Buy something, or you're nicked

Every time I open the newspaper, I see something prefigured in the science fiction of Jeff Noon, William Gibson or Ken MacLeod. We're not going to be travelling to other galaxies or going back in time, but we are gradually building a kind of corporate dystopia, a la Gattaca, Bladerunner, Robocop most explicitly and similar texts.



The future won't feel like Robocop. You personally might not be manhandled by brutal corpocops. But you're probably not mentally unwell, young or black. The streets will be clean and there won't be any raised voices. But the near future is becoming dystopian in a far more insidious way. It might seem innocuous, but the deployment of 100 militaristic security officers on the streets of Manchester is a further step away from the perfectly reasonable expectation that as citizens, we have the freedom to walk the streets and the expectation that should we commit crimes, we are arrested by public servants and tried by our peers.

These ex-police officers patrolling the shopping areas of Manchester will look like officers - they'll be wearing stab vests, and carrying radios and cameras. The company which employs them is even negotiation to get them the authority to levy fines on people for minor offences.

Think about that for a second. Despite the numerous examples of police brutality and corruption available, the police service is employed by us and is accountable to us through the courts, local authorities and parliament. We pay them extremely well and expect them to protect us. These cut-price cops won't have any requirement to prevent crimes against us, or against the public sphere. Low-paid and responsible only to corporations, they'll stand by and watch while your granny gets mugged. Why not? There's nothing in it for them, and they're probably not insured to get involved. At the same time, we're giving away to these corporate security guards the right to punish us - without trial - when we do something that offends their employers. Clearly there's only one kind of crime that matters to the Conservatives - crimes against business.

This is such a bad idea that even the cops - formerly the armed wing of the Conservative Party, though the Tories are doing their very best to alienate them - think it's a step too far.  This will happen in your town too. My own awful MP and his cronies in WVOne explicitly see this city's centre as a retail space only: nothing else will be permitted.

Public space is being handed over by councils entranced by shiny presentations and promises of zero-tolerance on litter - but what will also go is the catholic anarchy of urban space: the poor, the rich, the young, the old, the amblers and strollers and buskers and natters and campaigners and loafers will all be swept away with them. How will you appeal against being made to move on by these retail bouncers? You won't.

Thankfully, resistance is possible… as Mallrats makes clear.

Piss off, Portas

Those of you based in the UK may have seen lots of headlines about The Dark Place and 11 other cities winning £100,000 each to 'revitalise' their central districts, a competition overseen by the ubiquitous Mary Portas, one of those individuals who has turned self-confidence into national prominence.

Local bigwigs are orgasmic about this, which I think is utterly foolish. £100,000 is a nugatory sum to spend when the challenge is this big. It won't make the slightest bit of difference. Instead, the government has spent £1.2m to a) draw attention to the fact that most of Britain's urban areas are identically depressing and b) to further this woman's career.

The simple fact is that there are two ways to solve this city's problems. The first is to repair this country's damaged economy. That might sound glib and facile, but I mean it, and you certainly won't hear my useless multimillionaire MP Paul Uppal (last website update: 1 month, last Tweet: 17 days) making this point. Conservative and conservative Labour governments decided to pursue an economy based on rock-bottom wages for the vast majority, with the proceeds of financial speculation temporarily filling the gap in government funds. That's come to a crashing halt and the population is too poor to carry on spending.

If you believe in consumerism - and I don't - then the answer is easy: pay people more. Divert some of the billions which accrue to directors and shareholders (FTSE CEOs earn an average £2.7m) and thence offshore, to the workers. They'll buy new shoes and wallpaper and Katie Price 'novels' and ice-creams and bicycles.

