For reasons that now escape me I’ve just finished watching The street that cut everything – this was an “experiment” where Nick Robinson persuades a street to give up all council services for 6 weeks. The very subtle (no honest it was subtle really – like a brick wall across Brandshatch) sub-text was that councils are terribly good value for money and that cuts can only affect vital services and are therefore evil.
That said I was hugely impressed with how well the street actually did, they managed to meet all the “challenges” aunty threw at them and stay on budget (just about – one can’t help but suspect that the additional challenges were set to make sure the budget didn’t last). The community (on the whole) pulled together and did a damn good job of going from having the council provide everything (including social interaction) to having to do it for themselves. Oddly as many dodgy libertarians might predict a community can actually pull together and choose to help each other out when asked to do so.
So that said, I may have hinted that I considered the “experiment” to be somewhat rigged. So lets ignore the in built slant to the situation in that no one on the street had any knowledge of any of the bits of legislation they were expected to adhere to, they also couldn’t make use of any of the economies of scale notionally available to the council. The best bit of rigging though was the funding they got, which was their council tax – so no slice of any central government funding, no slice of the business taxes, in fact nothing from any of the other funding streams that the council have. But I suppose in balance to that they didn’t have to pay anyone to do any of the jobs as they were doing it themselves (though then also had to also do jobs beyond their street as well). That though really was the huge hidden flaw – they were pretty much forced to organise along traditional council lines, there wasn’t the scope to really try anything radical. For instance they had to have weekly rubbish collections or they’d be fined – anyone had weekly rubbish collections of late? One of the residents insisted on free school meals and the same provision for getting their child to and from school and wouldn’t consider other options provided by the community – especially when it went wrong the first time it was tried.
So what the program did manage to show was that a single very small street, isn’t a viable self supporting community especially when people aren’t allowed to give additional money to the community. So wow if you ham-string a community it doesn’t do so well – who’d have thunk it.
My thoughts entirely! About ten minutes into the ‘experiment’, I said the ending would be that everyone would say – “it was worthwhile because we got to know the neighbours and learned to help each other, but ….. we now realise what a difficult job the council do, how cost effective they really are, and how we do so need them”. Oh the joy when they got their council approved plastic bins back!
Yeah the hugging of the bins was a bit over the top – and the out come predictable (I note very little time was given to council waste e.g. the log etc.). I do also wonder that there was no other leisure centre/gym available except the council run one thus forcing people to have to go for walks. Could this be council provision of services forcing out the private sector. I think the main point it really made was having given over so much of everything to the state to look after it’ll take a while to unravel it.
Oh and an interesting comment in today’s Metro TV review:
“Taking away The Street’s streetlights was an excuse to send in fly-tippers and graffiti artists under cover of darkness in the equivalent of a reality-show honeytrap. It was daft and fake; I haven’t had lights on my street for the past eight years and – amazingly – it’s no different to when we had them”