by Andrew Orlowski,
Local activists are the strongest soldiers in the war over the character of England
“NIMBYs are the real revolutionaries”, I argued two years ago in a cover story for The Critic’s summer edition on housing policy. This week the people’s army came good.
Faced with the dispersal by the Home Office of large numbers of unwanted asylum seekers, one of them, Epping Forest District Council, pushed back. It ordered the closure of a hotel that had been converted for the exclusive use of 138 migrants, and that had become the focus of community protest that attracted nationwide coverage. But Epping could only make the order thanks to local planning regulations that Westminster policy wonks regard as reactionary and bureaucratic.
As The Times’ Steven Swinford explained:
In the end the Bell Hotel … wasn’t closed down because of protests, local fears or crime or disorder. It came down to planning laws – specifically the Town and Country Planning Order of 1987.
The 1987 statutory instrument allows a local authority to intervene when a property has a change of use. Under the orders of the Home Office, The Bell and hotels like it have agreed to change from being a public commercial leisure facility to a private state run human warehouse. Epping intervened, the Government appealed, and lost.
“Apologise to NIMBYism,” demanded the influential X account Max Tempers, citing Swinford. Others echoed the call, wondering: “Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?”
If both this reaction, and The Critic’s original headline, are in some part ironic, then the proposition underlying my piece was more serious. For two decades, politicians had promised to control migration, but governments changed, and numbers continued to increase. Voting didn’t work. Then, nine years ago Britons expressed a desire in the 2016 EU referendum to “take control” of the nation’s borders, only to see net migration rocket, in the largest demographic change to the island for a thousand years. So referenda didn’t work either. What tools did citizens then have left, except to grab what was nearest at hand? Local mechanisms like the TCPA could be used to express a stubborn refusal to consent to change imposed from outside. So, I wondered, perhaps Nimby-ism could be thought of as a grassroots political phenomenon? Were Nimbys the true heirs of Simon Bolivar and Mao Zhedong, but with a Waitrose membership?
Read also: If flags become markers of ethnic identity, I fear the Britain I once loved will disappear by Daniel Hannan, Telegraph
Rallying round the flag by Owen Polly, The Critic