Richard,

I just wanted to say that I thought your talk at the SOTMUS conference was spot on.

But when you talk about the cycling community, I think there’s an important caveat missing. Lots of people in our mapping community (or lots of the 5% who do 95% of the mapping) are enthusiastic cyclists, but few in the enthusiastic cyclist community are mappers.

I’ve not come across the London Cycling Campaign or any of the borough groups really getting involved with cycle mapping. Some members (myself included) do, but my impression is that most don’t. Despite embedding CycleStreets on their homepage and collaborating on a cycle parking campaign with them, I’ve never come across a big concerted push from LCC and local borough groups to contribute to OpenStreetMap beyond the odd mention in their magazine [edit: and a two-page spread]. The same was true of Andy’s great DfT data project. To this day, coverage of cycling infrastructure in London is patchy (although far better than any online alternative).

The same goes for lots of enthusiast communities. You’re right that a lot of people map the thing they’re enthusiastic about. But not many communities organised around those enthusiasms get mapping.

I’ve tried, here and there, to talk enthusiastic people round to OSM. I’ve talked to community campaigners I know involved with cycling, walking, food growing, trees, transition towns, vegetarianism, housing and school catchment areas. All benefit from mapping; some do it themselves with varying degrees of proficiency, usually with pen and paper, Powerpoint slides or Google Maps. But the technical hurdles of using OpenStreetMap (and in some cases simply the effort of mapping) often seem to outweigh the benefits they’d really get from the results.

After a chat over some tea or beer I have to send interested people half a dozen links to different web sites that provide the editor, the not-very-usable tutorials, the place to find tags that aren’t presets, the way to go about inventing new tags if necessary, the custom renders (often a mix of ITO and other third party sites), the way to see recent changes in your area that is actually usable, the quality controls to check your work, the places to ask for help, the other people doing similar work in London and how to discuss it with them, the inspirational examples, and so on. The diversity of web sites and tools is a strength of OpenStreetMap, but it’s also terribly confusing and it can be hard to discover the tool you’re after. Often there simply aren’t tools there to do what they want, and they don’t have the skills to roll their own nor the money to pay someone to make them.

It’s too confusing and complicated. Usually the payback isn’t enough, so they don’t even start, or give up shortly after their first dabble with an editor.

So… your idea of a community page is excellent. It could help to create a central focus for people with the same enthusiasms, saving me the effort of compiling all those links and making everything seem terribly disjointed. It will take a few bricks out of the wall holding communities back from contributing to OpenStreetMap.

Here’s my extension to your idea that seems technically within our grasp since Potlatch 2/iD and the Overpass tool. Make it really simple (a few clicks in a web-based tool) to set-up a hub for your niche interest: a community page bringing everything together, a custom editor with the appropriate presets, a nice map showing the results, data extracts (kml, json, shp), and code snippets to display the results on your own web site. You like Welsh chapels? Spend half an hour on this web form and bob’s your uncle.

As another hapless arts graduate with big time commitments to the Green Party, I don’t have the skills or time for this. I’m left cobbling together halfway-decent sites like OpenEcoMaps to try and fill a niche. It would be wonderful if the more technically gifted folk could make this a priority to turn more enthusiasts into the 5%.

I have two specific complaints in relation to your Today programme piece on climate science broadcast on the 17th May. The first is that the report used misleading language about recent developments in the science. My second complaint is that the report gave undue attention to a marginal opinion. Roger Harrabin’s report contained some interesting interviews, but the presentation was entirely misleading.

On my first, I believe it is misleading to suggest that the scientific establishment agrees that “global warming appears to have stalled” as he did in the opening segment.

The media, including Radio 4, covered a Met Office announcement in January by suggesting it showed global warming had stopped. The report was so misleading that the Met Office had to issue a statement.

The short-term fluctuations in the background temperature trend are well known, though as your report pointed out they are not yet fully understand. Carbon Brief produced a very useful summary of these issues back in January.

There are some scientists who have an optimistic view of future warming, believing it could still remain at 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. There are others who believe we are heading towards at least 4 degrees of warming. This uncertainty has been a feature of the scientific debate ever since the IPCC was set-up.

If Roger Harrabin is able to point to evidence of a growing consensus among scientists that global warming has stalled, I would be very interested to read it!

Second, in the BBC Trust’s 2010 review of impartiality and accuracy in scientific reporting, Professor Steve Jones made clear that the BBC was at times applying an “over-rigid” application of the editorial guidelines on impartiality, and giving “undue attention to marginal opinion”. The guidelines were revised around the same time to ensure that the BBC gives “due weight” in relation to impartiality.

A recent study found that 97% out of nearly 12,000 scientific papers agreed with the consensus position of anthropogenic global warming. This reinforced several other studies conducted in the past decade, which found a similar level of agreement.

So I believe that in this item you have given undue attention to an exceptionally marginal opinion of a poorly qualified blogger.

A more balanced and credible piece would have interviewed several scientists and climate policy experts about the implications of tipping over 400 ppm CO₂, with a note of caution that, as in all complicated areas, nobody can be quite certain where in the range we will end up.

I won’t hold my breath. Carbon Brief have produced a much more sympathetic write-up of the piece on their blog. I agree that most of the segment was interesting and quite clear, but Harrabin’s opening suggestion – that scientists are now agreeing with sceptics that global warming has stalled – was a grievous misrepresentation.

Update – their response

I received the following response from the BBC:

Thanks for your contact regarding ‘Today’ broadcast on 17 May on BBC Radio 4.

I understand that you felt an item on the above edition of the programme was biased in favour of climate sceptics.

Whilst I appreciate your concerns, it’s firstly worth noting that Roger Harrabin’s report was simply one of many in relation to this topic. In addressing any wide ranging issue such as this, balance cannot be judged simply on the basis of individual reports, and consideration must be given to our overall reporting.

Indeed, the issue of climate change has been covered on numerous recent occasions by the BBC, for example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22630912

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22567023

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22463480

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22177221

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22484907

Please be assured that we are committed to impartial coverage when it comes to this issue. That said, we don’t ignore the fact that there is broad scientific agreement on the issue of climate change and we reflect this accordingly; however, we do aim to ensure that we also offer time to the dissenting voices.

