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For people In Bath, the detrimental effects of the Great Car Economy are inescapable. Maybe you are asthmatic. Or have had a loved one that has been killed or seriously injured in a car accident. And when it is not cutting life short, the tedium of commuting and that eternal search for a parking space is making it seem sooo verrrry loooong, perhaps adding an hour to each end of the working day.
1998 had the hottest average temperature for the last thousand years and 1999 was only slightly cooler. Despite its status as a World Heritage site, the daily toxic cocktail of exhaust fumes that turn into airborne acids persistently damage Baths Georgian architecture. The east end of the city has been blighted by the Batheaston Bypass. When it was built in 1994, a grim sarcophagus for wood and water meadow, the road dissected Bailbrook village and caused heated and bitter divisions among Bath residents. Today, some persist in seeing it as a useful trunk road while others see the body of traffic and the tailbacks. Either way it has proven to be a colossal white elephant. And inevitably, five years later property speculators are stepping in to infill the remaining green spaces left in its wake and planning to build a further hundred new homes in the Bailbrook area. But we dont need to dwell on all this.
For years we waited for a new government to come along, wave its magic wand and deliver a cheap, efficient and integrated transport system. We were let down, of course, but putting the blame elsewhere gave us space to continue as we were without taking personal responsibility. Public transport is far from perfect. Run as a private monopoly for the benefit of shareholders, it is overpriced and needs to operate for the benefit of all the community. But it is only by proactively using the public transport system and agitating for change that we can bring about improvements. Buses and trains can be spaces for such radical activities as having a conversation, reading, snoozing, thinking. So spoil yourself. And when those that are able to walk and cycle do so all the city streets can become vibrant and alive again. It is true that not everyone can cycle. But it is often the elderly, children and those with disabilities that suffer most from the car culture that marginalizes them. Empty streets are threatening places but a critical mass of pedestrians keeps the streets safer. Bath already has some of the best street performers in the land. With imagination we could have cleaner air, street markets, affordable venues for the arts, better quality graffiti, fruit trees, and locally produced energy programmes.
The spa waters are one of the city's most precious features and were the reason it became a centre of spirituality, learning and healing. They should not a be gigantic shopping mall to benefit the few but opened in an environmentally sensitive way and accessible to all. A resumption of the road building programme will certainly refuel mass protest - to quote Aldo Leopold, 'to build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs'. There is scarcely a less rational and efficient method of transport imaginable than the spectacle of twenty private cars driving along with single occupants. What was once a status symbol is fast becoming an embarrassment. Remember: A new car does for the expression of individuality what a paper bag over the head does for street credibility.
In 1999 the Bath Chronicle, frustrated in its predictions because trouble did not materialize to fill those column inches, raged against the disruption that the Reclaim the Streets procession caused to business. The street party took perhaps three hours of the 8, 760 hours in the year. The implication is unsettling - the city centre is not for drumming, partying, conversation, picnicking, and the celebration of life. It should be reduced to the cash nexus of the market place. Other activities are unwelcome and acceptable. Many might feel that they find fulfilment in the retail therapy of shopping and buying, but not everyone feels that this is the limit to the potential of a thriving and flourishing city life. Green consumerism and fair trade have made some improvements in the quality of goods available to those wealthy enough to afford them. However, the high street stores still represent the end point in an economic system that reduces all life to commodities to be unsustainably reformulated, culled, packaged, marketed and now finally genetically modified. Like Oscar Wildes cynic, capitalism knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Perversely, the more environmentally benign the product the more expensive the price tag. The products of the sweat shop are always cheaper than the fair trade collective. The battery produced egg cheaper than its free range competitor. Even Marx, its best known critic realized that capitalism was an effective way of pushing up material production in the short term. However the long term cost is totally unsustainable expansion, the alienation of individuals and communities, massive inequalities in the distribution of wealth, and the destruction of the environment in the competitive struggle for resources.
