Like medieval citadels, great cities fuel social disharmony and division

I've talked before about how the big cities that, at present, drive economic growth, act to exclude people. Or, to put it another way, prevent people from being anything other than 21st century peons trapped in small, crowded apartments that eat up £4 in every £10 they're paid. And worse, unlike the past's rural peons, these new urban serfs cannot settle, opt out of having a family and live a sort of 'kidult' existence that is filled with ultimately unfulfilling fun.

The problem is that, when people travel away from the city so as to have a stake in the nation, settle down and raise a family, they find is difficult to maintain the work they had before and quickly discover that (outside the specially privileged world of public sector professionals) the opportunities in affordable places aren't there. This brings me to this quotation from French geographer, Christopher Guilluy:

All the growth and dynamism is in the major cities, but people cannot just move there. The cities are inaccessible, particularly thanks to mounting housing costs. The big cities today are like medieval citadels. It is like we are going back to the city-states of the Middle Ages. Funnily enough, Paris is going to start charging people for entry, just like the excise duties you used to have to pay to enter a town in the Middle Ages.

Guilluy uses this, in part, to explain the "gilets jaunes" protests in France but also transfers the effect elsewhere - to the UK's Brexit vote, to the election of Donald Trump, and to the new Italian government. While, Guilluy speaks most commonly of the working class, it's clear that the protest movements (whether on the streets as in France or in the voting booth as in Italy) extend to a wider group of those excluded from what I once called "The Great City of the West":

There's no actual reason, other than our sociable nature, for us to live in those 'Great Cities of the West'. Indeed, they're filled with untypical humans. There are the brave few who upped sticks and travelled thousands of miles to live poor quality lives on the fringes of the gleaming, sparkly city hoping for a lucky chance. We've the fortunate beneficiaries of inheritance or beauty who can skim across the surface of the city enjoying its lights and pleasures while affording the means to avoid its darkness. And there's a vast mass of clever, skilled, hard-working people who turn the wheels of the city's economy but can't get a stake in the city, can't find the means to settle and have a family, and who justify this on the basis that they can get to see the beauties in their plays, galleries and stadiums.

Out in the provinces - sneered at by the grand city folk - there's a different culture emerging. In part this is fuelled by anger at the denial of opportunities but it is also about the reforming of community and of a hope that politics will bring the cities to their senses and allow the idea of an inclusive democracy back into our culture. Meanwhile the wealthy elite call for the over 75s to have their vote removed or for people to have to take a test to earn the right to vote - the desire is to exclude the less educated, the old, the working class from power, to return us - in the name of progressive politics - to a world before the extension of the franchise to workers in 1918.

Just as, before the trade unions and their socialist and social democrat party offspring, workers lacked a voice, today people in small town England, in la France périphérique, rust belt USA and Italy's crumbling industrial cities lack a voice. Yes they are working class but it is broader than this, as Guilluy describes:

They tend to be people in work, but who don’t earn very much, between 1000€ and 2000€ per month. Some of them are very poor if they are unemployed. Others were once middle-class. What they all have in common is that they live in areas where there is hardly any work left. They know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else.

If the establishments of the west want to avoid upheaval, they need to find a way to respect - listen to, heed - the voice of these people. Above all we need to stop patronising them as the "left behind" or worse and to realise that the great cities of the west will need them. The great and good must stop making the city such a barrier to having a real, cash stake in society.


....

Bars, birth rates and gentle decline - Europe's left behind places

Every Italy village has one of these. This one, Bar Centrale, is in Fontanelice a village in the Bolognese Appenines and it's pretty typical. Go inside and there's a bar (and a barman or waitress) dominated by the obligtory coffee machine and, sitting on the cheap plastic chairs around rickedy tables are a bunch of old men. They probably won't be drinking, it's not an Italian thing really, but may be playing cards, reading Corriere dello Sport or one of the seemingly endless local papers Italy enjoys, and talking in that 'putting the world to rights' way loved of men in bars everywhere.

The wall behind the bar will feature a large poster, maybe framed, of a football team - usually from some victorious season long, long ago rather than the current team. In Fontanelice it was a black and white framed photograph of a Juventus squad from (judging from the hairstyles) some time in the 1970s. I'm guessing that, like bar decor everywhere, it's just there not causing offence but gradually losing both definition and relevance as the years pass by.

Just as for us in England, the pub was the heart of the world, these bars represent that old Italy of community, the shared experience of the place we live. It's true that little Italian towns and villages also have trattoria and even full blown restaurants but the bar, its decor and regulars slowly fading, is the common factor, the thing that every little place has. And I guess that, just like the English pub, these bars are finding times tough. I'd note that the slightly posher place we stayed - Dozza just outside Imola - didn't have a bar of this sort in the old town (an osteria served this function in the evening but during the day there was just the cafe and gelateria in the public park).