Secondly, this competition is a symptom of our urban failure, rather than a solution. The language is of consumption, while the planet burns. What this town needs is a mixed economy, like an Italian city centre. Not just a place to shop (the appalling Paul Uppal prefers to talk about shoppers who should be privileged rather than citizens) but a place to chat, flirt, sunbathe, vote, argue, preach, proselytise, sing and dance, read and rally. City centres should be microcosms of their communities: we need to reflect the messiness and irrationality of the population. If the kids want to skateboard and the old people want to sit and watch the world go by, they should be free to do so.

Sadly, The Dark Place has opted for the sterility of the monoculture.

 But most of the money will be used for a Dragon's Den-style project to support entrepreneurs while solving one of the city's biggest problems. Wolverhampton has the fifth highest level of empty shops in the country, and so new businesses will be given grants to move into abandoned buildings to trade and showcase their work.

This is ridiculous. Cities are more complicated than piss-poor TV entertainment. We all know what 'entrepreneurs' want: subsidies and higher profits, achieved by blackmailing local government, importing shoddy tat and depressing wages. Who are these 'entrepreneurs'? What qualifies them for the term? Who judges them? Why not 'support' local citizens - perhaps some of these abandoned buildings could be turned into Citizens' Advice Centres, trades union offices, child-care centres, art galleries or educational establishments (we used to have a city-centre 'HE Shop': long since closed).

Local power has been put into the hands of 'City Centre Company' known as WV One (sadly and rather covertly supported by my employer, the local university, though perhaps it will provide a non-consumerist voice), rather than retained by local government in the interests of all.

WV One works with partners in a co-ordinated and proactive way across the city to attract new investment, shopping and leisure facilities and to encourage continued improvement in the city's environment, safety and access. 

As far as I can see, there has been no debate about this. The result is that the city's future will be narrowly focussed on consumerism, and by corporate consumerism at that. The city is virtually dead in terms of independent shops: there's no baker, no cheese shop, no independent book shop, no wine and beer outlets, no independent shoe shops and very few independent clothes shops.

The result of course is that shoppers' money flows out of the town to Swiss and Cayman accounts.  The physical results are two-fold: appalling architecture and a population discouraged from doing anything other than shop in the city centre. If WV One and its counterparts in other cities get their way, any non-consumerist behaviour will result in exclusion from space which once seemed public but turn out to be private.

This is already under way here. Under the deeply Orwellian headline: BID Will Put Businesses In Charge, WV One announces that local democracy has been abandoned. I thought - perhaps naively - that I was in charge, in some small way, by casting my vote for a council. But no.

A Wolverhampton-educated woman has been appointed to lead the establishment of a Business Improvement District (BID) that will put local businesses in charge of improving the city centre trading environment.
University of Wolverhampton law graduate Michelle Baker has joined WV One as BID Director with a brief to help city centre companies decide if this is the right approach for Wolverhampton.

Thanks Michelle, but a) there are almost no 'local businesses', just national and international chains, and b) how about us, the inhabitants. The paucity of Michelle's thinking is cruelly exposed:

“A BID can stimulate economic growth and a positive sense of place but for businesses, the real benefits are on the bottom line.  With the support of city centre companies, a BID in Wolverhampton could provide a quality shopping and social experience in the city centre with increased footfall and consumer spend and reduced crime levels.  It would stimulate the economy, improve on the existing appeal and market the city centre as a destination of choice.”  

These could be additional security measures, more events, city centre hosts or rangers and better marketing to attract footfall.”

They just can't think further than corporate profits - not that this kind of announcement is brought to the attention of the general public, who would, I suspect, think of themselves as more than pound notes with footfalls.

We need to beware of these weasel words: what does she mean by a 'social experience'? We know that Uppal and Co. want to sweep the streets clean of beggars, religious loonies, political groups and charity collectors - just like Albert Speer in Germania. 'Additional security measures' = private security guards with no responsibility to the general public, just to their employers, no duty to prevent crime, simply the task of getting rid of inconvenient or annoying people. As to these 'city centre hosts or rangers': how are they any better than 'charity muggers'? Either they're salesmen for tacky promotions or they're another force used to sweep the streets clean of intransigent non-enthusiasts. (Read all about this and similar schemes in Anna Minton's excellent Ground Control).

