We early on identified planning and governance as key challenges for Sydney. CFS’s important study , Global Sydney, published in 2010 ,benchmarked Sydney against other global cities and found that despite Sydney’s very strong performance in certain categories (liveability for example),it needed to transform its transport and governance infrastructure. A global city with 43 local councils and no metropolitan governance has challenges not faced by Singapore let alone London. By contrast Sydney has what CFS is calling a ‘decision-making deficit’.

Planning is clearly at the core of modern public governance. So to have problematical governance structures inevitably leads to problematical planning delivery. This is certainly the case in Sydney though the problems afflicting the planning system here are not just an expression of the problems of governance. Planning is in difficulty here partly because planners themselves have created a system which no longer delivers the quantity or quality of development the city needs. This is why the Committee for Sydney welcomed the Moore/Dyer review of the New South Wales planning system launched last year and why it decided to make a submission. Sydney needs a planning system fit for a global city. The review will be critical in achieving what Sydney needs.

Below is a copy of the executive summary of the CFS planning submission which I helped draft .The full version is available on the CFS website. Note that the CFS has now created a Planning Reform Taskforce to lead on CFS engagement with the planning review in 2012. It is chaired by the CFS deputy chair, the formidable Lucy Turnbull. If you have any views on this submission or the review, why not respond to this blog? And readers from the UK should note:you will find many of the problems are the same in your cities as in Sydney – and that may something interesting about the shared difficulties many democracies are experiencing in persuading local electorates to support development and growth. However, Melbourne ,Perth and Brisbane have been growing twice as fast as Sydney over the last decade or so and have permitted many more homes in relation to demand. Sydney needs to learn from those cities and others – and fast.
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The CFS planning submission

An effective and equitable planning system is vital for a strong Sydney economy, for maintaining an attractive and sustainable environment, and for promoting a vibrant and inclusive democracy. The current planning system in New South Wales cannot achieve these aims.

The consensus view is that the system is broken. It cannot achieve its fundamental purpose: to reconcile, in the fairest and most efficient manner possible, competing economic, social and environmental priorities, at the national, city and local level.

There is clear evidence that Sydney is failing to plan properly for growth and to meet its full potential. In 2010/11 only some 16,000 homes will be delivered in Sydney compared with demand for between 25,000 and 50,000.The review of the planning system is vital. We need a planning system which enables strategic decision-making to support Sydney’s competitiveness

In the view of the Committee for Sydney a new Planning Act is needed to:-
• improve the civic discourse around land-use planning,
• restore community trust and faith in the development process,
• reduce unnecessary uncertainty, delays, regulatory costs and risks,
• better align tiers of government in the planning process
• ensure strategic decision-making in the economic interests of Sydney
• secure the development needed in this most important of Australian cities.

Governance and planning: further reform

Much of the problem is the decision-making deficit around development promoted by the multiplicity of smaller councils in metropolitan Sydney. There is a failure to take decisions which, however beneficial to the wider community and the interests of Sydney have adverse impacts for existing homeowners. Examples range from the location of ports, roads, airports, railway lines and waste disposal sites to major residential developments – all essential projects for a growing city. The planning system routinely fails to enable strategic decisions for Sydney to be taken.

By contrast Vancouver and Auckland have transformed their governance structures to streamline planning and decision-making. The WA government has also initiated a radical review of governance in Perth. Tasmania is undertaking a similar review for Hobart and Southern Tasmania. Brisbane’s capacity for integrated planning and cross government and agency collaboration is enhanced by the large scale of city and local government in South Eastern Queensland. Victoria is enjoying the fruit of the consolidation of local government which was undertaken in the 1990s. In a globalised economy investors view good governance and effective decision-making on planning as essential investment criteria. Competing cities get this. Sydney must not get left behind.

The current planning system pleases no-one

Currently, the planning system pleases no-one. Private developers find the approvals process subjective and fraught with uncertainty, delays and risk. As for the public, the planning system has become an un-transparent process for delivering unwelcome development in the eyes of some and not enough development in the eyes of others.

Conflicts over land–use have been heightened when they could have been resolved earlier in the development process. The key is how we involve the public in plan-making and the subsequent all too adversarial development application process. Both need fundamental reform.

