Here is a quotation from the concluding chapter of Not thinking like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss:
Liberalism, in the sense I have been using it, is committed to the inviolability of individual taste and opinion, the need to protect maximum unfettered choice, and free enterprise. Anyone who, in our world, can see a viable path from this conception to a situation where we avoid ecological disaster has much sharper vision than mine.
I came across these sentences recently and it dawned upon me the intractable nature of the problem we face when it comes to our behaviours and the environment.
It has often been my opinion that to sufficiently address our environmental challenges we will need to reduce what we consume in quite a stark way. However, how will this ever materialise when the principles of liberalism, as it is defined above, are so embedded within our institutions and our everyday lives?
Of course, this isn’t the first challenge to have been placed at the feet of liberalism. Prior to the Liberal landslide election of 1906 there were many conversations as to how the Liberal Party could address poverty and maintain liberal beliefs at its core.
The answer? Liberalism was reframed and instead of just considering 'freedoms to' it was surmised that it should also include 'freedoms from'. Yes you have the freedom to speak, trade, assemble etc., but you also should have the freedom from poverty and ill health.
Outside of London and a few other anomalous places, public transport is suffering in modern Britain and, arguably, it is the fault of uninhibited liberalism.
In the 1980s bus services were deregulated and were, by and large, taken over by private enterprise and, to remain commercially viable, many services have been cut. British Rail was sold off and became the patchwork of regional services we see today supposedly competing against each other in a free market.
The freedom to own a car was taken up on a massive scale. Roads were built to maximize this freedom. Services such as shops redesigned themselves to capitalize.
If liberalism died then you might expect a queue of environmentalists at the funeral, ready with spades to help fill in the grave.
Liberalism, however, is not going to die anytime soon. Despite my negative review thus fair, it has given us the kinds of lives that the people of 1906 Britain could not have even dreamed of. However, perhaps we could take one lesson from 1906 and ask how we might reframe liberalism to face the challenges of our time.
Instead of thinking of the car, for instance, as a freedom, we might perceive it as a ball and chain. After all, in places where you are stuck having to use a car you also have a vast list of charges to pay:
- cost of driving lessons and test
- insurance
- tax
- fuel
- maintenance
- cost of car and financing
- parking costs.
You are also obliged to drive it everywhere and when you no longer can drive it, perhaps due to ill health, you are stuck. Then there is the polluting element causing illegal levels of air pollution in some places. Should we not develop our towns and cities so that people are free from all these burdens?
The question then becomes: how do we free people from these burdens?
Luckily, in Britain our capital city provides solutions and some of them not so unfamiliar to liberalism. Franchised bus services might be one way we could go or municipal bodies, like TFL does in London, running services in towns and cities.
For trains we need to look at the successes of our European neighbours and create a unified network and, as I mention in another post I have written recently, we need to bolster that network with the reopening of former lines.
Liberalism faces many challenges when it comes to environmental concern, modern consumerism being the most difficult. However, perhaps by using public transport as a model, we could show how the behaviours we consider to be archetypally liberal are, in fact, quite the opposite.
Peter Doveston is part of the Northampton Streets Campaign and writes for CA-WN Exchange. You are welcome to contact him by email.
Great blog, thanks for posting Peter!
ReplyDeleteI'd like to make a few points. About the present - the UK is the most car-dependent country in Europe, this means that it spends the least on public transport and active travel. Obviously a lot of people in the UK think our situation is totally normal and get VERY touchy when you challenge the primacy of the motor car. Will this ever change? Perhaps we're on the cusp on a technological change that will transform our perception of mobility . . .
About the future - it's my contention that the fundamentals of the motor car - steel bodied, combustion engined, owner-operated are all coming to an end. Quite how much, and when we'll deviate away from these fundamentals no one knows, but it's possible in 30 years cars will be made of composite materials, will be electric and fully autonomous. This will lead to the concept of 'mobility as a service' which is on demand. When cars are autonomous there will be less sense in owning one, their performance will be exactly the same as they'll all scrupulously obey the rules of the road. You'll whistle up a car to take you from A to B, perhaps you'll get a discount if you're amenable to ride sharing. It will arrive, take you to your destination, then head off to its next job. Crucially it will very spend little time parked (UK cars currently spend 96% of the time parked). This could transform urban areas with the amount of land given over to car storage - parking bays, garages and garage courts - reallocated to other use. You could still own a car, and you could still sit in it alone (again, we're very inefficient, rush hour traffic is often nearly 90% single occupants), but you'll be incentivised hugely to break away from current norms. Lots of radical change is on the way, I look forward to urban planners doing away with car storage so much!
Thanks so much for taking the time to write a comment, Matt, and I appreciate you reading the post too!
ReplyDeleteYou are right, people to get touchy when the car is challenged however I don't think this is down to the nature of the car itself but rather the feeling of protection and independence it gives to people despite the fact, as my blog contests, these feelings aren't necessarily representative of reality. We know how dangerous cars can be and we know they can be a burden.
My prediction for the future would be that if autonomous vehicles did become the prime mode of transport then people would buy, own and use them in a similar way to how they are used now, the act of driving would be the only thing removed. Unfortunately, this doesn't alter the status quo much in terms of how burdensome they can be and we musn't forget that not everyone has the ability to drive nor the finances to run a car. On a separate note, 'autonomous' vehicles do already exist in a certain sense, most urban dwellers have the choice of booking a taxi but the costs and lack of 'independence' associated with this is just not attractive to most.
My local council certainly seems to think that the autonomous vehicle isn't going to provide the silver bullet any time soon as they are currently in the process of extending the railway car park with a finance scheme set to end in 40 years! Another electric vehicle car park has also been proposed in the town centre.
If my assumption is correct and the autonomous vehicle proliferates in a similar fashion to the current one then we will still be left with all the same issues in terms of parking, pollution (particulates from tyres and break pads, battery production etc, not just exhausts!). In my mind, the strongest solution we have is one that's been around for a while, functional public transport and segregated cycle networks.
Would love to chat with you more at some point. Do drop me an email if you're interested. Petedoveston@hotmail.com