Planning law is so loaded against local communities fighting supermarkets, it's amazing Bristol-style disturbances are so rare
Last week's riot in Bristol's Stokes Croft has dissipated, but the debate beneath is still a crackle of irreconcilable assertions: Tesco claims that many residents wanted the store, though the company has yet to announce whether it will reopen. Residents and some councillors insist that they did not want it, and the squatters who were the focus of the police attention say they were never anything to do with the No Tesco lobby in the first place.
But even while we await the truth, there is an interesting conversation to be had about how much influence you can have over the face of your local high street: the short answer is none.
For the long answer, take this case of the Sainsbury's Local in St John's Hill, south London. It's already been built, so I'm not agitating against it. In truth I never took much interest in its planning: it's not my local, it's my mother's. The problem with self-evident injustices – such as "supermarkets destroy local shops" – is that they're so obvious and well-worn. If it's not your own cornershop, it just feels like a fact of life.
More naively, as soon as I heard my mother was against it, I assumed Sainsbury's had already lost. She's been opposing planning permission, not just around and about, but in this ward, for 35 years. She once got a building refused by making a scale model and exhibiting it in Wandsworth town hall, so councillors could see how ugly it would be.
That is no longer how it works: first, supermarkets now buy sites that were formerly pubs, bars or restaurants, so don't need planning permission. Sainsbury's says it doesn't have figures for how many of its acquisitions this applies to, and so does Tesco; but it was the case in Stokes Croft (the site was a comedy club) and St John's Hill, and I can think of three others in that part of London.
Supermarkets still have to apply for a premises licence, but the council even at this point is pretty toothless. Nick Griffin (a different one, as will quickly transpire) was part of the opposition to this Sainsbury's, and also a barrister: he laid out the legal grounds for opposition. Before 2003, there was generally an onus to prove that there was a need for another alcohol vendor in the area. Since the Licensing Act (which became law in November 2005), it's been up to the residents to object on one of four grounds: prevention of crime and disorder; public safety; protection of children from harm; prevention of public nuisance.
Griffin thought the last was the one most likely to succeed, but also knew that with a large, well-run, multinational company, none of these objections was likely to wash, and none did. One of the absurdities of the whole process is that the council invited local comment, put out chairs for the residents in the licensing committee meeting, and seemed well-disposed towards the locals, admiring their pluck (I'm extemporising now) – but it could only refuse to grant a licence within the law. And the law has no provision for people who just want their local shops to survive.
Residents are brought down to small acts of sabotage that look quite petty-minded: you can object to the highways department about the creation of a loading bay, but you'd need the council on your side. You can object on environmental grounds to the noise, but only once it's opened, and often small supermarkets aren't that noisy. Besides which, none of this is the point. "The main motivator," said Griffin, "was the shop next door, run by Sri Lankans [the Loshanans], who'd been there for years, worked really hard, and just spent a lot of money on the shop."
There is a hugely important distinction between a chain and a corner shop: not the nostalgic preservation of a quirky high street over a homogenised one; rather, the practical, concrete things that a corner shop might do – checking that locals are OK in the snow, even to the point of dropping round – and Sainsbury's probably won't. It's true that it doesn't snow that often, so this example sounds a bit desperate. But this is what thinktanks and policymakers mean when they talk about "support structures" and "social cohesion" and "resilient communities". Are people aware of one another? Is somebody going to notice if you've fallen over? Sainsbury's, for all its patronage of the arts, is not going to notice.
A letter in the Times last week asked pithily: "If the majority of residents are opposed to the opening of a small Tesco store, surely a simple boycott would ensure its rapid failure?" There is a devilish logic to that, although boycotts are a bit passé. UK Uncut did a wonderful target of a Tesco in January where they emptied the shelves of everything emanating from two other big tax avoiders, Kraft and Walkers crisps.
But communities aren't about majorities. There are plenty of people who feel neutral about where they shop, who are busy, whose sense of belonging might be more rooted to their work than their street, who find it annoying (it is annoying) that you can only get longlife cream in a corner shop. But the people who do consider themselves to be part of a community know that the community is weakened when it's dominated by faceless chains; and yet, as a community, they have no say in the matter.
With this level of impotence, the really amazing thing is that people don't riot more often.