Source: BBC Radio 4: Moral Maze
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01q8qqk
Date: 30/01/2013
Event: Moral Maze: Nimbyism and HS2
Attribution: BBC Radio 4
People:
David Aaronovitch: Hello. Pass through almost any British village or town, it sometimes seems, and you'll discover a community dedicated to stopping something. Posters saying "No to... (fill in the unwanted project, for yourself)" are ubiquitous. Earlier this week, the preferred route of the next section of High Speed 2, the new proposed rail link between north and south, was announced, and MPs - mostly Tory and mostly from the shires - immediately protested. Just as immediately, those businesspeople in northern Labour councils, who believe that the line will mean jobs and growth, expressed their delight, and condemned the nimbyism of their opponents. And you may just have heard there on the news about the problems of agreeing where to put our nuclear waste.
Almost every campaigner will, of course, express their position in terms of studies and facts. What gets left behind, though, is the moral argument between those who stand to lose from progress and those who are usually hungry for it. Opponents see themselves often as protecting valuable and precious ways of life that just happen to be theirs. As one letter writer to a newspaper said this morning: "It's truly wondrous how noble, how public-spirited and how self-denying some people can be when its not their back yards which are in peril." "Growthers", as they might be called, lament the ease with which the Chinese or the even more authoritarian French can build great infrastructural projects in next to no time which benefit the bigger community, while we're still bogged down in a judicial review and an appeal to a re-held inquiry.
Strip out the contested claims and you're left with a series of dilemmas about the price of progress and the morality of resistance. About common good for all versus the good life for some. So - that's nimbyism versus the iron march of progress, your moral maze.
Our panel tonight is Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA and former advisor to Tony Blair, Giles Fraser, parish priest in South London and Anne McElvoy, Public Policy Editor of the Economist. And the first question I'm going to ask you, panel, is: have any of you ever been a nimby? Claire, have you ever been a nimby?
Claire Fox: I was about to actually say that although I'm on the side here of progress and development - and I think in a democracy, you have to always weigh up the greater good of society versus the particular arguments of nimbys - I'm worried about demonising nimbyism as well. I don't want to kind of just say "I'd never have thought you shouldn't have done that there", because there are actually times when that is a spur to action. You can look outside your window and see some monstrosity built by the council - as I have done - and just thought "I want to write a letter". So I understand the instinct. But we need to have a broader moral discussion about what should we do, that's not always what we want to do ourselves, as individuals.
David Aaronovitch: Not totally sure that Claire answered that question. Anne, what about you?
Anne McElvoy: I'll answer it. I was a toddler nimby. I was dragged along on marches as a very small girl, opposing opencast mining in the northeast of England. And I would still stand by that, actually. And I do think nimbyism may be driven by self-interest in the first case, but it doesn't mean it lacks wisdom or foresight. And I think, as in that example, it was a very good corrective to something that central government was into at the time, and it was a jolly good thing nimbys were there.
David Aaronovitch: Matthew, did you march against things happening in your area?
Matthew Taylor: No, I don't think I ever have been a nimby. But I also think that, whilst on the one side of the argument there can be people entering into massive rationalisations for the fact that they don't really want their house prices - house values to go down, I also think, on the other side of the debate, there can be a kind of fundamentalism about progress - that anybody who stands in the way of progress is misguided. So I think nimbys are a problem for the debate but I also think this kind of growth fundamentalism is, too.
David Aaronovitch: Okay, thank you, panel. Our first witness is Penny Gaines - she is chair of the campaign Stop HS2. Penny, welcome. You are from the village of Quainton, and you got involved when you discovered that the railway, the high-speed rail was going to go one side of the village of Quainton. Can I just do a thought experiment with you, if you don't mind, which is: if it could be proved to you that HS2 coming past the village, through the village of Quainton, past the village of Quainton, would actually have significant benefits for people in another part of the country, would you say "Ah well, go on then. Put the thing through"?
Penny Gaines: Probably, if it could be proven that HS2, or any other big infrastructure project, was of the kind of benefits that people are talking about, I probably would say "Okay, put it there". I've had so many people come up to me, during the time I've been working on Stop HS2, saying "If it could be shown to me that it was in the national interest, I would say: okay. Go ahead. Do it." But what we've found is we've said to the government, we've said to various people "We've looked at this and it's wrong because of this, this and this", and they say -
David Aaronovitch: I understand that. Could you just take one step further - do you think your fellow campaigners, as you look at them, would take the same attitude?
Penny Gaines: Some of them would.
David Aaronovitch: And some of them...?
Penny Gaines: Some of them might not, but many of them would take the same attitude. If it's in the national interest, that's okay.
David Aaronovitch: Thanks. Giles Fraser, your witness.
Giles Fraser: Tell me about Quainton. Tell me about your village. What's it like?
Penny Gaines: It's - it's a village, it's about nine miles from Aylesbury, it's in the Vale of Aylesbury. It's very quiet, very tranquil. We've got a railway centre there, which is about a mile and a half from - well, a mile from my house. The -
Giles Fraser: A church?