Q1. What should be the underpinning objectives and philosophy of a new legislative structure?

Community involvement

We need to enhance the role of communities in shaping the values and strategic objectives in the local plan at the earliest opportunity – something made easier by new social media – while reducing the area of discretion and subjectivity at the later DA approval process.
Productivity growth

The new planning system must place greater emphasis on delivering economic objectives and on the State or City-significant infrastructure and development projects which underpin productivity. Planners need clearer guidance on the importance of economic considerations alongside social and environmental ones.

Integrated land-use and infrastructure planning

The interlocking nature of the challenges facing Sydney calls for a more integrated approach to infrastructure and land-use planning. The emerging Transport Masterplan for New South Wales is an early opportunity to promote the better integration of land use and transport planning.

Better public sector coordination

The current Act requires a costly and unworkable process of consultation with, and approval from, too many concurrent authorities. Queensland’s Coordinator General/whole of government approach to key development applications should be explored.

Better linkages between State and local plans

Effective planning regimes provide better linkages between a State Government’s strategic plans and local plans. The current s.79C is a key part of the problem for Sydney as is the lack of statutory weight for metropolitan and regional plans. Currently, s.79C, which provides the heads of consideration for planners and consent authorities, constricts consideration to local environmental, economic and social issues. In reality priority is given to local environmental issues only. A ‘new s.79C’ must include as specific heads of consideration issues of regional or metropolitan significance such as population growth, demographic change,housing supply productivity and access to transport.There is now a big gap between such strategic planning issues and the local issues which are taken into account at the level of statutory planning. This is a major defect in the system and leads to inertia in Sydney.

This situation is made worse by the fact that Sydney’s Metropolitan Plan does not have any statutory weight compared to often outdated LEPs and sits alongside many other plans relied on in the development application process. There is no clear hierarchy of plans for a consent authority to grasp onto when making decisions of metropolitan or regional significance. That hierarchy must be clarified in the new Planning Act. Regional and metropolitan plans must be statutory. A new Act should however also require that any new metropolitan or Regional Plan be based on robust research, analysis and the kind of deeper community and stakeholder engagement we advocate in this submission.

Development levies

The current approach to levies and developer contributions actively deters development in Sydney and adds excessive costs to those buying new homes whilst not delivering the infrastructure needed. A more transparent and proportionate approach is required.

Transport oriented development

Sydney has a network of 300 rail stations, many with under-developed ‘footprints’ around them. It is sensible for much new higher density housing and economic development in Sydney to be focused at transport nodes.

Q2. How should plan making be undertaken?

By engaging the community – at an earlier stage
Plan-making at city and local level is an opportunity for far deeper community engagement and civic discourse than has been the case. By ensuring participation and community endorsement of key objectives and principles at the early stage, we can create a far better platform for a more consensual, objective and successful development application process at the later stage.

On the basis of greater public involvement and confidence we can then reduce the scope of local discretion over development applications when they conform to the strategy, planning controls and building codes.

Q3. How should applications for proposals for development be assessed and determined?

Code Assessable Development

Such a transparent ‘code-based’ assessment system, and a presumption that conforming development will be approved, engenders certainty for developers, raises community trust and makes the Development Application process less adversarial.

Code assessable development is the basis of the effective Queensland planning system. Under the Sustainable Planning Act 2009, codes which express the development standards which apply to land must be adopted. Development Applications are assessed for compliance against such codes. If the development complies the local government must approve the application. Such code assessable development does not require public notification. New South Wales should follow suit. Certification of development and complying development should be based on objective criteria and subjective discretion reduced. It is the balancing provision to enhanced community involvement in the plan-making stage.

Procedures for development of City/State/Regional/National significance or priority

Every effective planning system needs to have a means of processing major projects which cannot be adequately dealt with at the local government level. The challenge is to identify appropriate thresholds which trigger a different planning approach and appropriate mechanisms.

A replacement device for 3A for development of ‘more than local significance’ needs to form part of the new planning approach. An effective planning regime needs to enable development of demonstrable wider community benefit beyond what may be acceptable to a vocal minority. See also our comments above relating to deficiencies of statutory framework as provided in s.79C.

