Provision

Why do the clocks go forward during the night, why don't they go forward during the day? Is it because our society is still formed around the notion that our productivity is more important than our wellbeing? 

Point made

A little while ago I wrote a defence of the Shard from an aesthetic viewpoint. That was before it was complete, and whilst I still don't object to it aesthetically, I am well aware of what it has quickly come to represent: the triumph of wealth over imagination. The uses to which the building has been put reflect the general approach of it's Qatari owners to the spending of their spectacular mineral wealth, which appears to be to build something obscenely big and then fill it full of stuff for obscenely wealthy people to do. Of course the Shard isn't full by any stretch of the imagination: at the beginning of the year it stood 2/3rds empty. This fact seems almost unpardonable when one considers the fact that London suffers a chronic housing shortage. You would think it would bother the building's owners, given that they are losing out on potential millions of pounds in rent, but I doubt they even give it a second thought. Like many of the nations made rich by our obsession with burning as much of our planet as possible, the middle eastern countries invest for the long term. Sensibly, they know that their resources, whilst currently ample, are finite and therefore they should invest in things that will make money long after the oil has run dry. Everyone knows that property is a pretty good long term investment and moreover that in London property prices never go down. So the Shard, like an increasing number of buildings in Central London, doesn't need to make money as such to accumulate wealth for its owners. It could quite easily sit there partially occupied for the next few years until its owners decided they needed to realise the capital and sell it. Of course, it will eventually fill up anyway, so they will probably make a profit long before they come to sell it. All this maybe doesn't matter much with a commercial/clerical building in a slightly odd corner of the City of London borders, but as always with the Shard, the problem is with what it represents: it is property almost entirely divorced from its original purpose, property almost entirely as a commodity; a new form of currency to be traded. 

I should probably declare an interest at this point: Ms P and I are currently in the process of trying to buy our first home. Like almost everyone I know who has bought a first home in London, we have had some help from family and we cannot afford to buy where we rent, so we are moving to a part of London that makes our parents pull funny faces and say things like "I'm sure it's very up and coming". Some might say it ever was thus in London: once Islington was considered an undesirable place to live, as (more recently) was Hackney. The fortunes of an area rose and fell as different parts of the city became fashionable or immigrant communities moved in and out; the city had a cycle of regeneration that made it vibrant and fresh. Now anywhere within zone 4 is fashionable and immigrant communities move to satellite towns where the rent is cheaper but they are more feared because they are a much greater portion of the population, allowing the 'floods of immigrants' claims of opportunist politicians to seem genuine. 

I am lucky, my household income is above national average, so we can at least afford to live somewhere in London, but the house we're hoping to buy was probably built with the intention that it would be relatively affordable housing. So we have become part of the problem: pricing others out of the market, unwittingly assisting in the demographic cleansing of Central London. Our intentions are at least reasonable, we just want a house to live in, whereas much of the property in the city centre no longer serves this purpose, it merely sits there, often empty, accumulating value. Ironically it seems that on this market it is residential property that is most desirable, as this is what is being created wherever possible by developers keen to maximise the money they make selling property to foreign investors. Perhaps even more ironically, this property is likely to gain more value if it is left empty, as by not adding to the housing stock in use, it exacerbates the housing shortage, pushing the price of all property up. Gradually this rush for residential investment property will wash all the character out of whole areas of London, as businesses move away, pushed out by property developers keen to turn their premises into flats and the lack of local business due to the lack of locals. Of course the owners of all this property won't care much as they don't actually live in the property and so don't care if it has any local ameneties; even when they do stay at their London residencies, they will be eating at the international restaurants in the Shard or elsewhere, and getting all their services provided by international concierge services. Local businesses for such people are just something that messes up the view from their car window as they are driven from one over-designed and sterile space to the next. To them the poor are to be kept the other side of a window at all times and in comparison to them 99% of the world is poor. The result is that parts of London will become vast empty storage units for expensive furnature, populated almost exclusively by private security guards. Even tourists will keep away from such areas, as there will be nothing to see or do there. Meanwhile, the rest of London will become a ghetto for the upper-middle classes, filled with identikit coffee shops and sterile gastropubs. All the character, culture and innovation that used to differentiate London from the rest of south-east England will gradually disappear and the city will just a more expensive version of the many featureless urban conurbations that litter the bottom corner of the country. 

Of course the owners of the the homes in this brave new world will be largely unconcerned, as homeowners' main concern is apparently the value of their home. Certainly this is a fact that the current government is relying on, as its current housing policy appears to be geared towards making sure that more people are able to believe they can afford the same number of houses, thus guaranteeing a continuation of house price inflation in the south-east of England. Obviously this is sensible politics for the Tory party, the majority of whose core support already own their own home and so believe themselves to be benefiting from the increase in house prices. Of course, they rarely are; when celebrating how much their house is worth on paper, people seem to forget that they are likely to always need somewhere to live. Equally if they think they're providing a home for their children, they should probably think about the fact that rising house prices simply increase their children's inheritance tax liability. Obviously, building new homes would help mitigate some of the ridiculous lurch skywards of London house prices, but more effective than that in the short term would be measures to make sure that all houses are homes, rather than just investments. Of course the current government is going to do nothing of the sort because that would risk upsetting the kinds of foreign nationals the government likes: the ones who visit occasionally to spend money in the international businesses and so add much less to the local economy than they claim. Meanwhile politicians of almost all stripes make noises about restricting access to the UK for foreign nationals who come here to work and contribute to the local economy, the people who run our hospitals and bars. I struggle to see the logic; we are railing against those who add value to our economy whilst letting those who add nothing to it force us out of our own capital city. 