Penny Gaines: A church, yes.
Giles Fraser: And the church has been there a long time, it's one of those old village churches.
Penny Gaines: Yes, it's - it was around back in the time of St. [sic] James's Bible, because the rector was one of the people who took part in writing St. James's Bible.
Giles Fraser: Okay, so I'm a vicar, so I'm going to ask you a sort of - I'm going to ask you a question. And it isn't about High Speed 2, because I don't know anything about - I'm quite agnostic about that. I'm not really into the policy. I'm interested in the morality of the sort of - the whole thing that's going on, here. 'Cause in that church, for hundreds of years, one of the sermons that's bound to have been preached is the sermon about the Good Samaritan. And the Good Samaritan is in answer to the question "Who is my neighbour?" So a lawyer comes along, and he says, you know, "Love God and love your neighbour". And the lawyer says "Who is my neighbour?" And the answer to the question "Who is my neighbour?" is not the person who lives around me. The answer to the question "Who is my neighbour?" is actually the, sort of, stranger or the person who lives far away, and so forth, like that. And what people think of, when they think of nimbyism, is the people who answer that question, just about, the neighbour is the person who lives next door. What do you make of that, the parable of the Good Samaritan?
Penny Gaines: It's one of those very compelling things, where it makes people think about who - like you say - who is thy neighbour, is it the person who lives next door to me or is it the person I somehow know through other ways, or is it just someone I don't know at all? And it goes both ways, you have the sort of - neighbours are the people who when you start off - in a village, you can say "Well, your neighbour is someone who lives in a city or a town", or whatever. But also, if you live in a city or a town, your neighbour is the person in the countryside. Because if you're in the city, you, too, benefit from the Green Belt and the countryside around you.
Giles Fraser: That's absolutely right, so it works both ways. But my anxiety with some of the stuff that you hear, and this phrase "nimbyism", which is obviously a sort of, you know, obviously it's a phrase which you don't like very much - but it gives the idea that all you campaign about is for your own interest, and your own neighbours and your own place. And actually there is a sense of not really caring about how things exist beyond your own, sort of, very narrow locality.
Penny Gaines: Yeah, I mean the moment you start framing the debate as "nimbyism versus the greater good", you are stifling discussion because the people who feel that they're going to suffer from something, they have a great incentive to start looking at the details and looking into something with great depth. And that's what I found with HS2. I have read thousands and thousands of pages of documents which I might not have read if HS2 was going somewhere completely, completely different, and from that point of view I feel like I am informed about the debate.
Giles Fraser: But you wouldn't be so concerned if it went somewhere else, you wouldn't have read those pages.
Penny Gaines: I wouldn't have read those pages, but it's like a lot of things - people are vaguely concerned about all sorts of things. So you've had discussions on the Moral Maze about things like euthanasia and gay marriage and all that kind of thing, and you might be concerned about - everybody might be concerned a little bit about those, but they wouldn't go and read all the documents and all the arguments for it, they just might read one or two articles in a magazine.
David Aaronovitch: Claire Fox, your witness.
Claire Fox: Just on that, have you been involved in political campaigning much, before? Is this, kind of - are you new to it?
Penny Gaines: I did a bit of student politics when I was a student, but I haven't done any campaigning before this. The first time I was involved - the first time I went on a demonstration, I helped organise it because of HS2.
Claire Fox: The reason I was asking, you've just referred to things like euthanasia and gay marriage and those kind of things, it's because it is about how you make political decisions, in a way, how you make those kinds of political decisions. Because can you imagine a situation whereby every time somebody had to make those big political decisions about - the laws about euthanasia or about gay marriage, about all the rest of it, if local people could veto it by having a demonstration, would you think that was a good thing?
Penny Gaines: I think what's important is that all sides of the debate are listened to, and all sides of the discussion listened to, and that part of the discussion isn't, sort of, sidelined by saying "We don't care about your views, because we've decided what you're going to think".
Claire Fox: I can understand that, and I can understand also being irritated about the kind of closing down debate on nimbyism. But over history, every single piece of progress, as you can imagine, has been opposed by people saying "If that railway comes in this area it's going to corrupt..." - everything from corrupt the morals of the youth to destroy the health, I mean, from steam engines onwards. Can you not see that every single bit of progress has been opposed by people like you getting active and so on, and so forth? Is there a danger that you are inadvertently just a reactionary conservative brake on - I mean, not you personally, but you know what I mean - a reactionary brake on progress? Just 'cause you don't like it. How do you deal with that accusation?
Penny Gaines: Well, we've been called Luddites, in Parliament, and what I find quite amusing is that when I say "the demand for travel is going to change, because the internet is coming in, and you're going to have people using thing like Skype to communicate", my children - I have teenagers - they communicate using Skype with people they've never met in - abroad, and we're having this argument through - the Victorians had this wonderful idea, they had these wonderful ideas about building railways, we must build railways because we want to be like the Victorians, whereas when you -
Claire Fox: No disrespect, but even on Skype - and we can't even do fast broadband in this country - and what I'm trying to say is: the kind of - I'm not talking about railways, I mean - see that as a metaphor.