Q4. What should be the availability of conciliation, mediation, neutral evaluation, review or appeal?

The elements of reform we suggest around community involvement in plan-making, transparency of process, the more objective code-assessable approach, accepted procedures around 3A style development of significance and standardised levies, will go a long way to reduce the possibility of conflicts around determination. Too often the development assessment process has become the stage for policy making and the appeal body, such as the Land and Environment Court, is called upon to make decisions that should have been determined locally. Excessive time and costs are spent in achieving a less than optimum outcome. Much of this will be avoided in a planning system with the improvements we have identified.

A brief conclusion: planning reform and governance

The Review is a critical opportunity to turn a new page on planning for this city. It must be grasped. Re-organizing city governance remains the next key task. We note that the strap-line for the radical review of local government in Perth is: ’Towards More Effective Metropolitan Governance’. In our analysis the full transformation of planning delivery in Sydney will come from a similar review here.

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The full submission can be read on the Committee for Sydney website at htp://sydney.org.au

The story of South Wales since the collapse in the 20s has been that population went down overall in the 30s and 40s – and in some places dropped like a stone – then recovered slowly but in many places has not reached the levels seen in 1921. Indeed, the Rhondda has lost more than 40% of its population at the economic peak and many former mining towns continue to lose population. New South Wales’s population has more than trebled in the same period. This is despite the fact that for more than 20 years now other Australian States have seen even faster growth with Sydney in the last decade for example ‘only’ growing at 1.2% per annum whilst Melbourne has seen 2% growth each year.

Some national figures for Welsh and Australian population growth since 1901 show what a terrible ‘long century’ it has been for Wales since 1901. In that year Wales’s population was about 60% of Australia’s. Today it’s about 13%.

Yes, New South Wales has got failed places where population went away when the economy did. But even places well away from the fast developing coast where most Australians seem to want to live, have seen and will see some population growth in the next few decades. So Dubbo or Tamworth will still grow 1% a year or more though nothing like the growth we shall see in Sydney or coastal towns like Port Macquarie, destined to grow by 30% in the next dozen years or so. The Valleys of South Wales will be very lucky to maintain their current depleted populations though continued decline is predicted. And why not? There is after all precious little to keep people in some South Wales places except free social housing and welfare benefits.

Many New South Walians don’t actually get how well off they are by such comparisons. Whilst there are patches of concentrated deprivation here and in remoter places there are what Tony Abbott has called ‘welfare villages’ largely inhabited by indigenous populations trapped far from either employment or anything that would look like a traditional lifestyle, New South Wales has no equivalent of Merthyr, Blaenau Gwent, the Heads of the Valleys are any South Wales social housing estate you can name where multi-generational worklessness is normal. Some NSW coastal towns have higher economic inactivity than is good for them but this is mostly a sign of relative affluence as they attract early retirees. Despite the anxieties ,New South Wales is still on the rise .Old South Wales remains in serious trouble and things worsen as , public spending begins to fall, the euro zone implodes and GFC 2 picks up pace.

There are some echoes between the NSW and OSW (Old South Wales) experiences, largely to do with managing and leveraging mining royalties. For various reasons, as much to do with non local ownership patterns in Welsh mining, whatever money was made when King Coal ruled the world from South Wales, was in the first period of small scale mines, re invested locally. As the scale of pits and capital required grew, royalties and mining incomes tended to be exported to London and thence internationally. Globalisation is not that new, after all. This mean that the coal boom brought very little local capital formation of any scale in South Wales and hence wasn’t recycled in local businesses or infrastructure. As Australia is investing $25bn a year less in infrastructure than it was in the 1970s, despite the mining boom of the last few decades, there must be a worry that some of the Welsh history is being replicated in Australia .

Of course NSW has never had the type of mining based economy OSW had and Queensland or Western Australia have today. The numbers are worth comparing. South Wales had a coal-mining workforce in 1921 of 150,000 in a population of 2.5 million whereas Australia’s resources sector only employs 170,000 in a population of 23 million. Indeed, there is now increasing worry that without a big mining sector NSW will in some senses get left behind by the other resource giants. Hence the references here to Australia having a two or three speed economy, with NSW not being in top gear.