Nevertheless, please be assured that I’ve registered your comments regarding this issue to our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback made available throughout the BBC, including to programme producers, as well as members of senior management.

The audience logs help to shape future decisions regarding BBC programming and output.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

I’m not really satisfied with the BBC basically saying “I’m not going to respond to your complaint about that specific programme because, look, we have all this other coverage too”. I’ll give a reply some thought… any suggestions gratefully received.

To avoid misunderstandings from the outset, I think social and environmental justice are important, but they don’t define my political philosophy.

The new philosophical basis of the Green Party says:

A system based on inequality and exploitation is threatening the future of the planet on which we depend, and encouraging reckless and environmentally damaging consumerism…. The Green Party is a party of social and environmental justice, which supports a radical transformation of society for the benefit of all, and for the planet as a whole.

This sounds great! What could be wrong with that? I hope I might persuade you why I don’t think it is quite right, or at least encourage more thought and debate about political philosophy and the precise meaning of different terms.

I have three problems with encapsulating our approach as social and environmental justice, opposed to ‘a system’ that is taken to mean capitalism by most who supported the new philosophical basis. They are:

1. Is capitalism the only source of injustice?
2. Do we only value nature for its human uses?
3. Is material wealth really the end of politics?

These are not new arguments. I would highly recommend you read Jonathan Porritt‘s book Seeing Green, published in 1984, and Andrew Dobson‘s book Green Political Thought among many sources of further explanation and inspiration, in order to work out what your philosophical basis might be. You will also find that there are many other ways to address my concerns, besides deep ecology. For example, there are interesting variants of “eco-socialism” that look a lot more like the ecologism of the Green Party than the ‘social and environmental justice’ of parties like the Liberal Democrats!

Is capitalism the only source of injustice?

Too often, social justice doctrines simplify the sources of injustice. Most often, it is pinned on “capitalism”.

There is some merit in pointing out that capitalism is the dominant logic in the global formal economy – that is, once we exclude the informal economy of people caring for their parents, friends trading possessions, and so on.

But there are many variants of capitalism, which I would define as control through the private ownership of capital such as land, factories and finance. For example, there are the comparatively free market American capitalism, the variants of capitalism regulated by social democracies and underpinned by welfare in Europe, the Chinese state capitalism, and many more. Corporate capitalism is among the worst, putting a legal obligation on capitalists to put the maximisation of profits before all else.

There are also, within a capitalist market, many forms of ownership and control. There are multinational corporations, which concentrate power and wealth in a tiny elite. Corporations very often sell their products to another form – the small family-owned businesses like corner shops, who in turn trade with companies with yet more varied structures. Some forms of capitalism take surprising forms. For example, Gore has a flat and decentralised management structure in which everyone is an associate working in a semi-autonomous team. Gore is quite different to the stereotype of a privately owned corporation, yet it is a privately owned company within the capitalist paradigm. Is Gore a source of injustice, or symptomatic of the ‘system based on inequality and exploitation’?

There are also many other non-capitalist forms of organisation that interact with the market: the third sector of charities, social enterprises and co-operatives; the public sector including the government, state schools and the NHS; the quasi-private anomalies like quangos and private schools (which have charitable status).

[EDIT: James Mackenzie challenged me to clarify these remarks on Twitter. I think that the NHS and state schools are among the greatest achievements of British government, and are tools for social justice. But they are not beyond reproach. For example, the NHS is too centralised, trusts aren't locally accountable, some parts such as Foundation Hospitals are barely accountable at all, and migrants aren't given full access to healthcare. State schools are similarly being taken away from local control, and for the most part bring children up with values of obedience to authority rather than participation in decision making that effects them.]

While these aren’t capitalist organisations, they are in many respects undemocratic and socially unjust.

Non-capitalist states have also been deeply unjust. One need only think of the terrors inflicted by Stalin, or of more complex cases like the treatment of homosexuals, anarchists and dissidents in Cuba.

There are plenty of Greens with a more anarchist bent who think the state is a principal source of injustice. Many probably agree with Kropotkin, who said “it is becoming evident that it is merely stupid to elect politicians and trust them with the task of making laws”. Many might also agree with Murray Bookchin and his form of social ecology. He described capitalism as a “social cancer”, but also advocated a radically decentralised political system to end the domination of nature by man, and of human by fellow human. Both thinkers would say that injustice stems from more than just capitalism.

While it is true that the logic inherent to capitalism – putting power in the hands of those who own capital – leads to social injustices, I think it is also too crude to suggest that our world is dominated by a single ‘system’ called ‘capitalism’, and that all injustices find their root cause in this malign system. Indeed, for Greens there are abundant reasons for thinking that all manner of ideologies create environmental injustices, or even deep ecological crises.

Do we only value nature for its human uses?

The second problem I have with social and environmental justice is that they are concerned with human well being. I think a lot of people are confused about what ‘environmental justice’ really means. Let me explain.

Social justice on its own considers the rest of the natural world as an instrumental concern, rather than being intrinsically valuable. By that I mean that social justice requires the natural environment to support social progress, and so must take problems like air pollution, climate change and river flooding seriously to promote human ends. Social justice advocates may care deeply about and enjoy the natural environment, but through the lens of social justice the natural environment is there for human use and aesthetic enjoyment.

Environmental justice builds on this, recognising that environmental problems tend to most affect the least powerful in society, and that justice therefore demands either that this power imbalance is rectified, or that the problems are resolved. Flood defences should be funded for everyone regardless of wealth, and air pollution reduced in poor areas criss-crossed with main roads and industry. Environmental justice can even recognise the potential, as yet undiscovered potential of the natural environment to help people. For example, we might seek to protect rainforests because they probably contain plants and organisms that hold the key to future medicinal cures.

Friends of the Earth produced a good paper in 2001 on the origins of environmental justice in the USA and how it could influence policy. They define it as follows:

Environmental Justice’s two basic premises are first, that everyone should have the right and be able to live in a healthy environment, with access to enough environmental resources for a healthy life, and second,that it is predominantly the poorest and least powerful people who are missing these conditions.

