Grow up.

“You’re being paid to say these things!” Yes, I am! By the site which is publishing it! I am not, however, being paid by any developers or other shadowy pro-construction forces. But I’m not getting any younger and we all have bills to pay so just for the record my DMs are open.

“CapX is a right wing website!” I am aware, but it’s good, at times, to talk to the other side. Also, while I don’t agree with the site’s line on any topic but this, that I can think of, if I only wrote for platforms I never disagreed with, I’d never write anything. And while I’m sure there are people who’d be happy with that, you can probably understand that I am not one of them.

“I can’t believe you’ve spent half a week sitting on the internet having arguments about a single sodding tree.” Bloody tell me about it.

Something that isn’t about a bloody tree

Hey, buy my book!

Why don’t the clocks go forward for another six weeks?

On the last weekend of October every year, Britain puts its clocks back. Last year that switch took place in the early hours of the 29th, 53 days before the winter solstice (21st December), the day in the northern hemisphere on which the night is longest. 

Half a year later comes the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and halfway between those landmarks come the spring and autumn equinoxes. Because the precise length of a year is approximately 365.2422 days – not even a whole number, let alone one helpfully divisible by four – and because we use a system of leap years to compensate for the fact, the exact date on which these events take place wobbles within a window of a couple of days. But generally speaking, the movement of the Earth around the sun means our calendar is pleasingly symmetrical. 

And so, you might imagine, if the clocks go back approximately seven and a half weeks before the winter solstice, it would make sense for them to go forward again approximately seven and a half weeks after it. That takes us to 12 February, the Monday just gone, so one might imagine that, since the clocks obviously did not go forward last weekend, then surely to god they must be about to this weekend.

They won’t. They won’t go forward, in fact, until the weekend of 30-31 March, another six and a half weeks away. Although the clocks went back just 53 days before the solstice, they don’t go forward until around 100 afterwards. Within a margin of a few days difference, this happens every year. 

All this, and the fact it conflicts with our sense that the calendar should be symmetrical, came up in a group chat the other day. Why, someone asked, do we still not have our evenings back? 

First, let’s think about the reason we change the clocks at all. It is not, as the myth would have it, to do with farming, but to do with energy efficiency, and it wasn’t the invention of Benjamin Franklin either (he merely used a satirical pamphlet to propose saving candles by waking everyone up at dawn). The idea of changing the clocks as policy dates to the early 20th century, when a British builder by the name of William Willett found himself travelling through suburbia early one summer’s morning in 1905. Despite the blazing sunshine, he realised, the blinds were all down because everyone was still in bed. Why not, he proposed in a pamphlet, swap a useless hour of sun in the early morning for an extra one in the evening? Not only would that make summer evenings nicer, it’d save on electricity too. There’s some debate over whether this actually worked – but nonetheless, his plan was implemented in many countries in the years during and after the First World War.