It’s more complex than that because Sydney remains Australia’s only global city and has seen its financial services sector more or less sail through GFC1. It’s also the case that Sydney is well placed to capitalise on the continuing with the only economy which seems matter in the early to mid 21st century: China.

What is suffering in NSW and indeed Australia , is the non mining manufacturing economy whose exports are being killed by the high price of the dollar – which itself has risen high partly on the back of the mining boom. And herein lies a real danger and a real echo of the South Wales experience.

It’s sometimes forgotten outside the UK or just not known that the collapse of manufacturing in the west of the UK (Wales), the midlands, the north and Scotland , didn’t just affect a sector. It affected a geography. Whereas that geography had been the wealthy and ebullient part of the UK in the 19th century, in the 20th century it was the south-east which prevailed, largely on the back of financial and business services. There was a link between the collapse of one and the rise of the other and of the differential and opposite fates of the periphery versus the centre. Its name was sterling and principally the high exchange rate thereof.

Essentially, as UK economic policy began to favour the growth of financial services over anything else, the default position became to protect the value of sterling and the high interest rates which kept it there. Interest rates became set less by what the economy outside London needed and more by what the Masters of the Universe in the City of London, Wall Street and the Gnomes of Zurich wanted. As with the Aussie dollar today, high comparative interest rates were attractive to currency dealers and bankers whose money the City was delighted to save, manage and invest. Thus started a process which left manufacturing struggling with both high interest rates and a price for sterling which left them incapable of selling their goods. The century long decline of manufacturing Britain and the many communities in it has seen populations dwindle, multi-generational worklessness entrenched, and the balance of economic and political power in the country swing decisively south-east. Now out of the 11 regions or devolved countries in Great Britain, only two make a net contribution to the UK Treasury: London and the Southeast. In 1850, the opposite would have been the case, with London and the south-east piggy-backing industrial Britain.

Although many think this shift and decline were natural or automatic they have more to do with public policy than acts of God. Germany has retained its industrial base – even though its cost base increased – because its public and economic policy supported it and because its financial services were less important in the first place. Interestingly, as Germany in the last decade or so let its financial services off the leash so too has the ‘real German economy’ been adversely affected by the kind of stupid and greedy behaviour we saw in the City.

The UK suffered from having an economic policy which supported one sector at the expense of another. It also favoured one or two regions over the majority. Part of this is indeed the difficulty of having a single interest rate or currency for very different 2-3 speed economies – and the current euro zone crisis is as much about this inflexibility of policy as anything – but it is also about governments making choices. In the UK the choice was made to back the City at the expense of the UK’s manufacturing capacity and heartlands, with the latter being ‘compensated’ by increased welfare transfers, public spending and ‘regeneration’ investment. Not enough effort was put into developing new sectors and the infrastructure needed to re-launch their economies. Then we demonised them for being ‘dependent’ when the engine of their growth and jobs for those who now receive welfare benefits, had been blown up by their own governments.

I add: this is not a left-right battle. I worked for Labour governments that had little commitment to re-tooling the industrial economy outside London or little economic idea in their heads except de-regulating the City to make it safe for Lehman Brothers.

So South Wales lies more or less broken by the end of the industrial economy, with public spending now faltering as a way of filling the employment gap and parsimonious but still demoralising welfare benefits trapping people in failed places and catastrophic lifestyles.

Whatever the immediate prospects for the NSW economy, it can and will avoid the fate of Old South Wales being more diverse and less dependent on a single source of e employment anyway. Having said that, it will suffer from a one size fits all economic and fiscal approach which favours the nation-wide mining industry. Interest rates are being set by Chinese demand for resources rather than to reflect the needs of other Australian sectors or regions outside the mining boom. The logic of that is that to stay competitive in such sectors –rather than give up the ghost as the UK so disastrously did – NSW needs to disproportionately and proactively invest in infrastructure , soft(education) and hard(connectivity stuff), that supports productivity and competitiveness . Yes that’s harder to do without the mining royalties in the first place but there are other ways to skin the cat, including sweating existing assets more efficiently and borrowing-to-invest-and pay book through growth(structured finance approaches). My worry is that Treasury orthodoxy will prevent the NSW risking its AAA status in the bond markets precisely at a time when no-one should be listening to S+P or anyone of the ratings agencies who brought us GFC 1 – and precisely at a time when NSW needs to be improving its infrastructure both to maintain competitiveness and ensure the sustainable growth of Sydney. I am sure sense and ambition will prevail.

And Old South Wales? Deep in the mire of structural and policy driven poverty it also has a bureaucracy which is trapped in Treasury orthodoxy and frankly not up to the challenge of defending it against the coming storm let alone turning the economy around. Returning to my 1901 comparisons I believe that the Old South Walians and the New South Welshmen of that era would both have looked pretty equally confidently at the prospects of the coming century. It says everything about South Wales’s strength then and feebleness now that no-one would have found the comparisons between glowing futures of the two places far-fetched then. To make them today is a study in stark contrasts.

I am now leading the Arup team working on Moreland Council’s digital strategy. That’s in Melbourne and is a first wave test site for the roll out of the National Broadband Network. A really interesting place where more than 50% of the population were born outside Australia.

I’d be interested in your views on the strategy work I’ve been doing. I think the NBN can have substantial impacts, not least on the design and delivery of public services, if the public sector can get its act together. I see a big need role for local government to take a leadership role in developing strategies and taking action to ensure that local communities can exploit the opportunities. Local government can also lead the way by digitising its own services, by involving citizens in online conversations and relationships and by ensuring that there is a significant local effort around digital inclusion. A commitment to open data and open government is a must in this process.

I’m a rubbish consultant by the way, because I give away all my best ideas free here…

The problem is partly governance. There are just too many councils in Sydney at 43. There is no equivalent of the single metropolitan tier we have in London. So, on a routine basis, strategically important development applications which should be approved and which will be of benefit to the community and the city are rejected in the interests of a vocal minority of current house-owners. Nimbyism is promoted by this small scale of council.

But the planning system is broken anyway notwithstanding the governance crisis in Sydney. As someone I consulted told me ‘Planning in Sydney? It’s buggered mate’. There is an arcane reason and an obvious one. The former has to do with s79C of the 1979 EP+A (aka the planning act). The latter has to do with the breakdown in public trust towards the planning system.

Section 79C is the core of the planning system and is the bit on which planner’s base evaluation of development applications. It boils down to a template which highlights the local environmental impact of development over any other consideration. Despite the fact that ‘economic impact’ is a consideration in reality little attention is paid to it. More importantly, because the city’s metropolitan plan is not statutory its strategic concerns –on population growth, an ageing population, productivity, a presumption in favour of transport oriented development ,climate change and infrastructure of more than local significance – get ignored in favour of local plans with statutory backing. So the Committee for Sydney backs a reform of s79C so that it includes wider strategic considerations and greater statutory weight being given to city and regional plans and the establishment of a proper hierarchy between plans.

Although the submission doesn’t support part 3A as it is – this became notorious and contentious as a device for ministers to in effect force through development against the wishes of local councils – the CfS does see the need for a replacement device which enables development of more than local significance to be approved, in the wider interests of the city. Every effective planning system has such a device and boy does Sydney need one.

The final reform CfS proposes to development applications procedures is that we think the highly politicised, subjective and ad hoc approach to development applications taken by many local councils needs to be replaced with a more technical and objective appraisal which essentially ensures that the application is in compliance with the plan and the building code. DA approval is presumed for compliant development. Such a ‘code–assessable development’ process applies in Queensland and the result is clarity and lower transaction costs for developers while ensuring community buy-in. Brisbane twice as fast as Sydney in the last decade and having an effective planning system was partly behind this.

So far, so good. But what I think adds distinction to the CfS submission is the emphasis and value given to engaging the community deeply and early in the plan-making process. This is the quid pro quo for a more ‘code-assessable’ system. We need a new civic discourse on the values and objectives of the planning system and local and city-wide plans. We should use modern social media to ensure that people in their hundreds of thousands get involved in plan-making in this city. And the planning review is a real opportunity to kick-start that enriched community involvement in planning we so obviously need. Call me an optimist, but I believe that we can get more planning applications and more development through even in the middle class inner suburbs if we engage with people more on why, for example, density is a good thing, or why we should do flatted development around transport nodes or how their children will never get affordable homes without this kind of approach.

I see no alternative anyway to such a civic discourse and I for one am willing to accept the results. I think modernist planners and supporters of density have been too indifferent to the need for dialogue with – listening to – people who don’t share their views. The broken planning system in NSW is partly about an attempt by people who thought they knew more to force change on citizens who just weren’t with the programme. There needs to be a first principles discussion between the framers of plans and planning systems and mere people. And when we do that we can make more progress on delivering for Sydney than by just ignoring people and attempting to good to them instead of with them.

I was moved to write this piece by an experience this week of speaking at a slightly weird event in Chippendale on the border between South Sydney and the inner west. There were 5 architects and me. All the previous speakers (all intelligent and decent men, which we all were) more or less moaned about the lack of political will to deliver denser development .Though I agreed with the objective I had a strong sense of being in the presence of a latter day Sydney version of the Culture Wars so much a feature of public life in a divided Australia in the previous decades. The disappointment in and contempt for people who still hanker after the ¼ acre block and suburbia was palpable despite the fact that many of the speakers lived in such places.

I rebelled and said that we in the density camp had never respected people enough to have a proper conversation with them about why we needed this kind of development in Sydney. I pointed out that Australian cities are different to European or Latin American ones – Sao Paulo for example has a population of 18m on the same geographical foot print as Sydney with its over 4m. Maybe density is the answer, and I’m sure that greater density as a principle is correct if we want to build stronger communities less reliant on carbon and long road commuter journeys but we need to be clearer as to what our overall aim is. Are we building Sao Paulo or something else? I’m not clear and I’m sort of an expert. How can mere people know what we mean?

The South Australian Integrated Design Commission is the other great initiative worth a serious look. Run by the excellent Tim Horton ,whose glass is never just half full but positively brimming over – optimism is a vital force in urban regeneration in my experience – the IDC has just come to the end of a series of meetings and workshops aimed not just at identifying the best design solutions for the future of Adelaide but how you deliver them. Experienced and long suffering readers of this blog will know that I have a short fuse on the subject of ‘design-led urban regeneration’ if that means ignoring economic realities and how ‘visions’ can be mad real, as is so often the case. I remember the overkill of fact-free masterplanning and reality-lite design guides which flowed from the Urban Task force in the UK. To be fair, the Task Force did have other recommendations other than ‘good design’ but that one thing got focussed on and a lot of paper subsequently flowed. The result? Some better designed buildings and places in towns that still didn’t have any economic rationale and remained dysfunctional. I exaggerate for effect.

The IDC notion of design – to its great credit- embraces an understanding of the economic imperative and driver of change – and the need for delivery tools and vehicles to implement the vision or the design approach – whilst retaining all the planning,design and architecural excellence you’d expect in an organisation so named. Find out about them.

Why the title? Oh, Mr Horton forgot to tell me that the genuinely great – though not always right or applicable in all circumstances- Nordic planning guru Jan Gehl was in the audience when I spoke at an IDC event today. When asked about Comrade Gehl I said ‘I think Jan Gehl is great but in thiscontext I think he’s a miniaturist when what we need is the big picture’. I meant that urban regeneration requires an answer to the question ‘what is the place for and on what economically will it live?’ and that the Gehl approach does not answer that question. It addresses itself to a level of detail below that big picture. But I probably came across as sneering at genius. And then the chair says:’and Jan Gehl, would you like to respond?’! I burbled my appreciation of his ability and then sulked for half an hour….

I still think I’m right of course but civility is always a virtue.It was kind of funny – and at my expense of course , which I’m sure regular readers and indeed friends will appreciate. I’ll get my coat….

To be fair, though we always try and nurture the really talented and committed , we sometimes award prizes for kids who show a positive attitude towards music rather than talent – a display of sentimentality my competitive and musically rigorous –nay unforgiving – dad would have been contemptuous towards. But then,if he were alive we wouldn’t have the awards so the question of his views doesn’t arise. That settles that. Sorry dad.

