Though Cowards Flinch

The centre of Drachten, Holland

(I wrote this a few days ago, but it got ‘stuck’ on a laptop.) 

The Tories are against street clutter, and Eric Pickles is either telling or encouraging local authorities – depending on how you see the recent announcement – to get rid of it.  

I’m certainly not against the general idea of removing urban street signage and markings, because I know a thing or two about road safety, having been an active safety campaigner on road safety matters for the last decade. 

The whole notion that removing signage and markings in towns and villages will actually improve road safety by forcing drivers to slow down, watch carefully for the movements of other drivers and pedestrians, and generally take responsibility for their car’s potentially lethal speed and weight, is a convincing one. 

It’s also been around quite a long time now in Europe. Developed originally by a Dutch traffic engineer in the mid 1980s, the idea has taken off in many towns in Holland and northern Germany.   This article, setting out the concepts, the history and the current state of play is very good (see also the video of it in action).* 

The point about the recent announcement on road signs and markings, though, is that none of this stuff about road safety is relevant.  

Pickles is not concerned with road safety, just as his mate Hammond is not when it comes to speed cameras. 

So when it comes to street furniture, Hammond again sets out the case on the basis of cost 

[U]nnecessary street furniture is a waste of taxpayers’ money and leaves our streets looking more like scrap yards than public spaces. 

But Pickles’s approach is different.  He is, apparently, concerned that: 

Our streets are losing their English character….. Common sense tells us uncluttered streets have a fresher, freer, authentic feel, which are safer and easier to maintain. 

Of itself, it’s difficult to know what Pickles is on about.  Is Pickles seriously suggesting that England town and villages have, at some point in there history, been characterized by a lack of signs?  Is he saying that English towns and villages have been less sign-bearing than ones in other countries?  Is there any evidence of this?  What does he actually mean by ‘authentic’? What exactly is his point? 

But the reality of signage is not the issue here. 

Instead, Pickles is developing a discourse that articulates Englishness with the new ‘commonsense’ Conservatism-in-power that he seeks to represent.  Whether this is consciously done is hard to say, but for the Left this is, I suggest, a potentially dangerous development.  Just look how it is lapped up by the Tory faithful, and you can see what appeal it might have more generally. 

If, on a broader scale, the Conservatives are able to sell their cuts programme in particular under the branding of some kind of ‘return to Englishness’, it will be all the harder to combat. 

The danger is that Pickles and his colleagues may now be able to do now successfully what John Major was laughed at for attempting to do for his failing Conservative government – to connect Conservatism with the supposed English delights of cricket and warm beer.  

In so doing, they may be close to recreating for the 2010s the kind of discursive articulation of ‘traditional’ Tory values and New Right thinking, under Thatcher, that Stuart Hall wrote about so well 30 years ago. 

As I’ve set out, the new Conservatism is more complex, and more dangerous, than many of the Left have assumed.  This is one more small but significant example of how they are winning the narrative battle at the moment.   

The biggest irony in this case is that very continental thinking on road safety is now being co-opted under the name of Englishness, to serve the needs of a very English ruling class.

*  Major sign and marking removal also an idea I’ve keen to promote in my nearest town, Ormskirk, the centre of which was part of the mass ‘pedestrianisation’ movement of the 1960s along with many towns of its size and type.

The town now suffers some of the same problems of traffic jams on the circular one way route round the town, and falling shopper numbers linked to the more  convenient carparking supermarkets, where you can take all your goods to the car in a trolley rather than lug bags round the shops with you. 

My informal canvassing of opinion on the idea of removing both the pedestrianisation and the road marking, as in the Holland and Germany, to create both a more accessible town centre and more routes through and round it, meet with a lot if interest and initial support. 

Unfortunately, the Conservative administration supposedly in charge of such matters has failed to follow up on its promises to undertake a traffic management study in the light of the knock-back on the wider Ormskirk Bypass, and I currently spend time campaigning for people to have their say on traffic management in the town rather than having my not entirely uniformed say.