There are lots of demographic factors driving this decline - the bars may still be there but for how much longer? The most important though, like a lot of other places in Europe, is that Italians are quite literally dying out:

Italy’s birth rate has more halved since the ‘baby boom’ of the 1960s, with the number of births falling to 488,000 in 2015 – fewer than in any other years since the modern state was formed in 1861.

“If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births a year in 10 years’ time, 40 percent less than in 2010 — an apocalypse,” the minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, said in an interview with La Repubblica on Sunday.

“In five years we have lost more than 66,000 births (per year) — that is the equivalent of a city the size of Siena,” the minister added. “If we link this to the increasing number of old and chronically ill people, we have a picture of a moribund country.”

Italy has Western Europe's lowest birth rate - just 1.39 well below the accepted replacement level of 2.1 - which is why you see so few children in these little towns and villages. The wonderful culture of these places - relaxed, welcoming - that us visitors want to celebrate is threatened by this low birth rate. And the result - just as we've seen in Japan - is that villages and small towns depopulate and are eventually abandoned:

The phenomenon is happening across the country, from mountain-top villages in the Alps and the Apennines to tiny terracotta-roofed hamlets in the sun-baked valleys of Sicily and Sardinia.

Nearly 2,500 villages are at risk of turning into ghost communities, with a startling two million homes abandoned or left empty by their owners, according to the report, which was compiled with the help of the National Association of Italian Councils.

We will see this process repeated elsewhere in Europe, at least in places that either don't attract or don't welcome immigrants. And, as we know, the problem with those immigrants is that they arrive without the cultural legacy that might sustain the bar, the cafe and the pub. Moreover they're not heading to those deep rural areas of Europe but to the towns, resorts and cities that provide the work they came here for. In France it's clear:

The visible decline of so many historic city centers is intertwined with these anxieties. Losing the ancient French provincial capital is another blow to Frenchness — tangible evidence of a disappearing way of life that resonates in France in the same way that the hollowing out of main streets did in the United States decades ago. A survey of French towns found that commercial vacancies have almost doubled to 10.4 percent in the past 15 years. As these towns have declined, voters have often turned sharply rightward. Albi is traditionally centrist, but the same conditions of decline and political anxiety are present, too.

Politics aside (although this sense of decline is an important factor in the kick-back against the Great City of the West and its denizens) we're seeing the same problems. A glance at the people walking the high street - older, wearier, less content - in an English provincial town will be matched in France, Spain and in that lovely little bar in Fontanelice. We tend to talk of these people as 'left behind' which is unkind and largely untrue. What we should talk about is how the places themselves are left behind, victims of the ageing population, too few young people, out-of-town shops and the World Wide Web.

In Italy, with a sclerotic economy, high unemployment and Europe's lowest female participation rate (just 37%), the problems are reflected everywhere - in the deathly quiet daytime streets of small towns, in the industrial zones littered with empty factories, rotting teeth in the once mighty bite of Italian manufacturing, and it the desperation of a government offering payments of eighty Euros a month as a 'Baby Bonus' for new mums.

If we're seeking Europe's problems we shouldn't be looking at immigrant ghettoes in Montpelier or Rotterdam, nor should we be screeching about house prices in Central London or Barcelona, rather we should be turning our attention to the left behind provincial places where the things we treasure in our cuture are at their most profound. The slow death of the English pub, the struggles of the French provincial high street, and the decline of the Italian village's cafe-bar - these are what people see and don't understand even if, as we know, they are partly to blame.

International 'anywhere' people - Flat Earthers as geographer Harm de Blij called them - may be right about global trade and business (and my head tells me they are) but when I look at those quiet, backwater places once comfortable and thriving my heart tells me we've got something wrong. And worse that the only people talking about that feeling in my heart are those blaming others - immigrants, foreigners, Muslims, bankers - for the problem rather than looking for a way forward. If this doesn't change, if the Flat Earthers continue to see the Great City of the West as the answer, then Europe and America's political divisions will only worsen and deepen.

...