Penny Gaines: Yeah.
Claire Fox: I suppose, what I'm saying is: can you not see that in order to move things forward, you're always going to disturb someone? If you build anything - a new hospital, if you have built all the houses that lots of young people need to live in, you can't Skype your way into a new bedroom, if you see what I mean. We need to build, don't we. How do we build, without upsetting some local people?
Penny Gaines: You have to think very hard, you have to weigh up all the evidence. And that's the thing that we've found with HS2. We've said "Can we have a public inquiry, from someone who's independent?" And the answer's been "No, you're just nimbys."
David Aaronovitch: Penny Gaines, thank you very much indeed. Our second witness is in our Manchester studio. He's Sir Richard Leese, who's the leader of Manchester City Council. Welcome, Sir Richard.
Sir Richard Leese: Good evening.
David Aaronovitch: My question to you is this, before the panel start in on you. You've got buses, in Manchester, that are going around with the slogans on them about HS2: "Their lawns, our jobs". Something of a class-war message there, isn't there?
Sir Richard Leese: Well, it's certainly not our message on those buses, and whilst I'm a very enthusiastic supporter of HS2 - and for us, it is jobs, it's about survival more than progress, actually a lot of the people who will get those jobs will be living in the leafy areas of Cheshire that High Speed Rail will be coming from, so actually the beneficiaries are not solely the residents at the heart of the city, the beneficiaries cover a far wider area.
David Aaronovitch: So just to be clear, you deprecate those messages.
Sir Richard Leese: Absolutely, and if I had High Speed Rail coming through the middle of my house, I wouldn't be very happy about it, I have to say. But I understand that people would object. What I find -
David Aaronovitch: I'm going to pass you straight on to Anne McElvoy. Anne, your witness.
Anne McElvoy: So, if you had High Speed Rail coming through the middle of your house or garden, as you just said, you wouldn't be very happy about it, so you'd be a nimby.
Sir Richard Leese: I - in those circumstances I probably would be, but I think most of the people who are objecting, of course, haven't got High Speed Rail coming through the middle of their house. They might have it coming through the middle of their county, but -
Anne McElvoy: So what's the difference? Why is it so bad, if you were a nimby for a different reason?
Sir Richard Leese: I think it's about what the - there is a very direct, personal impact. And if I, hypothetically, I've lived in a house for fifty years, I'm very comfortable there, I'm very happy there, I will not be very happy about being forced to move. I think if I lived five or ten miles away, then I'd look around me and see a county full of canals, full of railways, most of which have been an addition to the landscape rather than something that's been a blot on the landscape.
Anne McElvoy: Well, that's obviously not what people think you object to, if you live a few miles away, is it. What they think is that it is going to blight the countryside. Why don't you take their arguments seriously?
Sir Richard Leese: Well, I think all the evidence of the last couple of hundred years says that simply isn't true, and have to recognise that we live in what, in this country, is an almost 100% man-made landscape anyway. And railways - people, by and large, quite like them.
Anne McElvoy: Excuse me, how can you have a 100% man-made landscape? Can I just quote you a bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins: "What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left". It's not true that it's man-made, is it?
Sir Richard Leese: It is - all fields, fences, all those things that Hopkins was talking about, were, certainly. An element -
Anne McElvoy: No - mountains, lakes, undulations and much else wasn't.
Sir Richard Leese: - a large element of man's influence over them. The Lake District - the fact that it's got no trees - or very little trees - is because of the influence of man.
Anne McElvoy: But if man makes it - can I just come to a moral point here, if I could. If, as you say, it is partly man-made - but we could argue about how much is natural and how much is man-made - does that give man, and woman too, a direct duty to preserve? Isn't that actually rather a sound moral instinct?
Sir Richard Leese: There is absolutely an obligation to do that, and that's another reason why High Speed Rail is a good idea, because it allows large numbers of people to move around in a very efficient way that minimises damage being done to the landscape. I think people would be more reasonable to object to, say, the M40 when that was being built, than something like High Speed Rail.
Anne McElvoy: You're getting into policy specifics now, but you don't accept that people may see a strong moral case for keeping things, or preserving, you only see a sort of moral driving case for overriding their concerns.
Sir Richard Leese: I don't think most of the people involved in campaigning actually do want to preserve, in that sort of sense. I think quite often it is a false notion of the preservation of a particular lifestyle, which isn't permanent anyway.
Anne McElvoy: You know that.
Sir Richard Leese: I think in most cases, that is undoubtedly the case, because the world changes, it never stays still. And there are other things that will factor into this, for example climate change that will impact on us, whether we campaign against High Speed Rail - or something similar - or not.
David Aaronovitch: Okay. Matthew Taylor, your witness.
Matthew Taylor: Sir Richard, I've looked at the arguments for and against, and what is clear is this is not an open and shut case. And you're a reasonable man, you know it's not an open and shut case. It's a gamble. It's a pretty huge gamble that you're advocating, isn't it? Both in terms of its effect on the countryside, but also in terms of its cost to the taxpayer.
Sir Richard Leese: No, I don't think it's a huge gamble. I think the evidence about the importance of transport to economic growth and for us creating jobs is incontrovertible.
Matthew Taylor: What isn't incontrovertible is where those jobs will be created. And you know that, you know that many people would argue that jobs are more likely to be created in London than Manchester.
Sir Richard Leese: What I do know is that for Manchester, the north, to be able to create jobs, that we do need those transport links and know the transport links are getting blocked up. And yes, jobs will be created in London, but if I was to get into the position of saying "There are going to be eleven jobs created in London for every ten in Manchester, therefore I'm going to oppose it", that would be a pretty stupid position to get to.
Matthew Taylor: Do you accept that one of the reasons that people might be sceptical about this is that politicians - and council leaders in particular - have got a bit of a history, haven't they, of saying "Here's our grand plan, it's going to make the world better, we're preparing for a new form of transport". That was precisely the rationale that led to cities like your own having the heart ripped out of them in the '60s and '70s, in order that they be run for cars rather than for people.
Sir Richard Leese: Well, the fact the heart of our cities was ripped out in the 19th century to build railways and build canals, in the first place.
Matthew Taylor: Yes, but those decisions in the '60s and '70s were disastrous, and they were made by people who hadn't read the work of, for example, Jane Jacobs, who argued that cities must grow organically, and that we should resist those people who say "Big schemes is always what we need". Often, big schemes are terribly counter-productive.
Sir Richard Leese: Well, in many respects, what we're talking about is not doing something new, and we're not taking a gamble - actually, we're doing what's tried and tested, which is putting in a transport infrastructure that we know will work because we've done it in the past, here, and across Europe, across the world, other people have done it, and have done it a lot faster than we have. We know it works.
Matthew Taylor: What do you say to people who say that although academics, economists are divided on HS2, they're not in the slightest bit divided in other ways that you could spend your money. You could spend your money on buses, you could spend your money on nurseries, you could spend your money on things which would concretely improve the lives of people, year in, year out. But yet you'd rather spend it on a huge product that we can't be sure about. Is that a responsible thing to do?
Sir Richard Leese: If we're saying that good transport links between Manchester, the north of England and London aren't important, let's just close the West Coast Main Line and the M6, and we know that if we were to do that, it would be an absolute disaster for this area. If we take that those links are getting more and more blocked up, they're getting more and more congested, that means - not that we particularly need speed - we need capacity.
David Aaronovitch: Sir Richard Leese, thank you very much indeed. Our third witness is the distinguished economist Lord Robert Skidelsky, who is the Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, but - more important, in a way, for this discussion - is also the author of a recent book, with his son, of How Much is Enough?: The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life. As I understand your argument, Lord Skidelsky, it is that actually we have been too concerned with material progress. We are now, and not enough with preserving, conserving, creating a good life for ourselves.
Lord Robert Skidelsky: That's right. I think until recently - fairly recently - we've had to grow in order to get to the material base from which we can look beyond growth. And that's the thesis of the book, in a nutshell.
David Aaronovitch: Claire Fox, your witness.
Claire Fox: It seems at the moment, when we're in such an economic crisis, that turning our back on growth is an odd thing to do. So one of the arguments that we've heard tonight is that we want more growth, we want progress, we want to have ambition, both as a country but just - you know, if the Victorians had a sense of the future, then surely we should embrace a sense of the future for ourselves.
Lord Robert Skidelsky: Well, there are two replies. One is: let's think of recovery rather than growth. We are actually in a slump, and let's at least get back to where we were. This is a long-term perspective. And secondly, progress is not the same as the growth of GDP. There are many, many ways we can progress without linking it to just making money -
Claire Fox: But I - that might be be true, but as we're not -
Lord Robert Skidelsky: - to progress spiritually, for example.
Claire Fox: No, but I mean as we haven't got very much GDP, and we're not making very much money, I think - you can understand, for people -
Lord Robert Skidelsky: I agree.
Claire Fox: - that what we might want, at the moment, is a little bit more sense of economic dynamism, rather than trying to make excuses for not having enough. I'm only saying that because, surely, things like the "good life" - in order for us to philosophically consider our spiritual lives, we don't want to be worried about unemployment, or having no money, or being poor, or "How are going to feed the kids?", or any of this. Or even - wouldn't it be nice to be a bit more ambitious and be able to think we could, you know, get to Manchester dead quick or even fly to the Moon? Wouldn't that be good for the spirit?
Lord Robert Skidelsky: Yeah, and more and more things to buy in supermarkets -
Claire Fox: Let me tell, you I -
Lord Robert Skidelsky: - and more and more consumer goods.
Claire Fox: But that's good, is it not? I mean, can -
Lord Robert Skidelsky: For ever and ever, like Mrs. Marcos's shoes, 2000 pairs?
Claire Fox: I don't think most of us have quite arrived at getting 20, never mind 2000.