Species extinctions are taking place at 100, 000 times faster than they do by natural selection. The laws of supply and demand mean that productive force always has to crash and maintain shortages to stimulate future demand. And when environmental protection is achieved it must not be the working class communities that work in dirty industries that carry the cost. In areas such as Sellafield there is support for the nuclear industry from local people afraid of unemployment. In the heads we lose, tails we lose gamble of our daily lives we celebrate job creation even at the cost of the health of the physical world upon which all of our livelihoods depend. But now the economy is booming. Measured by the quantitative standard of the Gross National Product everything is getting better every day. Yet somehow we don't think so. New Labour innovation is really old hat, just like the common-sense revolution and all the other party sound bites. Maybe now we could enjoy a different type of hedonism: pleasures and desires that dont cost the earth. William Morris once famously said 'own nothing that is neither useful nor beautiful'. If we are to achieve real quality of life we should plan for capitalisms obsolescence. Its time for its redundancy. 'If a robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage How feels heaven when Dies the billionth battery hen?' Spike Milligan
Globalization, Local Distinctiveness, and Accountability - Nationally only about a third of the population vote in local elections. In Bath like everywhere else turnout is low and we dont need to look far to find a reason. The gap between the political and economic elites who hold power and the local communities that they claim to represent is huge. When did you ever vote for the managing directors of the top one hundred (blue chip) companies? Or the President of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank? While they may be appointed by elected representatives (politicians are never delegates [this distinction too subtle for lots of people]-----) the degree of accountability is extremely tenuous. This massive centralization of power is never allowed onto the political agenda - unless we make it so! In the Monarchical British state we are all of us subjects not citizens. In a privatized world the way that society is organized and resources are distributed is decided by economic decisions in the market. Cash is votes and if you haven't got much cash you haven't got much say in the political process whether you take part in elections or not. With massive inequality of wealth, democracy is very much a fiction.
Much time is spent debating the bureaucratic centralization of the European Union but if this is to amount to anything beyond xenophobia and a little England mentality we need to look at the wider issue of whether life should be determined by states in the pockets of big business. Ironically the competitive free market capitalism of globalization thrives on the nationalist warfare, religious bigotry and racism that divides and distorts our lives as humans. Better to work towards direct participatory democracy and ideally face to face exchanges. The American social ecologist, Murray Bookchin, described a vision of active citizenship in which power is devolved to the grassroots but exercised in a spirit of international solidarity. He has suggested a form of political administration in which the higher up the coordinating structure, the less the concentration of decision-making power should be. Genuine consensus decision making would make us active participants, as we educate, agitate and organize to take more direct responsibility for our own affairs and become more fully alive. Ideas about self-help and enterprise have too long been appropriated by right-wing ideologues. Currently we are expected to uproot ourselves to follow jobs - to commute long distances (creating soulless dormitory towns) and relocate - in order to live (and to create profits for our bosses). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called this process deterritorialization - alienation caused when people are forced to move by economic compulsion rather than choosing to travel for pleasure and exploration. (If working class people from outside Fortress Europe attempt to cross national borders however, they become stigmaticized as economic migrants, criminalized and attacked by the so-called liberal, democratic and free states of the West!). Forging community links helps us feel more fulfilled where we are: we literally reclaim the streets when we feel at home in them. When we nurture the difference and diversity of localities we challenge the corporate identities of the increasing banal high street.
The Public Order and Criminal Justice Acts aimed to neutralize and silence a long and proud tradition of street protest and dissent. Today any political demonstration is outlawed that doesn't have the explicit sanction of the police. New Labour's Terrorist Act continues this trend in attempting to intimidate extraparliamentary opponents by bringing dozens of non-violent acts within the definition of terrorism. Bath has its own radical tradition of campaigning in the streets against injustice and for progressive change, from the banishment of Mosleys fascist blackshirts during the 1930s, to the marches of the peace movement, miners, the hated Poll Tax, student loans and road protest. This year will be the sixth street party, and although it is not beloved of the authorities and the editors of the Bath Chronicle, has become a part of the social calendar. There are no leaders and there is no hierarchy. Just ordinary local people who feel strongly enough to go out and participate in a unique combination of protest and celebration. Nobody has the right to negotiate on behalf of several hundred people who may support the cause but in most cases they do not know (at least at the beginning of the day!). We reserve the right to come together to enjoy ourselves in a spirit of commonality, celebrate street life and to open up the space for positive change. John Stuart Mill once suggested that often social movements go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. We claim the right to be ridiculous. However, Capitalist globalization has ironically made possible the means for the mass organization and protest that challenges it. What happens in Bath and in smaller places is not just a side-show to the spectaculars in London, Seattle, Washington, Geneva and Prague (26th September 2000[link? - easy peasy!]). It will be those thousands of small decisions that are made at the everyday, local level that will really count if there is going to be a thoroughgoing social change. It may seem absurd to talk about revolution: but all the alternatives assume the continuation of the present system which is even more absurd. Maybe, Reclaim the Streets publication Anti-social behaviour is a genuine problem of city life. Not surprising given that the casualties of free market capitalism are not only in the third world but in the increasing burden of debt, alcohol and drug dependency, depression and psychiatric problems, occupational, environmental and stress-related illness in our own society (together neuropsychiatric conditions) are Britains biggest killers. We need to break the cycle of repression and anti-social behaviour, that cannibalize and thrive on each other.