Dominique Strauss-Kahn - the French Jimmy Savile

****

The Spectator makes an entirely inaccurate comparison to the trial of Jeremy Thorpe (a man who was charged - and acquited - with trying to murder the man who blackmailed him over a homosexual affair) - the truth is that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, urbane, charming, politically-connected and powerful is the French Jimmy Savile:

Back in Paris, a young female journalist accused him of attempted rape during a magazine interview. When this case too was dropped on the grounds of insufficient evidence, the pimping investigation began. A parallel charge of gang rape, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years, was withdrawn in 2012. But in preparation for the pimping trial, two examining magistrates spent four years transcribing hundreds of pages of text messages and emails. During the three-week trial, an extraordinary picture of DSK’s downtime emerged. Hours were passed in the company of a Belgian pimp called ‘Dodo la Saumure’, proprietor of ‘le Dodo Sex Klub’. Afternoons were spent arranging meetings on the Belgian frontier, or in Madrid, or in Washington, where expensive locations were hired and his friends including a Lille CID inspector flew in with what DSK called ‘the equipment’ (young prostitutes).

This is an unrepentant goat. Yet it seems French socialists rather fancy him as their presidential candidate. I guess we're supposed to respect Gallic worldliness but all I see is an entirely corrupt culture - sexist, exploitative and oppressive. For all our prurience and hypocrisy, I rather prefer our willingness to call out politicians for unpleasant sexual behaviour and especially the sort we see here - were I some sort of feminist, something of a celebration of 'rape culture'.

....

Nannying fussbucket of the day: France

****

They - the French I mean -  don't like beer.  Well, in truth, quite a lot of French folk like beer. But their government doesn't:

Despite the best and combined efforts of brewers, bar-owners, consumers, politicians, citizens and celebrities over the last six weeks, the French Parliament last night approved a bill to hike French beer tax by a massive 160%.

Note this is just beer - not wine, not cider: only beer. It is a blatant piece of preference to the (almost untaxed) wine business. Mind you, even after this massive hike in rates, the duty on beer in France will still be less than a quarter of the rate in the UK.

....

In which we are reminded of the terrors that NHS privatisation would bring...

****

In a blog post on another matter Anna Raccoon describes the experience of France's semi-private health system:

...a chauffeur driven limousine pulled up outside my house, precisely on time, in order to drive me in comfort some 100 miles to the specialist Cancer centre in Bordeaux; the scan was carried out within minutes of my arrival, leaving me half an hour to enjoy a cup of freshly brewed coffee and a fag before the consultant appeared smilingly at his door to greet me by name at the allotted time. I cannot tell you what hell and deprivations I must suffer now that I am safely out of the all embracing  grasp of the NHS.

I'm sure there's a reason why the NHS can't deliver this sort of service. The words "monopoly" and "government" spring to my mind.

....

Housing policy - a couple of modest suggestions

***

I was struck by a piece in New Start Magazine about how the UK's planning system is a drag on the development of housing - and especially housing for rent. The article draws comparison with planning regimes in France, Germany and Holland where performance is a little better than in the UK.

Thinking about this it struck me that there is a further issue - land value. We know that land values are far higher in the UK than in France (mostly a function of the amount of developable land available - France is a lot bigger than the UK) and that those land values represent a significant element in the cost of housing.

So why not eliminate land value entirely? Rather than providing subsidy to the housing associations to build affordable homes on public land (and in effect turning the subsidy into a capital receipt for the public agency owning the land) why not require those agencies to gift the land at no consideration? This would make building affordable homes affordable and the subsidy could go directly as grant for the purchase of land - a major saving and a more effective system.

And while we're about this we should extend a duty onto developers to retain an interest in the properties they build for at least 25 years - whether in the form of a freehold or an equity share. This would provide an incentive to build better, more efficient housing.

...

Friday Fungus: Truffles and why the Duke must be patient!

There are a load of myths about truffles - not least that the white truffle can't be cultivated. This picture from somewhere near San Miniato in Tuscany is a deliberately planted truffle wood. And as you drive through the area around San Miniato you will see quite a few of these truffle orchards - some with hazel, some with oak and most with poplar.

And the black truffle associated with France and with Piedmont has been cultivated for hundreds of years - and has been successfully transplanted to North America and to Australia. Plus of course to the UK. And in a newsworthy (and so far unsuccessful) way to Sandringham. It seems that the Duke of Edinburgh's lovingly planted truffle impregnated oak trees have so far failed to produce a truffle - or at least one that the skill of a Lagotto Romagnolo hound can find. The Duke will persevere - his supplier Truffles UK says up to eight years is need for the truffles to emerge, so there's time to go yet!

And let's be clear. Truffles have an intense, powerful mushroom flavour that can turn ordinary cucina povera into the food of the great. A few scrapings of white truffle into your spaghetti carbonara and it is transformed. And added to that classic Tuscan ribollita soup and - as I discovered here - you have a truly great dish.

So the good Duke - and anyone else setting out to cultivate truffles - needs to be patient. It's worth the wait!