Ah, the public/private distinction..........

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

[the new Brit tolerance for dope smoking doesn't kick in 'till after
the ridiculous 2nd paragraph]

The spirit of Mill returns to stifle visionary public projects

The public realm is again in hock to fast-buck private finance

Jonathan Glancey
Wednesday August 8, 2001
The Guardian

Do you remember this verse? "John Stuart Mill/ by a mighty effort of
will/ overcame his natural bonhomie/and wrote Principles of Political
Economy."

Principles of Political Economy was published in 1848, the same year
as Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. It was a year of
revolutionary ferment throughout Europe. Mill, however, chose to
popularise the laissez-faire economic theories of Adam Smith and David
Ricardo.

Cut-throat capitalism had rarely seemed so prudent, nor so wise or
cuddly. As it is again today, when a Labour government, albeit New
Labour, sighs for big business with the divine ardour of the hart that
panted after the cooling streams in the Psalms. The new, soft-centred
capitalism toils and spins for the benefit of us all, whether in the
design of hospitals and schools nationwide or the London Underground
through the agencies of PFI and PPP. These fashionable acronyms mean
that what survives of the public realm is increasingly in hock to
private finance.

Their impact on the physical and economic landscape of Britain is
proving to be as dramatic as was the enclosures of common lands. This
may yet be ruinous, but who cares when we might be saving ourselves a
few bob?

"Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed
themselves of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the
most curious - certainly the least creditable - is the modern
soi-disant science of political economy, based on the idea that an
advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespectively of
the influence of social affection." This was John Ruskin writing in
1859.

It was the equation of something like Ruskin divided by Marx
multiplied by Morris over low-church dissidence plus trade unionism
and enlightened municipal government that gave Britain its particular
form of social reform and welfare in the 20th century. These and other
factors, such as the carnage and pointless destructiveness of the
first world war, encouraged legislators and a new breed of high-minded
politicians, business-people and administrators to shape a new
political and economic commonwealth.

The tigers of laissez-faire economics were to be tamed. It was quite
possible in the hands of men like Frank Pick (1878-1941), chief
executive and deputy chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board,
a public corporation created in July 1933 along the lines of Lord
Reith's BBC, for the methods of big business to be placed in the
service of altruistic public enterprise.

A Congregationalist who believed neither in awards nor in the annual
bonuses or imaginative pension plans garnered by post-Thatcher company
directors, whether or not they succeed or fail, Pick saw the LPTB as a
device to provide London with a world-beating integrated and
democratic public transport system. He succeeded brilliantly. The
historian Nikolaus Pevsner described the LPTB as a "civilising agent"
and Pick as a latter-day "Lorenzo the Magnificent". Kenneth Clark,
then director of the National Gallery, pointed out that "in another
age he might have been a sort of Thomas Aquinas".

The Italian Renaissance, medieval scholastic philosophy and London
Transport in one and the same breath? Improbable as this trinity might
seem in the era of PFI and PPP, there was a moment when Ruskin's essay
"Unto to this Last" was an unsung bible for an influential section of
the British business community and the politicians who served it.
Seemed, because the truth was that people like Frank Pick were as thin
on the ground as gilt on the statues of Victorian philanthropists or
honest Edwardian businessmen. Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), for
example, was not exactly honest. This American tycoon created much of
the early electric underground network. His business tactics,
according to Michael Cassidy, solicitor and former chairman of the
City Corporation's policy and resources committee, "would not be
unrecogniseable today."

Cassidy, one of a team putting together a private sector bid for the a
part of the PPP underground, has written a paper entitled "A Private
Sector Underground for London: Return of the Ghost of Charles Yerkes."
After serving seven months in a Philadelphia jail for embezzling
municipal funds, Yerkes moved to Chicago, where, says Cassidy, "his
dealings with corrupt politicians, including Michael 'Hinky Dink'
Kenna and John 'Bathhouse' Coughlin, gained him significant control of
the Chicago trolley car franchise, including, in 1895, an attempt to
achieve an exclusive 50-year licence for Chicago transit without
payment to the city. His corruption of elected councillors quickly
turned against him, with marching in the streets and an eventual
ousting from the Chicago scene, which brought him to London."

Yerkes built three tube lines and electrified the District and much of
the Metropolitan railways in just five years, channelling mostly
foreign capital through tunnels of political skullduggery, essential
for his fast-track prototype PPP methods. His questionable methods led
to the setting up of a royal commission on London traffic. This called
for a coordinated approach to the underground and its links with other
public transport services. The scene was set for Frank Pick.

History has since performed a u-turn. The financing of major public
projects in Britain is now more inspired by Yerkes and Mill than by
Ruskin and Pick. Norfolk is about to build or rebuild 86 schools along
PFI lines. Contractors bidding for the work have 12 weeks to prepare
their designs. Twelve weeks. Good to know the future of our schools is
being thought about so carefully. These schools will be cheap'n'
cheerful, but it is unlikely that future historians will describe the
perpetrators of their PFI-design as "civilising agents". PFI buildings
have a tinny style of their own: Palladio or Hawksmoor, they are not.
Nor are they commissioned by the Thomas Aquinases or Lorenzos of our
age.

Perhaps we feel that most of the great social reform battles have
already been fought for us by politicians and business executives like
Herbert Morrison, Nye Bevan and Frank Pick, all of them more
influenced by Ruskin than Mill. Perhaps, in an age of comparative
prosperity, we don't want busy-bodying do-gooders like these making us
think about the nation's common treasury or common wealth, when
there's a fast buck to made by pretending to be civic-minded.

Perhaps, such people were a short-lived, one-off phenomenon between
the 1918 armistice and Mrs Thatcher's unsocial philosophy, in the life
of a country on its way back to its crafty commercial roots,
reconnecting to a world in which bonhomie is about as welcome as John
Ruskin would be at a PFI-financed pole-dancing club chock-full with
merchant bankers.

jonathan.glancey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx