A new National Park? Where would you suggest?

Sometimes I wonder. Think about a National Park for a second - you might come up with images of the Lake District, a grand Cairngorm or Sussex's rolling downs. Maybe your thoughts stray a little further to embrace a wilderness park like Yellowstone or even the Serengeti. I think of the Andalucian Sierras towering over the assorted Costas where we lounge, drink, eat and get sunburned.

But none of you thought of Birmingham!

"I think we have an extraordinary landscape here waiting to be discovered by millions,” says landscape architect Kathryn Moore, unrolling a jauntily coloured map of her visionary new park in a Birmingham City University office. The professor isn’t talking about of Cumbria, Umbria, Snowdonia or Amazonia. She’s talking about the touristic potential of the West Midlands plateau, the heart of England that threw itself into the fiery crucible of the Industrial Revolution and still bears sacrificial scars. It is here that Professor Moore wants to create the United Kingdom’s 16th national park.

Now I'm pretty sure that there's some great stuff about the 'west midlands plateau' but I'm also sure that it's importance isn't about its landscape, wildlife or ecology but rather the glimpses of industrial heritage, the prospect of culture and the attractions of the city. These aren't the stuff of national parks.

Why do people dream up this nonsense?

....

If Birmingham's a 'jihadi breeding ground' it's not a very good one

Islamist terrorism is undoubtedly a problem. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the UK's home grown Islamist terrorists nearly all come from with the Muslim community. This means that the largest such communities - Birmingham, Bradford, Luton and so forth - are more likely to produce terrorists.

Here's the Daily Mail:

Sparkbrook has become synonymous with Islamic extremism; one in ten of all Britain’s convicted Islamic terrorists, we now know, have come from Sparkbrook (population 30,000) and four adjoining council wards.

In total, these highly concentrated Muslim enclaves, occupying a few square miles of the city, have produced 26 of the country’s 269 known jihadis convicted in Britain of terror offences.

Over a fifth of Birmingham's population identified as Muslim in the 2011 census - that's about 250,000 people. And they are, as with most immigrant populations, concentrated:






That population - one of England's largest concentrations of Muslims - has produced just 10% of terrorists and the number (26) of those terrorists represents just 0.01% of the population. We should be vigilant, carry on working to prevent and protect, but this really doesn't tell us that Muslim communities are rife with budding terrorists and more than Jo Cox's murderer living on a council estate makes such places riddled with Nazi-sympathising nutters.

Confusing the dominant Deobandi version of Islam in Britian's Kashmiri population with ISIS is wrong, if at times understandable. Deobandi beliefs are very traditional and include very definite views about the role of women (and how they should dress), a reverence for the physical Qu'ran rather than its contents and an increasingly assertive approach to other Muslims who don't adhere to these positions. So when the Daily Mail describes Sparkbrook, it shows a scene that is familiar to anyone from my city of Bradford:

Visit the area and you’ll inevitably pass along Ladypool Road, the neighbourhood’s bustling main artery, at the centre of the Balti Triangle, so named because of the number of curry houses that line the pavement.

The shops are largely Islamic, too. There’s Only Hijab, the Islam Superstore and Kafe Karachi, to name a few. Dotted around Ladypool Road are 22 mosques, dominated by the twin minarets of Birmingham Central Mosque.

None of this suggests that somehow terrorists are being created by the presence of curry houses, hijab shops and an Asian cafe. Yet that is somehow the impression that is given - tens of thousands of perfectly ordinary Birmingham residents being categorised as some sort of problem because a tiny handful of men from that place committed terrorist offences.

The Mail is right to point at the manner in which Labour politicians pander to pressure from Deobandi organisations - Cllr Wazeem Jaffar and the four-year-old in the headscarf is a shocking example of indulging religious fundamentalism. But then the same politicians play a game of community politics unrecognisable to those of us campaigning in the rest of the country. And, yes, this is a problem - from electoral fraud through to grant-farming and favour-mongering - but it is not creating the basis for young men becoming Islamist terrorists.

In discussing the threat of Islamist terror - and there is a threat - we need to get away from the from the idea that mainstream Islam in the UK is promoting that terrorism. We should remember, and perhaps Birmingham is a good place to do this, that throughout its existence the IRA exploited sectarian sympathies and enjoyed the support of some Catholic priests. But this didn't make the rest of the Catholic population of England and Ireland complicit in the IRA's murder and terror. Islamist terror groups are no different, they exploit Muslim grievance (just as those Birmingham Labour councillors exploit the same grievances) and find some sympathetic voices. But what comes across most strongly is that so few - a tiny group - Muslims from Birmingham get involved in the world of Islamist terrorism.

....