Lord Robert Skidelsky: No, but then, you know, there's 30 and then there's 40, what else are we offering people?
Claire Fox: So let's - can I just ask - it's just a question of who decides. I suppose my question now is: with something like this discussion at the moment about infrastructure projects, is the one thing that I would like the state to be definitive on, that they would, maybe, make a strong bid for leadership and say "We know we might not be popular, but we're going to go for it anyway".
Lord Robert Skidelsky: Yeah, you need infrastructure, you need infrastructure in order to lead a good life. It's no good saying "Well look, let's get back to everyone, you know, using bicycles to go from London to Manchester", or, sort of, walking or something. Because there, you need certain material base, and one of them is good decent infrastructure.
Claire Fox: And if you think about how slow the infrastructural growth has been, in this country... I mean, this is the first big project that we're talking about, almost from the Victorians, but I mean, it's been a long time since we've built a road or a rail network. Could you therefore not say that we haven't got enough? I mean, I'm only asking you because you said "How much is enough?" and I'd say we're nowhere near arriving at that, yet. Surely we need a lot more, rather than worrying that we haven't got enough.
Lord Robert Skidelsky: It's a matter of balance, isn't it, between private and public. You know, Galbraith wrote about this in the 1950s - private affluence, public squalor. We've got a lot of public squalor. Let's have a little less public squalor.
David Aaronovitch: Giles Fraser, your witness.
Giles Fraser: I probably shouldn't say this to you, but I've got a bit of a problem with economists. And one of my problems with economists -
Lord Robert Skidelsky: They are dreadful, I know...
Giles Fraser: Well [laughs] - is, one of my problems is that in so many economic models, you presume that people make their decisions on the basis of rational self-interest. And that you lock in a sort of selfishness into it. And one of the things that you've said is: you don't have to go beyond self-interest. Now where does altruism fit into this picture, then?
Lord Robert Skidelsky: Well, what you have to do, we say, is to decide what you think a good life is. And a good life contains some essential elements. And one of them is friendship. And friendship is our word for community and actually thinking - thinking communally. So it's not, it is -
Giles Fraser: That doesn't sound like an economist speaking, to me.
Lord Robert Skidelsky: No, but I mean - it's not a book designed to please economists. I mean it might please some economists, who actually think we do need to go beyond GDP, but of course it's a moral book. It's a book about morality. And morality - except for a particularly English version of morality, utilitarianism - has never relied on self-interest as a motivating force.
Giles Fraser: But you're - but you're in favour of self-interest on some level, in terms of your model. I mean, you don't have to go beyond self-interest, is what you've said.
Lord Robert Skidelsky: No, I don't - do we say that? I didn't think we did. I think - I think we argue that if you leave self-interest untrammelled by any kind of moral constraints, then it goes into insatiability. And I mean insatiability is there in human nature but we don't want to give it free rein.
Giles Fraser: And there are people who will say that's all very well for you to say, because you do pretty well, and, you know, you've got a good life and a pretty - I'm presuming a fairly good standard of living. But what about people who are considerably poorer, and that will rely upon, need that sort of growth model in order to pull themselves up? I mean there's a sense in which growth is something that's - it's very easy to pooh-pooh when you've got enough.
Lord Robert Skidelsky: Distribution. Distribution. You know, averages - it's the delusion of averages. You talk of the average standard of living, and you think "Oh well, that's all right, most people could do quite well on that". And then you actually ask how it's divided, and you find that a huge amount of it is concentrated in a very small number of people. And a lot of people do not have enough to lead a good life, as things are. Well then distribution comes centrally into the picture. And we've abandoned any philosophy of distribution, because all we've gone for is increasing GDP - growth.
Giles Fraser: So, growth for who, is an important question.
Lord Robert Skidelsky: Absolutely crucial.
David Aaronovitch: Could I get a very quick push on that question? Where would you stand, therefore, with the demand that people increasingly have to be able to use cheap air flight to travel abroad, and therefore we must build greater airport capacity to enable them to do that, so that they can simply do the things that people like you and me [sic] have taken for granted for years?
Lord Robert Skidelsky: Yeah, well, of course that's a reasonable - that's a very reasonable question. In a way, there was an aristocratic ideal, which was the ideal of a good life. And then the problem is: how do you make that into a democratic ideal? Where you have unbelievable problems of congestion. I mean, even if - even if everyone gets to what used to be an aristocratic standard of living, in terms just of money, in fact they're just things that can't be done by everyone, that they have to be rationed in some way. And that is - that is a big problem. I mean, I accept that, and I don't think we've got a perfect answer to that.
David Aaronovitch: Lord Skidelsky, thank you very much indeed. Our fourth and final witness is Martin Durkin. Martin Durkin is a somewhat controversial film-maker. He made a programme called The Great Global Warming Swindle, Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story, and he's just finished a film about Margaret Thatcher for Channel 4. Martin, is it your essential view that those who are against progress, against development, are essentially the "haves", who resent or don't want the putting of riches - similar riches - over to the "have nots"?
