The debate is raw, people participate and outcomes matter. Even if localism fans a fierce rural social protectionism, I like it
Sometimes I need a philosopher. I recently attended a community meeting for a group of Cumbrian villages outside Penrith. They were preparing uncertainly to pilot the government's new "localism agenda", and I wondered what they wanted from it. The cry was unanimous: they wanted protection from market forces. Above all, they wanted the right to social housing for local people. Blood runs thicker than water and nothing is as thick as English village blood.
The government's localism bill, now before parliament, intends to let it run. It will give parishes incentives to override planning rules and build on "exceptional" green-field sites, if housing is for local people. They will be empowered to designate shops, pubs, banks, even post offices, as "community assets", with cash and regulation to stop them closing. In addition, councils will get extra money if they do not object to developers wanting new private as well as social housing estates. But social means local.
So what is local? Since by definition locals already live locally, this new class of beneficiaries will be their children, together with local people "forced away, but who would like to return" and those who can prove "some local link". This is fierce social protectionism. In Devon a similar scheme oozes hostility to outsiders, second-homers, nimbys, the rich and landowners seeking "a quick buck", as council literature blandly puts it. Not just a new sort of English community but a new class of English citizen is being promoted, licensed to local security of tenure in perpetuity. They are the new landed gentry under entail. This is localism with bite.
Territorial politics is rarely susceptible to the normal badinage of right and left. Everything depends on where you come from. We could describe these village rights as sound social engineering, preserving mixed communities, defending the poor against a rapacious market and granting reasonable continuity of settlement to old village families. Or we could see it as a dangerous Cumbrian/Devonian exclusivity, hostile to immigrants, careless of rural conservation, interested only in dotting the landscape, Irish-style, with bungalows that benefit a few lucky locals – at the expense of urban taxpayers.
When I asked the Cumbrians if they thought residents of Kensington – many of them devoted locals – should enjoy the same entitlements for their poorer offspring at their expense, I got short shrift. To country people, cities can look after themselves. Decades of The Archers and farm support have led rural communities to see themselves as victims, yet on a higher plane of virtue. An English village is like a medieval monastery, a place apart yet blessed with an innate goodness that trickles down to all society.
I love villages and the idea of villages, sharing the romantic view of them as proxy families. The word evokes values that seem ever more desirable when society is more mobile, more disjointed, and families are broken and less able to support each other. If a village wants to see itself as a vestige of a certain sort of Englishness, let it do so, like the "free communes" of Scandinavia. The fight to resist extinction is as admirable in communities as in the natural world.
I am less clear what this has to do with civil rights, or with the competing claims of the urban poor. Whenever someone wants something that conflicts, a "right" is nowadays asserted. The word is treated as pure, absolving the claimant of any need to compromise. Yet go to any village meeting and the clash of rights is deafening. What of the villager's right to sell his house to a second-homer, of the right of a town-dweller to a cottage in a neighbouring field or of a tourist to enjoy the surrounding countryside? What is the claimed right to a local school, a bus service or even a job?
The simple response is that these rights should pass through the mesh of democracy, but that is no guide to the values that should influence government. Here all is confusion. The government published what purports to be a Domesday Book of environmental value, a gigantic overarching ecosystem assessment report. This puts monetary value, to the tune of £30bn annually, on such leisure and natural benefits of the countryside as fresh air, open space, water courses and species survival. This viewing of the environment in the round may keep a few economists busy, but it seems mercenary and slapdash, like old-fashioned cost-benefit analysis (which always justified the cost).
No monetary value can be seriously attached to a rare orchid or an uninterrupted view, any more than it can to the convenience of a new supermarket or a motorway. As for the value of "peaceful village life", how are we to balance that against the interests of a passing high-speed train?
At this point, politics is tempted to turn to philosophy. Most of these values are immeasurable, important and in constant conflict. The search for a simple tool kit to resolve them is as old as the divine right of kings and Marxism-Leninism. The tools usually break under pressure. These days the search mostly resolves itself into a messy utilitarianism as competing lobbies argue over the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and governments do what they like claiming majority interest.
Such utilitarianism pits personal against collective liberty or minorities against the mob and leaves them to fight it out. In the current New York Review of Books, AC Grayling applauds the latest search for some overarching approach to these conflicts, some "unity of value", by the legal philosopher, Ronald Dworkin, in his latest book Justice for Hedgehogs. Under Dworkin's optimistic analysis, personal freedom becomes a disciplined liberty, equality a sense of consideration for others. Our disagreements reflect a shared morality. Governments are not expected to make people equal, but rather "show equal concern for each individual". We disagree only on matters of interpretation.
This optimism would be helped if everyone agreed with Dworkin's essentially liberal view of humanity. I am not sure they do. The falling bomb does not excuse itself as "just a difference of interpretation". I and the Cumbrian villagers might agree about the value of self-government, but we might differ about their right to subsidised family tenure or to build over beautiful countryside. What matters in politics is not the agreement but the conflict. Asserting an overarching liberalism is like a referee telling two boxers that God loves them, and then leaving the ring.
Dworkin's argument is stimulating, but the best practical guide remains that of another philosopher, Bernard Crick, with his plea to elevate and not despise the messy necessity of politics. Rights will always clash. Interests will always lock horns. To Crick the key is to guard process, to ensure that democracy is open, arguments tested and debate conducted with courtesy. Politics is about participating in a fight, the most glorious fight on earth.
What I like about village politics is that it is raw, it matters, and most villagers participate. I may not recognise a community's right to eternal life, but I accept its right to fight for it. And may the best village win.