We share the same city, but sometimes it feels like we inhabit very different worlds. Free and inclusive public events are therefore essential for a city like ours.
A quick reminder of Phil’s list of hustings and events here. At the moment the new constituency of St Neots & Mid-Cambs is in the lead with six events.
As I type, the grim results from the European Parliament elections are coming through (Especially if you support the Greens or the Liberals – who took a hammering).
This was also the first election without the UK’s participation. There’s no point trying to predict what might have happened had the UK voted to remain because we wouldn’t have had the 2017 or 2019 general elections. Furthermore, ex-politicians who did a runner shortly after that catastrophe of 2016 might still be around.
I was also reminded of Rik Mayall’s Tory MP character Alan B’stard and his spoof speech that today could easily be mistaken as real!
Above – note how much larger the party conference audiences were for the Tories in the 1990s – and also the age profile too.
All of this leaves Western politics stuck in a doom-spiral.
…unless some force of nature can break us out of it.
“Uninspiring centrist refuses to tackle the underlying social problems…”
Given our over-centralised structure of governance in the UK – and in England in particular, no one in local government has the legal or financial means to deal with those underlying social problems. Certainly not in Cambridge or Cambridgeshire. Therefore local councils have to do the best they can against overwhelming pressures and challenges.
Two city-council-backed free summer fairs
These were:
- The Arbury Carnival (50 years old this year!)
- Abbey People’s Big Lunch
There was also a commercial event – a Town and Country display on Parker’s Piece funded by renting out of stall space to small businesses on the Saturday as well.
While these were going on, a debate on how arts and book festivals should be funded was kicking off online (see here, and also here). There’s no right or wrong answer – how you feel will depend on your disposition. Some will take the view that it should be private sector corporate sponsorship that should fund such things, while others take the view that corporations should be taxed more so that funds channeled through the Arts Council (founder Florence Ada Keynes’ eldest son, Maynard), and local government can ensure greater equity rather than having events in the most affluent of places.
“Why can’t we have fun stuff in South Cambridge?”
This was something I discussed with former councillor Sam Davies MBE over the years – you can see her thoughts in her blogpost here, and how families on low incomes find it more and more difficult to afford the activities that affluent families take for granted. The most striking and visual example of this is the new swimming pool and sports centre at The Perse that opens soon. In the meantime the ever-growing residential areas north of the River Cam still lack their own large swimming pool – something I’ve moaned about for years.
The lack of provision of community events was also raised by one of the younger parents who came to one of the events in Queen Edith’s that volunteers had put on. She asked why there were lots of things in Arbury & King’s Hedges, but not here. A reasonable question. Again, with no powers to tax the wealth generated in & around Cambridge, and with no institution or mechanism that can generate substantial donations to provide an effective charitable/not for profit alternative, local government has little choice but to look at the data and target those communities with the greatest number of people with the greatest needs. And that happens to be not our part of town. That doesn’t mean there are not people struggling. They/we are too. It’s just that existing systems, models, and processes struggle to pick us up.
The private sector are not specialists in community development, and ultimately they are only interested in their bottom line.
I’ve not written that as a ‘value judgement’ – rather because directors of companies have a legal duty to their shareholders as set out in Sections 171 & 172 of the Companies Act 2006. If directors consider actions supporting community groups of charities as not being compatible with their duties under the legislation…exactly.
Furthermore, the short-term funding agreements build in instability into the system – which is the opposite of what local communities need. You cannot put a financial value on the social value of the collective memory of communities, or the institutional memory of councils that experienced and long-term permanent staff can bring.
We don’t have the community and social infrastructure in many of our residential communities because there are few people with the capacity to volunteer, and even fewer suitable facilities to function as exciting and vibrant community hubs.
That chronic lack of social and community infrastructure – combined with negative externalities of ‘brand Cambridge’ (eg Air BnBs, apart hotels, houses designed as family homes being converted into short-term student accommodation, and so on) has a hidden but devastating effect on individuals and communities alike. And that is loneliness. Yet because conceptually it’s ever so hard to pin down, and even harder to come up with measurable public policy responses within existing limited models, trying to deal with it is easier said than done. Especially when funding organisations expect visible and measurable responses that can be directly attributed to a funding stream or the pulling of a policy lever. A symptom of silo working?
With councils having no powers to manage housing in the way that local government in some continental European countries do (a recently-arrived Italian researcher told me last week she was astonished that local councils in the UK do not have rent capping powers) means that people can find themselves more and more isolated as houses designed for long term accommodation is converted into poor quality short-term accommodation where landlords can (and sadly given the case studies from ACORN Cambridge, far too often, do) take advantage of short term/single year renters who have little incentive to fight back. And I have been in the situation of that young single year renter in an unfamiliar city.
In the case of Cambridge University-linked post-graduate students – the policy of the University having been to increase their numbers for some time now, the impact on residential communities is something that doesn’t appear to have been considered by the decision-makers. In a place like Cambridge, if you’ve got connections to people within, or to the colleges themselves, you have access to a very different lifestyle and social life compared with those that do not. It was only by chance after I finished my undergraduate studies that I returned to Cambridge and bounced not ‘back home’ to a pre-university year out (and a pretty depressing one at that), but bounced into that university bubble and a lifestyle and cultural life that was markedly different to that of my late teens.
Getting used to being middle-aged
I’m officially old because a council officer said that one of the leaflets on healthy living that I picked up at the Abbey People event was aimed at middle-aged people ‘like me’. I don’t think society or politicians/policy makers have figured out what to do with single, chronically-ill middle-aged grumpy blokes like me! I certainly haven’t! (Other than trying to ensure future generations don’t end up with the same raw deal that my generation of teenagers did in the 1990s).
For quite some time it feels like everything has been on hold. This week we see the party manifestos published for the general election. I get the sense that more than a few people are waiting for a game-changer to begin something new. Time will tell if the manifestos and the general election result will provide that much-needed spark.
Food for thought?
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