Martin Durkin: Broadly speaking, yes. The green debate on this - it's mainly a green argument, and you find that it comes from, for the most part, people with - you, know, who are very well off, by global standards. And when you look at their arguments against consumption, you find that it's usually mass consumption that upsets them. You know, they haven't got any objections to posh cheese shops or a vintners or places that sell nice Italian tiles. It's IKEA and Tesco and places like that that really upsets them - places that produce things very efficiently for the masses. And this is a very peculiar kind of anti-capitalism, because the - I call it "posh anti-capitalism" or "right-wing anti-capitalism". In the olden days, when I was on the left - you remember those, David - anti-capitalism - we used to complain about capitalism because it would cause the immiseration of the masses. Well, of course it didn't, actually, the masses did rather well out of mass-production, which is why they didn't buy our silly magazines. Instead, anti-capitalism today - this sort of posh lot - seem to - their gripe seems to be about the success of capitalism.
David Aaronovitch: Okay. Matthew.
Matthew Taylor: Do you think that economic growth, as we measure it, is the same thing as progress?
Martin Durkin: Well, I think there are very odd ways of measuring economic growth. I think growth, to me, means ordinary people doing better, having richer lives, living in nicer houses, going on more foreign holidays, and all that kind of thing.
Matthew Taylor: So targeting GDP growth is a perfectly reasonable public policy goal, for you.
Martin Durkin: I don't think that governments can target more growth. More government usually leads to less growth. I think leaving people to their own devices tends to lead to more growth, and the sinister thing about the anti-growth people is that it means more intervention, more restriction of people's lives.
Matthew Taylor: But economic growth is, generally speaking, a good thing. I think something else which you argue is that often the most capitalist countries, the most advanced capitalist countries are also very pleasant places to be - they have clean air, they have clean water. But the reason, of course, that they've got clean air and the reason they've got clean water is that people came along at various times in history and said "Actually, we shouldn't have unfettered growth. We should also think about things like the quality of life, like the quality of air, like the quality of water." Where do you think you'd have stood in those arguments from people calling for those regulations?
Martin Durkin: No, I think there are some regulations, about cleaning up rivers and that kind of thing - absolutely fine, no problem at all.
Matthew Taylor: Even though they stand in the way of the free market?
Martin Durkin: They don't, really, very much. The odd bit of legislation, cleaning stuff up, I don't think that's a problem at all. What stands in the way of a free market is huge interventions like our Town and Country Planning Act, which excludes - which means that 90% of Britons live on only 10% of the land in Britain. The nimbyism that that involves has caused immense suffering to an awful lot of people. That's the real problem. Not a bit of legislation like cleaning a river.
Matthew Taylor: I sense that what you're arguing really is that we don't really need to have a conversation about the good life or the good society - this is a way of smuggling in a form of elitism. If we simply allow free markets to do what they do, and economic growth to do what it does, then we will end up in a better place. [Inaudible] to worry about these kinds of philosophical questions, just let growth answer them.
Martin Durkin: Oh no, I disagree entirely, I think we need to argue about the good life. I think the problem is - on the subject of nimbyism - that that nimbyism, that has created the Green Belts and crowded us all into towns and cities in this country, has created enormous suffering. It is against the good life. People - I know a family, close to me, where they've got three black kids who live in a tiny, rotten little flat, and the smallest of them was in a cot, actually, but now is outgrowing the cot, but they can't afford for him to move out of the damn cot, so he can't straighten his legs at night. That's real suffering, and I think that debate about the good life really needs to be had.
David Aaronovitch: Anne.
Anne McElvoy: Can I just ask you, Martin, whether you think preserving natural beauty is a social good?
Martin Durkin: Oh, I think it is an immense social good. I think it's - we don't have nearly enough beauty. I think people are a bit odd when they go on about the beauty of the countryside, so I think for the most part, actually, our countryside is made up with very flat, very large rectangular, industrial, subsidised farms. There aren't very many -
Anne McElvoy: That's not really the bits that people are campaigning about, when they're accused of nimbyism.
Martin Durkin: No, exactly. No, we don't have nearly enough bits that look like Postman Pat. And I think we should have many more bits that look like Postman Pat, and they should be near towns and suburban areas, where ordinary people can go and enjoy them.
Anne McElvoy: Ah, hang on a second, hang on -
Martin Durkin: And that means they've got to have car parks attached, and toilets and cafes and things like that.
Anne McElvoy: Hang on, so now you want beautiful countryside but with car parks attached.
Martin Durkin: Yeah, because otherwise you can't go there.
Anne McElvoy: Right, but it's not sounding very exactly like the countryside - it sounds a bit more like a theme park.
Martin Durkin: Well, no, no, no. If you like lovely countryside with nobody there - which is what you're talking about - then go and buy a huge tract of countryside and enjoy it.
Anne McElvoy: No, there are plenty of people in the countryside, but the question is: do you not think any of it is worth preserving unless it serves what sounds like - it's like a displaced socialist desire to, kind of, as you say, bring everything close to people in need but not with many other concerns about the possible disadvantages, shall we say, for the country in general?