These are good premises, and environmental justice is an important concept I want to champion. But it fails to capture my form of environmentalism.

I hold an ecocentric philosophy. I think that all of the natural world (including humans) has inherent value, irrespective of its usefulness to humans. To be clear, I don’t think all of nature is sacred, I don’t think all species should be given equal value. But the value of all human and non-human entities should be considered. They should all have a seat at the table and not just be on the menu.

The new philosophical basis hints as much by saying we would transform society “for the benefit of all, and for the planet as a whole”, and pledging to tackle the threats to “environmental wellbeing”. But it is undermined, or even contradicted, by putting “social and environmental justice” as our central tenets.

Much has been written on the difference between these approaches. Arne Naess used the terms “shallow ecology” and “deep ecology” to distinguish instrumental value environmentalism from inherent value environmentalism. We still talk about “deep ecology” and “deep Greens”.

You may think I am splitting hairs. Most environmentalists would agree that clear logging a whole rainforest is bad. Destroying an ecologically sterile patch of land in order to properly house an overcrowded population may be supported by supporters of deep and shallow ecology (though not all). But destroying a diverse habitat that is of no use to humans in order to build a railway line that will reduce journey times is very unlikely to be justifiable to an adherent of deep ecology. By contrast, so long as it doesn’t cause environmental harms for a dispossessed or oppressed group, so long as the benefits are fairly shared, there is no environmental injustice to worry about.

A deep ecological perspective also cannot pin the world’s ills solely on capitalism. Many, perhaps even most, deep ecologists would agree with social justice advocates that capitalism is a big problem, perhaps even that it should be replaced with a different defining logic. But that is where the agreement will end, because social justice requires a new logic that places human social justice first, whereas a deep ecological perspective would put ecology – human and non-human interests together – first.

Most socialists, communists and social democrats also want to develop our industrial economy, growing it in order to promote material well being for everyone. As Jonathan Porritt put it, socialism and capitalism are in the left and right lanes of the same motorway, both trying to progress faster towards a cliff edge.

Chavez’s recent death brings to mind a good illustration. He made great strides in social and environmental justice, supplanting capitalism with a Venezuelan form of state/co-op socialism that distributed social and environmental risks and benefits more equally. But it was on the back of a fossil fuel economy. Reforms were paid for with oil. That is not quite progress, it is going sideways. It is going left instead of forward.

The standard left-wing alternatives to the current austerity economics are also good examples. Labour want to cut VAT to stimulate more consumption. More confident Keynsians want to build roads to get the economy growing again. Both may get Porritt’s car down the motorway faster in the short-term, bringing our leap off the cliff that bit closer.

A Government of social and environmental justice would try to steer humans away from the cliff, but wouldn’t necessarily worry whether large parts of the natural world go over the edge if that had no impact on humans.

Deep ecology can also lead to quite different perspectives on thorny issues like technology and population. It isn’t that deep ecology requires or implies one perspective, and shallow ecology another. Rather, I think that often disagreements on these issues are rooted in different ecological perspectives.

Take population – always an easy way to get ostracised! I don’t want to get into whether it is population or wealth that is principally to blame for our many ecological crises, or whether there are acceptable policies to reduce or stabilise the global population that should be adopted. That is a lengthy debate for another day. But there is a general difference in approach for the two ecological perspectives.

The shallow ecology perspective would want to ensure that eco-systems will sustain our population. But it would be relatively relaxed about the ever-greater grip that an expanding human population would have over the earth within that constraint. In an extreme example, you might advocate a techno-utopian future in which we have outgrown our reliance on many parts of the natural world, and have arrived at a wholly civilised ear th sustaining a large human population, with the rest of the natural world preserved only for recreation.

The deep ecology perspective leads one to worry that a growing population crowds out the rest of nature, and may reduce the diverse and rich value of the natural world. The extreme here would be a radical anti-civilisation deep ecological perspective, advocating a minimal human footprint and a massive reduction in our population.

I worry about the likelihood of an ever increasing population making an ever greater imprint on the natural world, necessarily reducing the value and richness of the natural world. I definitely don’t want to impose draconian population policies or start blaming people just for existing, but I also don’t want to lose sight of my belief that the earth is here for all species to enjoy, not just humans, and so we should try to preserve the diversity of life on earth.

That I value something other than this human-centric, material progress takes me to my third and final topic.

Is material wealth really the end of politics?

Many social justice doctrines are based on material values. Most socialist and social democratic political parties aim for economic growth and rising material prosperity. Their main beef with conservatives and libertarians is the unequal distribution of material wealth and the unequal treatment of those who produce it. The same is true of environmental justice.

It isn’t just that the siren calls for economic growth raise huge environmental problems. Tim Jackson and others have demonstrated that we would need to decarbonise our economic output at an impossible rate to make constant growth compatible with the Government’s target of an 80% cut in UK carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. In Prosperity Without Growth, Jackson put some numbers on this. Today we emit around 770 grams of carbon dioxide for every dollar of economic output. To grow the economy at 2% per year and cut carbon dioxide emissions we would need to improve that 11% a year, until by 2050 it was only 6 grams per dollar. As he puts it,

The truth is that there is as yet no credible, socially just, ecologically sustainable scenario of continually growing incomes for a world of nine billion people.

That leaves aside other environmental crises like our massive ecological footprint, the disrupted nitrogen cycle, biodiversity loss, and more.

All this growth, and for what gain? Experience tells us the trickle of wealth is more likely to be from the majority to the wealthiest 1%. Even if this weren’t the case, is our grand political vision really just about more work for more material wealth?

I think the materialism of most social justice doctrines is philosophically wrongheaded and psychologically unhealthy.

Many philosophical and religious traditions such as stoicism, Buddhism and Taoism, forms of Christianity and Islam and more, share the belief that well-being, or happiness, or tranquility, or fulfilment – take your pick – is really the best goal for humanity. Furthermore, they share the view that the accumulation of material possessions may secure greater comfort, but after that point they won’t generally contribute to well-being. In fact, being focussed on the accumulation of material possessions can reduce your well-being by making you constantly dissatisfied with what you have, anxious of what you might lose, and envious of those with more. These aren’t pleasant states of mind!

This insight is borne out by many studies of human psychology and happiness. For a taster, have a look at nef’s excellent work on well-being. But it’s often ignored by materialist social justice doctrines.

You don’t need to be a 1960s dropout hippy to take this insight seriously. The Green Shirts, an unusual mix of left-wing politics with military uniforms, marched through London’s streets in the 1920s and 30s calling for increasing productivity to be harnessed to enable workers to reduce their hours rather than increase their output. Karl Marx, in what I find his most interesting work – his early economic and philosophical manuscripts written in Paris – took great interest in what he called the ‘alienation’ that the worker suffers from himself and his labour as well as that product of his labour. By this he meant (very crudely) that factory workers don’t get to decide what to make or how to make it, and they have no control over the product once finished. They are cogs in a machine, not people fully realising their capabilities. Marx wasn’t just concerned that capitalists seize the products workers produced, he was also concerned that capitalism devalues the work itself and the value of the worker.

I believe that we need to tackle both problems.

We could ensure that rising productivity enables us to improve our life quality, rather than only pursuing more and more material wealth. Why not, as Marx dreamed, give ourselves more spare time instead in which to read poetry, fish and grow our own food?

The injustice of some lacking basic comforts while others enjoy billionaire lifestyles is obvious, as is the injustice of some suffering from pollution while others cause the problem. So we must try to redress these injustices, and ensure that everybody can enjoy a decent standard of living. The social and psychological impacts of gross wealth inequality are also increasingly well understood, requiring us to work for a more equal society.

But assuming we could achieve both goals, would we also then work to further increase the material prosperity for all? Would the sum of the British people’s well-being be that much greater, and would it be worth the environmental damage?

In conclusion

This is my philosophical basis. I see the well-being of all of nature as central, which is why I joined the Green Party rather than the Labour Party or any of the various far-left socialist parties in the UK.

My philosophical basis is important to me because it shapes my view of every policy or ideology I come across. I can be pragmatic, indeed one must in democratic politics, being the domain of persuasion, negotiation and compromise rather than totalitarian radical purity. But I try not to lose sight of the sort of world I want to live in, of the things I value.

I often find myself agreeing on one or more policies with just about every political party in the UK. I agreed with UKIP that proposals for European patents on computer software would stifle small companies, with the Conservatives that many of Labour’s illiberal laws should be repealed, with Labour that we needed a minimum wage, and with the Liberal Democrats that it was wrong to detain child immigrants.

I agree even more often with others in the Green Party, enough that I will happily campaign to help any number of Greens get elected in spite of disagreements. I remain committed and loyal to my fellow party members, in spite of the decision of our most recent conference to change our philosophical basis from a deep ecological philosophy to one of social and environmental justice.

In order to shift British politics in a Greener direction, there is no doubt that we must convince other political parties to take action on environmental issues. So I am happy to build consensus around shallow ecology arguments to achieve significant wins, even if the instrumentalist argument fails to tackle the root problem. For example, we may well need to ban a range of fertilisers to save bees, because the impact of a collapse in bee populations on farming would be disastrous. Winning this argument wouldn’t address the underlying problems with industrialised agriculture, but it is worth doing.

I will also continue to work hard on social justice and environmental justice issues. My job at City Hall has been dominated by work on unaffordable housing, co-operatives, low and unequal pay, workfare, anti-austerity and welfare cuts. As the many damaging cuts and changes to welfare bite the issue of a compassionate and economically sensible welfare policy is foremost on my mind. My proudest moment in the Green Party remains our successful campaign in Southwark to get the council to adopt a living wage policy, and I am now working hard to get the council to act on the air pollution that blights the lives of the poorest most of all.

But I try not to lose sight of my belief that the living wage is important because it can help people build a fulfilling life through their job and with the free time it provides them, not only because it gives them more money. I look for ways to tackle the cost of housing without trampling all over other species’ habitats, which is the default position of most of the housing lobby (build! build! build!) I continue to think climate change , resource depletion and biodiversity are among the most important and urgent political issues of our time.

I wouldn’t want social and environmental justice alone to define my political philosophy.

The only time  that the UK has seen house building match demand, and kept housing affordable, was when councils built in huge volumes from the 1950s to 1970s. If you think price bubbles are all about supply, explain the continued volatility of house prices through the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

People who want to see a massive expansion in house building can have their spirits dampened in other ways. Christopher Buckle from Savills wrote an interesting blog post suggesting that, on that house building data from the 1950s to the present day, a major boom looks very unlikely. He wrote:

If private sector housing delivery grew by 7.5% every year until 2017, a period of 7 years unbroken expansion from 2010, output would reach 133,000 new homes per year.  This would still be 10,000 new homes per year short of the average level of delivery seen over the 50 years prior to the credit crunch.  Such a sustained period of expansion has not been seen since the 1950s.

But the charts used by me and Buckle didn’t cover the 1930s, a time when private builders erected more than two million homes, almost twice as many as they managed in the 2000s and when the population was much larger.

Back to the 1930s

Those who think we need to tear up the planning system to solve our housing crisis often refer to the 1930s as a golden age. So I’ve produced a chart that goes all the way back to 1923 for homes built in England:

I have had to combine two slightly different data sources for this. The period from 1923-1945 comes from  BR Mitchell’s Abstract of British Historical Statistics (which start in 1923), and the period from 1946-2011 from official government statistics (table 244) which also includes figures for housing associations. This is a bit naughty, but it’s the best I can do.

This shows that there was indeed an explosion of private sector house building in the 1930s, jumping from 144,505 homes in 1932 to 210,782 in the following year.

The role that councils played

But it also shows that councils were still a big force, a point made more clearly by this chart showing the proportion of the total homes built by housing associations, councils and private builders:

During the 1930s, councils still built a quarter of the homes. That rose to a whopping 73% in the 1940s (not surprising given there was a war on), 64% in the 1950s, and around 40% in the 1960s-70s. In 1997, the year Labour came back into office councils only built 0.2% of homes. Housing associations to some extent stepped into their shoes, but in the 1990s and 2000s they only built 14% of the homes.

Based on this data, and a lot of other reasons, I think there are three arguments for councils building more homes if we are to contain housing costs:

1. These homes will be affordable to the tenants from day one, and in perpetuity, whatever happens in the market.
2. In the twentieth century, the only periods during which we built enough homes saw a very significant role for council homes.
3. Councils building more will expand the construction industry so introducing greater economies of scale and potentially improving skills.

A final note of caution

However, I wouldn’t want to say this is an open and shut case, nor deny I have other reasons for supporting council housing.

It is too easy to draw very simplistic conclusions, and to then make a tenuous connection in order to propose quite radical policies. This is what I think is happening with the romanticism about the 1930s suburbs.

There is a similarity between this debate and that of rent controls, in which we often make comparisons between the UK rented sector and Germany’s. It’s interesting that Germany has a very successful and highly regulated rental sector, and relevant given that Conservative, Labour and coalition governments since the 1980s have opposed those sorts of regulations. But there are many other differences between the countries. Similarly, there are many differences between the UK today and in the 1930s.

Can we have a major private housebuilding boom, as we had in the 1930s, regardless of Buckle from Savill’s gloom about the period from the 1950s to the present day? Brian Green wrote a good blog post in 2011 arguing that a 1930s housing boom seems unlikely. He wrote:

I sense a new romantic surge of interest in the notion of a private-sector-led house-building boom driving economic recovery. But… there were huge differences…

I’d recommend reading his post for his full list of reasons, I won’t quote them at length here. The gist is that in the 1930s you had a large number of new potential home buyers, plentiful cheap credit, low land costs, little demand from landlords and investors and a housing market that was very affordable. His conclusion:

It would seem that if we want a new house-building boom we will need a far more ingenious and powerful set of market prompts than promoting a greater availability of higher loan-to-value mortgages, freeing up planning and continuing to supply mortgages at low interest rates.

You can draw your own conclusions from the data I have presented, and the links to the articles by Buckle and Green.

Correcting errors

I was under the impression that the motion to change the philosophical basis was driven forward, and largely voted through, by newer members of the party, in particular people active in the organisation Young Greens. I described it as “their scalp”, and said it “came about in part through the emergence of something of a ‘bloc’ of Young Greens”.

I should point out that Josiah Mortimer, who proposed the motion, has himself described it as “Young Green-led”, and there were tweets such as this one from York Young Greens describing it in similar terms.

However, Benali Hamdache posted a comment making clear that I was ascribing too much responsibility to the Young Greens:

I chaired the workshop debating the policy. In that there were a number of young greens who opposed the policy, and a number of non young greens who spoke passionately for the motion. The workshop was 26-2 for the motion. In plenary the motion passed with substantial non-YG support. YGs represented a quarter of attendees and not all supported, indeed some did speak against in plenary. 74 attendees were YG, yet the motion received I believe a substantial amount more votes. All considered I think it unwise to put the vote as solely YG factionalism.

So thank you, Benali, for the correction. I’m sorry, and apologise for, the error.

Expressing regret

I also regret conflating what are perhaps three separate issues:

1. The motion itself, shifting the party out of the deep ecology movement towards a form of shallow ecology in which social justice is seen as a prerequisite for, and central to, environmental justice
2. The recent public policy positions of the Young Greens organisation that I was aware of, which had no substantial references to environmental issues
3. Statements like those by Adam Ramsay where I feel there is a degree of factionalism that is aligned against “old ways” and in favour of a kind of old Labour or hard left approach

Had I written something three times as long, I could have separated these out and taken more care to make my point. But I doubt many people would have taken the time to read that. Indeed, many failed to take the time to really read and reflect on the article I did write.

That said, it’s also all too easy, when drafting an article on your laptop over a few evenings, to miss the emotional impact of some sentences or even the overall piece. I knew full well that I would annoy some people, and get lots of people disputing parts of my argument, but I didn’t anticipate that some people would be quite so upset by it!

Several people have accused me of attacking all Young Greens for not caring about the environment. I never made this claim in my original article. My opening paragraph stated “ I think there is a lack of environmentalism (or perhaps even a current of anti-environment thought) within the Young Greens”, and in fact I closed my article stating that “I would like to think there are fellow Greens aged 30 and under who still think that ecology is a central concern”. There is a clear difference between the the interpretation I have been accused of and what I actually wrote.

But I could have made clearer, at the outset, that I know many Young Greens do care passionately about the environment, and that many who subscribe to what Arne Naess called the “shallow ecology movement” do care passionately about the environment. Indeed it was Young Greens who brought an emergency motion in support of the No Dash for Gas activists.

Open debate in the internet age

In among many polite, considered responses in person, by email and on Twitter, I have been subject to a heady mix of outrage and feverish condemnation on Twitter.

I have been told that my article was “deeply offensive”, “upsetting”, “bizarre and insulting”, and that they were “seriously worried by the attitude expressed”. I was accused of misrepresenting individuals’ views, even though I never mentioned them by name. One person told me, “I demand an apology”. Arguments levelled have been full of straw men, equivocation, false dichotomies and cherry picking.

I can take criticism, I don’t mind being called names, but I find this all a bit much. We have all posted a comment in anger, and sent aggressive tweets as kneejerk reactions. I’ve done this myself too often. But I wanted to call it on this occasion.

I have responded to comments that I felt were generally polite, and will ignore others.

By all reports, Young Greens were out in force at this weekend’s party conference, along with older members who have joined in recent years in search of a left-of-Labour party with realistic electoral prospects. Their scalp was a change to the party’s philosophical basis, removing clauses like this:

Life on Earth is under immense pressure. It is human activity, more than anything else, which is threatening the well-being of the environment on which we depend. Conventional politics has failed us because its values are fundamentally flawed.

And replacing them with clauses like this:

A system based on inequality and exploitation is threatening the future of the planet on which we depend, and encouraging reckless and environmentally damaging consumerism.

Leaving side various quibbles, the new clauses contain sentiments I broadly agree with. Green politics has, for a long time, had four basic principles: ecology, social justice, peace and democracy, all equally important goals.

What’s interesting is that the preamble to this policy motion went further than saying social justice is as important as ecology. It sought to “make social justice central“, asking that we “put our struggle for equality and democratic control of resources at the centre” of our politics (my emphasis).

Keeping the environment central

I am dismayed by this change.

I joined the Green Party because I think the environmental crises we are creating are the single biggest political problem we face. I want to distinguish between goals – the world we want to see – and struggles – the issues or problems we need to tackle. I think social justice, peace and democracy are equally important goals, but the raison d’être of the Green Party is surely that no other political party in England and Wales takes the struggle for the environment seriously?

If we don’t fix our environmental problems, the other concerns might as well not matter. Social justice issues like welfare reform will pale into insignificance as runaway climate change, the exhaustion of oceans and soils, the disruption of the nitrogen cycle and other growing crises all take their toll. Unlike most social justice issues, environmental crises are stuck in feedback loops that mean late or timid action fatally undermines our ability to tackle them later on; you can always build more homes in 2015 to make good on a few years of inaction, but we can’t, yet, take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere at a scale that could undo the damage of past years.

It is possible to conceive of an environmentally sound society that is socially unjust (such as many poor countries today) and of socially just societies that are environmentally unsound (such as many Latin American lefty countries, though they are of course undermining the foundations of their future prosperity). We are in politics to bring about a society that is environmentally sound, socially just, democratic and peaceful. But of all the struggles we face to achieve those goals, we must, I believe, give the environmental problems the highest priority because we live in a country in which they are the most severely neglected, and in which they pose by far the greatest threat.

One slogan I use with confidence is, “if there isn’t a Green in the room it won’t get discussed”. On occasion this is true of pay inequality, co-operative housing and alternatives to military intervention. But it is most often, and most starkly, true of environmental issues. We can and should work across a broad range of topics, but if we fail to work on environmental topics as a central concern then nobody will work on them in a serious way.

I also feel slightly queasy at the implication that the party is moving away from a deep green, ecological philosophy. The pale Green approach asks us to fix problems like pollution and resource depletion in order to build a socially just, peaceful and democratic society; the environment is important insofar as it underpins those things we really value. The deep Green approach asks that we adopt a wholly different framework, an ecological framework that sees humanity as part of nature and all of nature as inherently valuable. We struggle against pollution and resource depletion and other problems in order to realise a world with greater ecological well-being. Our understanding of social justice, democracy and peace flows from our ecological philosophy, which is central and formative. You can read more about this “ecological philosophy” here.

When we discuss policies that can be pursued by Green councillors, people without the power to overturn the basic values of the UK political system, we must be more pragmatic. For example, I don’t think it’s right to fight against housing development in regions of the UK that have severe shortages, on the grounds that we might – if in national government – begin to rebalance the UK’s economy to other regions with more empty homes and less housing stress (something I wrote about here).

But when we discuss our philosophical basis, we needn’t make this compromise.

To my mind, this new philosophical basis throws that out, and makes us a left wing party concerned with humankind that is fixing environmental problems for humankind’s benefit.

The Young Green element, or bloc

The motion vote came about in part through the emergence of something of a ‘bloc’ of Young Greens, self-identified as more left-wing, less hippyish and less deep Green than previous generations.

This first really came to my attention in a Guardian interview with Adam Ramsay. [update: I should point out Adam isn't an officer or spokesperson for the Young Greens, I mention him as a prominent 'young' Green who talks up this idea of a new approach among younger members] Here is the full quote:

There are, he explains, three elements within British green politics: the kind of veteran “ecologist liberals” represented by the Greens’ London mayoral candidate Jenny Jones; more left-leaning people who joined the party towards the end of the 1980s, like their current leader Caroline Lucas; and Ramsay’s own lot: what he calls “the Iraq war generation, which blurs into the cuts generation: people who are students now”. The middle group, he says, tends to side with his faction, and the result is an increasing emphasis on such issues as inequality and the public/private balance, as well as the Green staples of sustainability and climate change. “There’s more of us now, so we win,” he says. “And in terms of ideas and energy – we run the party.”

I know Adam from our shared time as activists in People & Planet, a fantastic student campaigning organisation he now works for. I admire Adam’s energy for direct action politics, and respect his tireless work to further Green politics. Back in the day, when I was on People & Planet’s Management Committee (a kind of democratic board) we were both pushing for the organisation to campaign on workers’ rights and to take a harder, more political stance following years of slightly fuzzy trade justice work. But his interview made me think we have subsequently departed for different planets.

My first bone to pick was his description of Jenny Jones as an “ecologist liberal”, and by implication not a lefty who would pursue issues like inequality and privatisation. That is rubbish, but not a tangent I have space for here.

My second bone was the idea that there are delimited “elements” in the party. What made it even worse was that Adam was apparently suggesting some elements have taken control of the party!

I’m not in any element or faction, thank you. I’m a Green, I follow my values and the evidence to support any proposal that I think is right. Talk of factions encourages people to switch off their brains and vote en bloc, and even to start imagining that there are other factions they should oppose or undermine. This divisive attitude put me off Green Left, despite feeling I was on the left of the party when it launched.

At conferences I have voted to remove unscientific nonsense about homeopathy that was a relic of a new age form of deep Green thinking, and I have voted to strengthen private tenants’ rights in the face of concerns from older home-owning and landlord members, but I don’t identify with young or old exclusively. I would have voted against this motion.

The emergence of the pale Green bloc

Back to Adam’s quote.

Like him, I came to the Green Party following nine years of Labour’s work to wage foreign wars, privatise public services and maintain the global trade agreements that kept corporations in the business of exploiting people and planet. I came to the Greens out of admiration for our Living Wage policy, but also for our deep commitment to ecology and the recognition that pitting the environment against the economy or society is always a false choice, always an ignorance of environmental science and economics, always a mistake, and deeply out of kilter with my philosophy. I joined following years campaigning on climate change, trade justice and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and my early years coincided with the buildup to the Copenhagen conference, during which climate change was unambiguously one of the biggest campaigning issues of the day.

I can see that people five or ten years younger than me have had a different track record. I first noticed this when drawing up our manifesto for the London Mayoral and Assembly elections in May 2012. I had extended various invitations to the London Young Greens committee to meet and discuss what they would like to see, to host workshops with new young  members, and to consider whether we should write a youth section into the manifesto. My offer wasn’t taken up, and in good time I received a polished Young Green manifesto to consider. The document had lots of good ideas, but there was nothing – and I mean, nothing – about the environment. From the Young Greens!

I was pretty astonished, until I reflected on the main issues on campuses in the preceding years – student fees, cuts, anti-austerity, pay inequality. Like weather vanes, the Young Green committee in London had followed the political winds and dropped any interest in the single biggest intergenerational injustice we have to deal with – climate change – let alone other environmental issues affecting young people or the pressures on London’s environment.

This has been repeated with the national Young Green’s innovation of  their own policy platforms. The first two concern housing and economic democracy (see Google cache while their site is down). These contain lots of  great ideas, but again the environment is almost entirely absent. The one mention of environmental issues in in relation to housing and energy use, left as a single pale Green consideration, far from the deep Green heritage of the party.

Do we need Young Greens for the Environment?

I don’t really want to propose setting up another faction, a group-within-a-group. That would only add to the problems we face.

I’d prefer to believe that we are really all on the same page, and that we can find ways to bring ecology back to the fore in the coming years.

I would like to think there are fellow Greens aged 30 and under who still think that ecology is a central concern; who think that it is, of all our core values, the one we most urgently need to struggle for given that it is the only one comprehensively ignored by the other four national parties; and who are also concerned at these signs that their peers seem to be downgrading ecology, either deliberately or by omission. Fellow Greens who recognise the need at times to present ecology in terms of social justice, and to give social justice and democracy greater prominence in our day to day work, but who still feel that ecology is paramount.

Join me! Or tell me what I’m missing…

You can now browse around maps of low carbon energy generators in London, veggie restaurants in Edinburgh, allotments in Exeter, recycling facilities in Glasgow and more! The data is updated every hour, direct from OpenStreetMap, and is available on maps and downloadable/reusable KML and GeoJSON files. The code is also in Github, so you could set-up your own version for another country if you like.

There are still some of the layers that aren’t working because the underlying data isn’t being extracted from OpenStreetMap properly. But I’m very glad that, after well over six months with it completely broken, the web site basically works again!

Today I can happily say one half of the system is now working again, and the underlying code is much improved.

OpenEcoMaps KML files, and now GeoJSON files, are being created again. Hooray! I switched from XAPI to the Overpass API; grabbed JSON which enabled me to write a more powerful function to turn this into usable objects (for example building a complete Python object for an allotment merging data from relevant nodes, ways and relations); wrote a new library to create GeoJSON files; refactored everything else to fit with these changes; and made numerous other small improvements.

You can browse, download and use the KML files and GeoJSON files with those links. To see an example, look at this KML file of low/zero carbon energy generators overlaid on Google Maps.

Now I just need to fix the web maps so you can see the lovely features on the main web site, and so people can easily embed the maps on their own web sites. I did dabble with using Leaflet before Christmas but I got stuck trying to get the icons to match styles defined in the GeoJSON file. I had a quick look at the OpenLayers code and quickly decided I had better things to do with my time! If anyone fancies giving it a go, the code is all in Github and is all released under the General Public License.

Ben Goldacre

Ben Goldacre’s interesting programme on evidence-based policy making went out yesterday evening. Like so much of his work, I found myself alternately agreeing vigorously and disagreeing in exasperation. The trouble is not what he does say, but what he doesn’t.

His central argument is a familiar one.

In medicine, scientists determine what works using randomised controlled trials. Give one set of patients a pill, give another set a placebo, and see what difference the pill makes. Do this lots of times, trying to control for confounding variables (like the participants’ lifestyles) and if possible make it “double blind” by ensuring neither the participants nor the researchers conducting the test know which group anyone is in.

This method gives us a high degree of certainty that some pills work while others don’t, or do so less well. It is far superior to simply acting on a hunch, monitoring a particular outcome and then assuming it was a result of your pill, without checking whether it might have been some other variable you haven’t considered and controlled.

So why can’t this method be applied to public policy? Why do we subject children to educational methods, the unemployed to work programmes, and criminals to rehabilitation methods that lack this rigorous evidence?

It’s a good question, and I completely agree with him that it would be good to do this more to weed out the “bad evidence” that informs so many policies. I’ve been supporting Jenny Jones in her scrutiny of the Mayor of London’s mandatory work experience pilot, which seems bedevilled by bad evidence, never mind whether it might be wasting the time of young people suffering in a very difficult jobs market and now feeling punished for it.

I felt sufficiently strongly about our approach to policy making to include several proposals in the Green Party’s manifesto for the 2012 London Mayoral and Assembly elections (PDF).

But there is also a danger that evidence arrived at through rigorous research could become “bad evidence” if it were applied technocratically.

For what Goldacre’s radio programme ignored, inexplicably, is the normative element of policy. He talked about “outcomes”, but how do we define a good outcome? It might seem obvious – stop a criminal reoffending, get a young person back into work. But it isn’t that simple.

It might be the case that one particular approach to criminal justice is more effective than another, but it might be considered unjust. What if we found that all forms of punishment led to higher reoffending rates? Should we drop our long-held belief in the moral right of punishment in favour of better “outcomes”? This is a normative, moral question – short of brushing it aside we cannot ignore the role of normative considerations.

Both the present and previous governments went for “workfare” schemes where unemployed people lose their benefits if they refuse to take up work placements. One of the supposed outcomes of this policy is that more people get work as a result. My reading  of the evidence for these suggests they don’t. But proponents also make a normative claim that it is right to make people work for their benefits, especially if they haven’t worked for a long time, if at all. On the other side, some (myself included) think that a compassionate and wealthy society such as ours can extend a universal right to a basic standard of living and shouldn’t impose conditions on those basic benefits.