Quote of the day - on equalities departments

****

In an otherwise pretty standard fare article about inequalities lies this observation about Birmingham's Race Equality Unit. And bear in mind this is an article telling us the we're just as unequal as we used to be:

For example, in 1984 Birmingham City Council set up a Race Equality Unit with the aim of addressing institutional racism and improving access to council services. By 1989 the Unit had 31 staff, including race relations advisers in housing, education, and social services. The Unit’s annual report for that year shows its activities included training, monitoring uptake of services, helping different departments devise race equality schemes, improving access to services (mainly by translating information), and organising outreach events. If you were to include something about community development (helping local community groups to support disadvantaged people) these activities would all be part of the Standard Six – the half a dozen key actions that have dominated equality strategies and policies over the decades.

Put simply we've spent over thirty years mithering on about race equality and levels of black unemployment in Birmingham remain three times higher that the City's overall unemployment rate. All that investment - much of it spent on 'monitoring', on counting minorities - hasn't achieved very much at all. Except provide a well-paid employment for all those equalities monitors, trainers and strategists.

....

On how planning nearly killed Birmingham and why garden cities aren't the answer

****

And before Brummies leap in and accuse me of doing down their city, the same goes for Bradford, for Leeds and for just about every other big city. Here's the quote from The Economist blog:

In the post-war era, there was a strong sense among British politicians that cities were slightly unpleasant things like mushrooms that ought not be allowed to grow too fast. Inspired by utopian city planners such as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, they decided that urban metropolises had to be cut back. Without much consultation, enormous numbers of people were "decanted" from inner-city slums to grey suburban council estates, where loneliness and crime thrived. Meanwhile, the city centres themselves were strangled with great elevated roads intended to get people in and out of the "commercial" zones. Birmingham probably suffered the worst of anywhere. Even Joseph Chamberlain's grand Council House was surrounded by roads.

Right now planners across the country are 'learning the lessons' of the past and drawing up new - and newly grand - schemes for cities and towns. Yet the echo of the think described above remains - cities are nasty, unclear, dangerous places and people want to live in ordered, structured and safe communities. We even have a "new" garden city movement:

Garden cities are back on the political and social agenda. Barely a day goes past without Boris Johnson, Nick Clegg, David Cameron or Ed Miliband talking about them. Lord Wolfson has got in on the act by launching a competition to build a new garden city in England. The prize of £250,000 is enough to properly kickstart a new social garden city movement.

And this 'movement' has a rhetoric filled with today's trendy rhetoric of 'cooperatives', 'community ownership' and 'social enterprise' - all guaranteed to get us shaking with excitement at this ordered world outside the city, a Utopian wonderland of community leadership, social capital and parks.

Forgive me if I don't share your excitement at building boring places filled with dullness, where every activity is purposeful, where committees of local worthies decide what you have in your front garden, the colour of your front door and whether you can put a six foot pink gnome by your gate. If you want these garden cities go build them but don't pretend they replace the excitement of the city or the mixed community of the market town or the tranquillity of the village. I'm with Jane Jacobs on Ebenzer Howard and garden cities:

“His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge."

And we've seen what planners did to Birmingham. Useful though those planner might be, we can't put them in charge.
....

Only the rich have 'gated communities' - elsewhere it's called safe housing!

Whenever the words “gated community” are mentioned the huffiness is palpable. How dare those rich people separate themselves from the rest of us. I mean, what about all that vital social capital destroyed by such selfishness:

Speaking after the meeting Councillor Patrick Codd said there was no other way forward, despite his fears of a divided community.

He said: “Unfortunately we were in a situation when we were going to High Court to talk about a few feet of land. It would have been difficult because there is no guide. This is something very very difficult to prove.

“I am opposed to gated communities, they breed fear of crime and they are antisocial. I think it’s a great shame.

“I have held this up for as long as I can; I am totally opposed to the erection of gates.”

I really don’t get it – if my neighbours and I decided to install gates on the drive up to The Nook that would be our business. It should not be any business of the council. And what exactly is wrong with these ‘gated communities’?

Many sociologists bemoan the growing popularity of gated communities. They say they're exclusionary, elitist and anti-social. Most of that criticism targets the wealthy.

And there we have it – the problem is that it’s rich folk who choose to live in gated communities, cut off from all you riff-raff! Or is it, are we getting it wrong?

Birmingham City Council owns over 400 high rise blocks and has tried several approaches to improving conditions for residents living in the blocks. These have included the installation of controlled entry systems, converting some tower blocks to sheltered housing and experimenting with single generation lettings policies for particular blocks. More recently, the Council has been developing a programme of concierge schemes for its most problematic high rise blocks.

Sounds to me like the creation of ‘gated communities’ – on the one hand we have councillors opposing the initiative of wealthy residents, landlords and agents in providing secure places to lives while on the other we have public bodies installing those self-same schemes in social housing.

....