This city is full of weird and wonderful people, with interesting and exciting ideas. Many of them work for the council, so it's strange that that organisation is so keen to pass on its responsibilities to these unelected, partisan and unaccountable bodies. There's little sign in the city centre of citizens' priorities, ideas or activities - nor will there be if Portas and her friends get their way. The mantra - despite 4 years of evidence to the contrary - is 'private good, public bad'. I reject this. Citizens are brilliant, and its time we stopped accepting that we're the lead weight on the economic and social balloon. That's why I'm such a big fan of UK Uncut - the real Big Society.

At least Michelle and her friends are honest in this headline: this is a coup. The question is, what are you and I going to do about it?

Update: Uppal's risen from his regeneration tank to 'welcome' the bid. Thus proving that while he doesn't believe disabled children deserve state benefits, private business does. So he is a socialist of sorts… redistributing our taxes from the poor to the rich. (Oh yes, could somebody show him how to deploy an apostrophe?). 

Citizens, not shoppers

The forces of darkness, aka Paul Uppal MP and the local Masons small businessmen, have decided that they want to sweep the city's streets clean of, well, everybody except shoppers. They have no vision of society beyond the transactional exchange of money between low-paid drones and tax-evading national chains. Walk down The Dark Place's main streets and it's nothing but Lichtensteiner mobile phone providers, Swiss-domiciled chemists and a bland, narrow 'range' of establishments substituting baubles for community. Of all the shops in the city's main space, one is independent: a butcher's. And they wonder why the place is depressed.

Trapped in this consumerist paradigm - and no wonder, given the Secretive Millionaire MP made his money speculating in commercial property - Uppal and his friends want to turn the city centre into a BID: Business Improvement District. They're a kind of urban cancer: they promise local councils that they'll turn any area into a clean and shiny place, the kind you see on corporate brochures. You know, white couples in pastel clothes strolling from Starbucks to John Lewis. Perhaps even a black or same-sex couple in the background to prove that capitalism can cope with 'diversity'. The clue's in the name: they don't want to improve the city - just their profits.

Of course BIDs are sinister, Orwellian organisations. They take public space, get the law changed and turn it into private space. The high street ceases being somewhere I could sit and read the paper, where goth kids can sit and peaceably sneer at me, where the mad and bad can expound their terrible religious views. It becomes a conveyor belt from the neon hell of chain store to chain store. No deviation permitted. You'll be there on sufferance, rather than as a citizen. Security guards can and will remove you for sitting, not shopping, for announcing your political views or simply looking wrong.

I can't express how strongly I oppose this. I want my high street to be a place where weird, spontaneous things happen. I want it to be various: not just a parade of shiny plastic. It's where we should party and protest or just stop to chat - think of all those Italian squares where the cool and the crazy, the old and the young interact. Cities are brilliant places, because large numbers of people are thrown together in an accident of geography. Out of this comes weird, exciting - and sometimes unpleasant - encounters, activities, art and other activities. If Uppal and his greedy friends get their way, we'll be reduced to one thing and one thing only: buying, then leaving. That's partly why this place is so unpleasant. During the day, you shop. At night, the only reason to be there is to drink so much that a technicolor yawn seems like the only way to brighten the place up.

The Dark Place is zoned. Nasty kebab shops and sex shops down a couple of streets, municipal buildings tucked away, shops - and empty shops - dominating the centre. Let's be more imaginative. Let's place public buildings in the shopping arcades: libraries, council offices, free leisure activities, so that the crowd isn't made up solely of open-mawed consumers. Encourage the goths, the chavs and whichever other social groups are out there.

I am seriously thinking about starting a proper organisation to challenge the BIDs. I've already got a name: RABID Wolves (Residents Against Business Improvement Districts). Neat, eh? Who's with me?