One simple change could reverse this tragic state of affairs, a change that could be symbolised in the Shard: any building not in use for a period of six months must be rented out (at local council rates) to key workers. The effect would be twofold: it would instantly eleviate the housing shortage in London and it would stop the international super-wealthy buying property near these re-appropriated dwellings, as they don't want to be that close to poor people. Gradually, as the global elite moved out of London, the price of property would deflate or at least rise at a rate more commensurate with wage inflation. I'm not saying it would completely solve London's housing crisis, but it would be a damn site more effective than building the same houses twice in Ebsfleet. Unfortunately no government will ever enact a change that will reduce house prices and certainly not in an election year, when their sole aim seems to be to inflate the economy as quickly as possible so people feel rich enough to vote Tory, regardless of the likelihood that this policy will in the long term leave them fiscally and culturally poorer. 

So it's not going to happen, which is a shame, but we know how we could make the Shard a symbol that London can be proud of, a London for the benefit of Londoners: we could fill the Shard with immigrant nurses. 

Personal ish

Over the Christmas break I caught up with a friend of a friend who I have only met physically once or twice before, but with whom I have a mutually following relationship on twitter (is there a word for this: 'followship', 'twinterdependance'?). So I guess I kind of presumed that we knew each other a bit and was therefore a bit surprised when at one point he said "oh, are you on Twitter then?" Indeed I was so surprised that I pointed out that he was one of the first people to follow me and it was only after I said this that I realised what meaningless statement it was. He would have had no idea that he was one of my first followers just as I have no idea what number follower of his I was. This was simply the first of a number of points in our conversation that made me realise the essentially unidirectional nature of Twitter relationships. My conversant is a much more committed Twitter user than I: he spends seemingly hours a day on Twitter, has many thousands of followers and is a legitimate user in that he is self employed and therefore uses Twitter as a promotional tool as much as anything else. He fully engages in many debates and through this appears consider himself familiar with a number of other public figures who engage in the same debates, at the very least he consders himself to know them in some manner and potentially to be known to (or by) them. I may be utterly wrong on this, but I suspect he knows them and they know him as well as I know him and vice versa (which knowledge, the evening's conversations led me to understand was somewhat lacking or even downright incorrect on my part). Maybe it is simply I who am surprised by this, having never encountered someone who talks about others as if they have met before when they clearly haven't. I am a very circumspect user of social media, so maybe this sensation of finding out which aspects of a person's online persona is actually part of their personality is much more familiar to more persistent social networkers, but to me it seems odd. I quite often find myself having conversations with friends in which I feel a bit lazy for regurgitating thoughts and opinions I have already written in this blog, but I guess at least it's an indication that I'm consistent. Any of my friends will gladly tell you that I am as prone to ranting on about the ills of the world in real life as I am on this blog or Twitter, the difference being that I probably present a bit more eloquently here (you never get the joy of the full shouty jabbing-the-air-with-my-finger version). I see this as just being consistent, but perhaps I am naive to think that my online persona should simply reflect who I am, or perhaps I am in denial if I think that it does. I find it easy to see that many of my friends are nowhere near as single-issue obsessed as their Twitter feeds would have me believe, yet I apparently can't see that someone who didn't know me as a friend might assume that all I am interested in is the lack of thought people give to their lives and environment. I'm pretty sure there is a bit more to me than that (although not much), so perhaps I simply need not to be surprised when the person I meet is not the collection of issues and ideas that I encounter online. 

We are constantly warning children and young people to be wary of strangers online for obvious and good reasons, but we grownups tend to believe that such warnings don't need to apply to us. Of course we are all (hopefully) on guard for the net's worst predators, but we don't seem so concerned about the potential emotional impact that not knowing anyone online could have when it is presented to us. I am not saying that I am emotionally traumatised by finding out that someone I thought I was friends with from the internet wasn't aware of this friendship, but the cumulative effects of such a disparity cannot be underestimated. That I am a fairly casual and occasional user of social media probably explains why this sensation is new to me, but for more frequent users of social media it must be all too familiar. People must surely become used to it and jaded; they must develop attitudes to society adjusted for the fact that people are something different from what they appear to be. Indeed what's to stop them from turning away from society altogether, or at least society as we know it: the society of present interaction. If only the only thing the 'real world' is gong to offer is disappointment, why engage with it at all? Of course, the alternative is to engage with the real world on the terms defined by the world of social media, dividing your friends and associates up into single interest groups and never allowing your interaction with each to stray beyond the confines of their defined interest. This strikes me as an entirely juvenile way to interact with people and indeed a potentially socially and culturally regressive one. Many of the most serendipitous moments in history have come about through the meetings and interactions of unlikely combinations of people, it would be a shame if we let the inflexibility of digital social networks kill the creative spontaneity of real social interaction. I'm sure many people would argue that digital social networks enhance networking because they allow one to connect to many more people, but I'm not sure this isn't the equivalent of battery farming friends. The resulting mass of identikit connections are unlikely ever to challenge our opinions and preconceptions in a meaningful way, allowing them to be reinforced and narrowed. We could end up holding bizarre sets of beliefs based on selected fragments of the opinions of people we don't know. Perhaps this is no different from the past when such opinions came from newspaper colmunists, but at least then we didn't think the columnists knew us or indeed, that we knew them. 

I recognise many people on my train every day, but because I wear headphones all the time I have genuinely no idea what they sound like, yet on some level I suppose I feel I know them. However, if I was to go to a dinner party with them, I would not presume to know anything about their lives because I only know them in the sense that I am familiar with their faces. Sherlock Holmes would be able to deduce much about these people based on the information I have available to me, but that is what makes him exceptional (and fictional). The rest of us will have to make do with the knowledge that we can only gleam from actually spending time in other peoples' company.