Martin Durkin: I think when you're talking about preserving the countryside, you mean what we have now, which is a nationalisation of land use. And because of the power of lobby groups like the Council [sic] for the Protection of Rural England, the vast majority of people have been hemmed in to towns and cities. And they don't see any countryside, for the most part. And because they're hemmed in to towns and cities, actually the most green people - ordinary people - see in their lives are parks.
Anne McElvoy: They could be choosing to live in - you don't believe people exercise a choice, when they migrate to towns and cities - they may be making a choice.
Martin Durkin: No, what a ridiculous idea. I mean -
Anne McElvoy: Ridiculous for people to have a choice -
Martin Durkin: - a far smaller proportion of people in Italy and Ireland live in urban areas, because they don't have the loathsome policy of Green Belts that we have had since the end of the Second World War. And about 60-odd percent of people in Italy - they've got a lovely countryside, by the way, they've got [inaudible] countryside. You don't have to exclude people from somewhere, in order to be - in order for it to be pretty. As it happens, these people who bang on about preserving the countryside - it never was depopulated like this. We're ruining the countryside, right now! We're killing it.
Anne McElvoy: But what about your - your moral concerns just seem to be so fenced in, to take the countryside analogy. Is it in the end that - for whatever reason, whatever your own political journey - your real concern is for poor people, it's about immiseration. It isn't, actually, about a wider social good, and you might be neglecting the role that nimbys play in making sure that the worst doesn't happen, over many years.
Martin Durkin: Oh no, well I disagree completely. If you want your moral dilemma, I picture the Bufton-Tufton staring out of his window at the empty mountainside, and he says "I like that empty m-" - if he wants to view an empty mountain, let him buy a mountain. There's a moral - because -
Anne McElvoy: And he's always a Bufton-Tufton, in your imagination.
Martin Durkin: Oh no, he could be a TV producer, or anyone. But the fact is, the other side of that moral dilemma is the poor kid in that cot, who can't straighten his legs at night.
David Aaronovitch: Martin Durkin, thank you very much indeed. Okay, panel. Let's consider where we got to, there. I - let's talk about the first witness, first. I thought there was a kind of rather interesting moment, Claire and Giles, when she said, Penny Gaines, that she hadn't actually ever campaigned about anything before, in her life. And it was a lovely, kind of, innocent moment, because I don't think she quite caught what you were getting at.
Claire Fox: Well, it's quite difficult. isn't it, because I - everybody gets politicised by one thing, at some point, so you could say that this is the start of her political journey, because something happened to her and she thought about it. But I think that obviously the inference was, having thought about the big political questions, and there is a danger, obviously, with any one-issue campaign, that - can I just say something about that because I thought she was right to point out that there is a danger of closing the debate down by over-caricaturing the likes of Penny -
David Aaronovitch: By name-calling.
Claire Fox: - by name-calling, and also the kind of "You're selfish, you're a Luddite". And I just - I don't like that kind of politics anyway, and I don't think it's very helpful. What I think was interesting, and even the last witness drew attention to it - I think there's been a lot more of them. I mean, as it happens, it's the government, it's been the state - and it's different governments, not just this one - who've said "We can't make any of these big decisions without having a public consultation". It's been the government that said "We're going to go off and talk to all the different NGOs and Greenpeaces, and so on and so forth. So, in a way, there's a danger that we blame the kind of local people who don't want their village being - that they take the burden for what actually has been, in my opinion, a loss of nerve and leadership by the centre, who actually won't go out and sometimes defy popular opinion, and then hide behind blaming the Pennys of this world.
Giles Fraser: The other point she made, which was quite right, is that this business about just cuts both ways. I mean, I asked her about "Who is my neighbour?" and she, you know, she said "Yes, I have to see that, but they also have to see me as their neighbour". And I thought she was very sensitive, and it wasn't, sort of - it wasn't a sort of "Me, me, me" type of argument. I thought she was an impressive witness.
David Aaronovitch: I thought she was, but I think you're being too nice. I do, but then I'm a nasty hard shell, I mean. Matthew, you must have also seen that essentially what you had here was a witness who said "This is the first thing that really got me going. And since I discovered that I was against this thing, I've been trawling all the evidence to discover all the things that will prove my case."
Matthew Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I thought she was the acceptable face of nimbyism, but I also, in the end, think that she was driven by pretty self-interested motives and she was searching for a way of rationalising that.
David Aaronovitch: Now, you got your own witness, as well, when you talked to Sir Martin - Sir Richard Leese, because what you got him to do was to say this thing about how the M40 had been a mistake. Which essentially was, of course, the folly of previous Sir Richard Leeses - I mean, he might say not - that was quite an interesting moment.