Goldacre didn’t say that evidence should trump political philosophy. But the two can often get confused in political debate. Politicians can lose the courage of their convictions and feel compelled to assert that evidence supports their case, when they began sure only of their convictions. Opposition can often feel that a policy must be “wrong” because the evidence shows it doesn’t achieve the outcome they would think right, perhaps ignoring the different view of a “right outcome” held by the Government.

It isn’t sufficient to consider these points in isolation – to, on the one hand, ascertain the evidence about the outcomes of a particular policy, and on the other to have one’s normative beliefs entirely in parallel, and to then attempt to reconcile (or more likely confuse) them in the murky world of political debate. Normative and empirical considerations must inform each other.

Another very interesting series on Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg’s examination of “the value of culture“, included a very good programme today on the old “two cultures” debate most famously expressed by C. P. Snow. He was concerned in the 1950s that artists weren’t assimilating the advances of science, and vice versa, to the detriment of both, and to the point where both “parallel cultures” viewed each other with suspicion. Instead of seeking to bridge the gap through understanding and engagement, they preached at each other. Goldacre’s programme  would have been much improved if he had engaged with both the empirical and the normative.

But there are two policies you won’t see in his list. Two policies that Greens often bring up in discussions about housing. I wanted to take some time this evening to explain why I think we should talk about them a little less, and in a very different light.

Before I launch in, I would heartily recommend this blog entry by Liz Emerson as an overview of the sources of our housing crisis, to give an idea of why we need to act. The Green Party’s policy platform is chock-full of good ideas to rectify this, but when it comes to building new homes I think Greens sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of the argument, and sometimes put forward two ideas that frankly aren’t good enough.

I have to make clear – while I worked with Darren on his report I am writing this blog entry in a personal capacity, and this should in no way be taken as reflecting Darren’s views, those of my employer the GLA or of the Green Party.

I also have to make clear that this blog is about London. The national picture is bound to be quite different, but I think many of the basic points still hold.

We should use empty homes before building new ones

The claim runs as follows: there are lots of empty homes in London, we should be making better use of them before building new homes.

Thr problem: It’s true that there are lots of empty homes in London, and that it would be good if we could make use of them. But there aren’t nearly enough to make new housebuilding unnecessary. Not even close.

The latest figures from Empty Homes show that there were 74,811 empty homes in November 2011. But of those, only 29,540 were empty for more than six months. A home empty for a shorter period of time could well be in the middle of renovation or waiting for tenants. So fewer than 1% of homes in London are empty for long periods of time – not very many, is it?

Empty homes are also often quite hard to bring into use. They can be in a bad way, on housing estates awaiting demolition, or owned by some grumpy absentee landlord. Councils, the Mayor and the Government all try to solve these problems, and they could definitely try harder. Our 2012 manifesto pledged to:

Set up a clearing house to offer all publicly owned derelict land to Community Land Trusts and to make all suitable publicly-owned empty homes available to self-help co-operatives to bring them back into short-life or permanent use.

But it would be a tall order to bring every last empty home into use, and to stop any more becoming empty for more than six months.

What’s more, the experts who advised the Government and the Mayor on housing need recommended that we need between 33,100 and 44,700 homes every year for twenty years just to deal with overcrowding and stabilise house prices. So those 29,540 long-term empty homes would deliver at most one year’s supply, leaving at least another 630,000 homes to build over the following nineteen years.

We should re-balance the UK away from London

The policy claim: there are another 250,000 long-term empty homes elsewhere in the UK, and if prices in London are so overcooked because it’s where all the jobs are, then we should give other regions a big economic boost to re-balance the nation.  This way lots of people would move away to Plymouth, Preston and Perth, the market would settle down in London and the south east and we could make better use of the housing stock elsewhere.

The first problem with this argument is that there is already quite a large net flow of people out of London. This diagram from the GLA’s strategic housing market assessment neatly illustrates the point:

The need for housing isn’t coming from job-hungry Yorkshiremen, but from Londoners having lots of babies at a faster rate than people are dying, and from a large net migration from outside the UK. This has changed slightly during the recession for various interesting reasons, but the basic direction of movement remains. A lot of those people leaving are retired, or moving out to commuter towns to raise families. So in fact we would need to persuade even more people to leave London to seek work elsewhere, persuade Londoners not to have so many children, and persuade far more international migrants to settle elsewhere.

The second problem is that these very big changes are far beyond the wit of the Mayor of London and local councils. We can certainly talk about these big trends and our ideas for the national Government. But when the Conservative or Labour government continues to fail to grapple with these trends, we have to be ready to say what we would do if elected in Camden, Lewisham and Bromley. It’s not good enough to throw up our hands and complain about the Government’s economic strategy.

Sticking to the facts

We can definitely say we should do more to bring empty homes back into use, and to re-balance the UK’s economy to boost the north, west, Wales and Scotland. I don’t agree with those who tend to write these ideas off because they are so fixed on new housing supply being the silver bullet. There is no silver bullet, Darren’s work shows that in no uncertain terms. We need every good idea we can get.

But we cannot pretend that they would be sufficient to meet London’s chronic housing need and that they are therefore a reason not to build new homes. Doing so makes us as guilty as those who pretend we can solve climate change and carry on flying more and more if we just build some nuclear power stations and insulate our lofts. We know that the facts don’t support the waffly half-hearted policies of other parties on climate change, so we should be sure that the facts support our policies on housing.

There are often issues with new housing developments. They can be on unsuitable land that should be protected for farming (or they can be on useless pony fields for little princesses); they can be low density car-dependent suburbs (or smart extensions with good transport links); they can feature too little affordable housing (or at least get some built in areas that desperately need it). But we must build housing in parts of the country where the need for housing is greater than the stock available. The social and economic costs are so severe that it should be one of our highest priorities to ensure this happens.

We needn’t be slaves to the market – we can advocate building council and co-operative housing for example – but we also cannot be the party of wealthy elderly councillors blocking housing needed by younger constituents as the Integenerational Foundation has warned.