The turn of the Millennium finds us living in strange days. Faced with the massive forces of corporate power and the aggression of the nuclear states, escapism flourishes in an atmosphere of social despondency and apathy. Counterculture is a fragile bloom and like the Sixties flowerpower era all too easily goes to seed. Since the sixties many of those involved in the counterculture became recuperated into the system they once despised and the adventures of May 68 became the stuff of anecdotes at the Christmas office party. For the rest they divided into the escapism of drugs and the supernaturalism of Christian or new age groups or the earnest isolation of doctrinaire political splinter groups. But enough of the spirit carried on so we can learn from their inspiration. We can learn from their mistakes too. And this time with clearer heads, more angry souls, and more compassionate hearts.
Eyes are watching you in Bath. The voyeurism and control freakery of closed circuit tv fundamentally affects what it means to be human. In the city streets we are now always the objects of anothers hidden gaze. There is a relentlessly totalitarian and Orwellian logic to this technology. It will only ever be fully effective if it is total - thus itself constituting one of the most fearful crimes of intrusion and state control imaginable. Already cameras are being developed which incorporate microphones able to detect and record personal conversations. On the pretence that it is being installed to discourage violence against the person, cctv is a Trojan horse used to monitor all behaviour disliked by the enforcement authorities; it is only as insightful as the discrimination and prejudice of the camera operators. Based on the logic that if you are not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear, cctv perpetually displaces crime into other (usually poorer) areas. It also takes responsibility for challenging genuinely anti-social crime away from communities. Private security is one of the great growth industries protecting not the vulnerable but the most powerful who are able to pay out regular, if often pitiful wages to security guards. We dont want a vigilante society either, we need a radical look at the causes of crime. If we rely on technological hardware and oppressive laws to solve our problems then we create neighbourhoods based on distrust and mutual fear - and a society that assumes the worst human behaviour if the state does not take control and monitor every movement. We cannot afford to live in a society so degraded that genuine anti-social crime and abuse are only avoided because of the consequences of being caught. 'People mainly with shirts and ties are ok. Most people you can tell just by looking at them. I tell by the hair'. Words of wisdom from two cctv camera operators.
Getting involved couldn't be easier, simply turn up on the 14th - bring fancy dress, instruments, bikes, sofas and anything else you feel like. It will be a great day with great music, great people, street theatre and art. Any queries or problems email us here.
Hope to see you there !
WHAT WAS THE PETROL CRISIS LIKE FOR YOU?
Hell on earth? Or an excuse to arrive late at work (or not go in at all!), to cycle, walk, run and take public transport?
Well, if it wasn't hell on earth for you, just Imagine what it would be like if petrol was permantely limited to the emergency services, enabelling ambulances to arrive quicker and people having to communicate with their neighbours to share lifts, or travel in a more healthy way.
Just Imagine a world, where kids did't get asthma from exhaust fumes, where 2000 lives would be saved in Britain every year.
Imagine a world without traffic, without motorways carving up the countryside, without road rage and stress. Imagine not having to wait to cross the road whilst inhaling all those fumes. Imagine what a healthier, happier, more peaceful world that would be.
Impossible, unrealistic? Of course not, we've already done it. All we need to do now is stick to it. It can be done and it will be if we all do our part. Do it for yourself, your kids, the environment and the future.