Matthew Taylor: Yeah, and I thought Sir Richard was an incredibly impressive person, and he's led Manchester brilliantly, but I did think that he was pretty much guilty of a fairly reductionist kind of account, which is, you know: "I think there will definitely be jobs", when we don't know there will definitely be jobs, and economic growth has got to be right. Now he was overstating his certainty, and I think that doesn't help this debate, because if you've got the Penny Gaines, who are, kind of, rationalising their self-interest, you've also got the Sir Richard Leese, who are basically saying "I know best, and this big scheme is definitely going to be good for you". And he's not really being honest about that - what he should actually be saying is "I think this might be the right thing to do. It's a bit of a gamble", and we might have a less polarised debate, in that case.
Claire Fox: But I think that one of the things I thought was that he was overly trying to come up with instrumental arguments for the HS2, and that's one of the problems with the pro people all the time, because they end up overclaiming. It'll be the - they start saying "It's pro green [?]" - no it's not, don't be silly. You know, it's going to [inaudible] number of jobs.
David Aaronovitch: But Claire, if they don't overclaim, what chance do they stand against the campaigners?
Claire Fox: This is what great vision has done in the past, that's the only reason I was talking to [sic] the Victorians, where you basically have to say, you know, kind of trust - this is basically about the future, about making the world a closer place. We would never have an M25, if we'd have kind of only gone for the economist, audit con-
David Aaronovitch: Anne.
Anne McElvoy: Can I come back to the countryside, here, because I do think this is - you know, and I think there is a really kind of moral argument for its preservation, in terms of looking after the future, as well as now, something we hear a lot about, actually, from left and right when it suits them but not always on this. And the last witness, to my mind - Martin Durkin - he had this very odd displacement, when in order to make his point about the poor child living in cramped conditions, there are many ways to do things about that but it doesn't have to segue, as it did with him - and to an extent, also with Richard Leese - into this illiteracy about the countryside, which they seem almost proud of. So we had Martin Durkin saying at one point, you know, he wanted to have what he called Postman Pat land, which turned out to have, you know, car parks and public conveniences. I mean, it sounded more like Animal Farm than Postman Pat.
Giles Fraser: But they did have a point about the idea that you can - you know, you have a nostalgia about the countryside, and that actually that sort of, you know, nostalgia that's - this business is actually much more man, woman-made - it's much more a problem -
Anne McElvoy: Good. Okay, let's -
Giles Fraser: - human artefact [?] - that's a good point, and it's right, as well.
Anne McElvoy: It's a good point up to a point, Giles. That's the problem with it, that incrementally there must surely be - even in the minds of these rather grandiose planners - a point when enough is enough, and trying to work out where that is. That is what the argument should be about.
David Aaronovitch: But Robert Skidelsky, Lord Skidelsky had quite an interesting problem with "What is enough?" in a sense, because what he admitted was: the problem of "too much" can quite often be when ordinary people just want what not-ordinary people have had for a long time. And he said yes -
Matthew Taylor: And his get-out clause was redistribution, which of course is absolutely fine, but it appears that we don't seem that keen on redistribution. So it - philosophically, it's an interesting answer, it's not a politically terribly realistic answer. It looks as though, unless you're going to have high levels of redistribution than anybody has ever agreed to, you do have to have some economic growth, if you're going to improve the prospects of the least well-off. And I thought Martin Durkin, you know, spoke eloquently on that point. And I also think he was good in, kind of, taking apart this idea that we must protect every single blade of grass in exactly the same way. And I think that has been a weakness of policy, to be frank.
Giles Fraser: I sort of agree and disagree with Lord Skidelsky. On the one hand, he had this idea of simplicity, and it's wrong to want more and more and more and more. That's all very well, but actually if you start saying that to the poor, to the people who haven't got anything, when you've got it all, there's something deeply problematic about that idea, to me.
David Aaronovitch: Claire Fox.
Claire Fox: I think it's quite interesting, the car parks point that Anne raised, because it fits in with Lord Skidelsky. I'm actually from rural North Wales, where there was an awful lot of people who thought we were undoubtedly trying to destroy natural beauty, where we wanted things like more buses, car parks and conveniences and, for example, supermarkets, and so on, because basically we lived in an absolute back of beyond, and you need more. And that's what was quite interesting, that was kind of - was that nimbyism? Or maybe it was just ordinary -
Anne McElvoy: The thing is, you just can't compare a huge [inaudible] with High Speed 2.
Claire Fox: It's a place of natural beauty, that those people in North Wales, who were visiting and/or living there but with less concerns about how you got around, if you were an ordinary person in North Wales, actually said "Oh, you're going to destroy the local community". Actually, the local community needed to develop. A lot of them wanted to move to cities like Manchester, but they did need a transport system in order to survive.
[Everybody is talking at once.]
Giles Fraser: - when Beeching closed down the railway in Quainton, that was there, everybody went spare.
David Aaronovitch: And your last thought.
Anne McElvoy: Oh, I'm going to give it to Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet" - and those who trouble to defend them.
David Aaronovitch: Well, that's it. We leave it with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Michael Burke will be back next week. My thanks to our panel - Giles Fraser, Anne McElvoy, Claire Fox and Matthew Taylor. Good night to everybody.