My father died in 2006 aged 82. He came to the mining village of Beddau when he was about ten ,his father having been driven out of Cardiff by a resentful constabulary frustrated at their inability to nab Dan the Band (as he was known locally) for the illegal gambling he definitely got up to in Cardiff ‘s infamous Tiger Bay. Having failed to get him before the courts they tended to beat him up at any opportunity and sensing this only led one way,my criminal grand-dad settled for life in the far less glamorous but comparatively safer mining village where my Dad was brought up.That’s where I grew up too.

There being no justice or God, my grandfather’s penchant for violence was matched by an extraordinary capacity to play the trombone ,which he did like an angel, which he wasn’t. He raised his 4 sons as brass band musicians . All played well. My father became the best cornet player in Wales in his teens . He was so good that at 13 the major brass band instrument maker of the day in the UK used him in its advertising.

He played for the best band in Wales at the time as solo cornet player, the Park and Dare band. He was also sold into slavery at 14 by his father to be solo cornet play for a while with the famous Brighouse and Rastrick band. He entered 64 instrumental contests as a soloist and won 64 first prizes. I have a letter from Clara Novello Thomas , a well known concert singer of the 30s and 30s saying that my dad at 14 was the best brass player she had ever heard , when he had supported her on a tour.

In the War he was part of an entertainment group that had Spike Milligan and Tommy Cooper in it. He was friends with Milligan who was once interviewed by the Musician’s Union house journal , and as a trumpet player himself he said my father (who he knew as Danny, his first name) was the best trumpet player he had ever heard. At my father’s funeral we had a brass band play part of an unfinished symphony he started writing when he was 16 and finished in time for Camborne Band to play at 81. He conducted it at their invitation , spontaneously, before an audience of 400. He may have been what Gramsci called an organic intellectual – a status he definitely would have sneered at and which he had attained through a talent which the state had done nothing to nurture as he left school at 15 with no qualifications. I never saw him read a book. He just wrote music on backs of envelopes.

After the War which he never gloried in, taking Milligan’s view, that a lot of strangers whom he had never met were inexplicably trying to kill him, he went back to the factory he had worked in before. He rose through the ranks to become a stork keeper and transport manager before leading a strike and then resigning. He was blacklisted for some years before his brother got him a job working for the National Coal Board as a filing clerk.

On his retirement he became for 15 years an energetic and much loved Labour councillor who was indefatigable in defence of the interests of his constituents . He died un-defeated in an area where Labour doesn’t always win. I can tell you that his dying words according to the nurse who attended were:’when’s he going?’ Puzzled, she asked me to interpret. Easy I said. He hated Tony Blair who kept on saying he would retire in his third term. My dad wanted him to honour that promise sooner rather than later. On the day he died I texted my then boss the Cabinet Minister David Miliband to the effect that ‘my dad gave up the struggle at 4am . His flag stayed red to the end. His last words were ,’when’s he going’ and he was talking about your mate’.
To his credit he responded warmly .

This is the man myself , and his first and beloved Council of Llantrisant , honour with the awards. The area has retained a passion for music and some remnant of its musical tradition. The kids who we support are fantastic. Not at all what you might expect if you weren’t Welsh and thought such things were for middle class kids. Sadly, that may be the case in much of the UK. We seem to be holding on to some social capital in my area ,though it’s a constant battle. Some of the schools help significantly by promoting and teaching music quite effectively, though not all.

The next Awards are in late October. To their great credit the Llantrisant Council co-fund this event with my family. They loved him too. I think they also knew that the area had nurtured this talent decades ago and wanted to use his example as an inspiration to other kids who might have few material comforts at home but who can through music raise themselves to another level. I have to say that if my dad can be an inspiration to them – when he grew up in abject poverty but was as rich as Croesus in terms of his personal culture – then that’s wonderful. But these kids continue to be an inspiration to me and those who hear them, too. There’s a few kids over the years who win this Award on go on to the Welsh College of Music or just carry on playing to ever higher standards. Some give up but retain a love of music. All are lifted through their involvement with music, that great secular mystery.

There’s one ten year old playing for us this year who won a prize two years ago. He played the organ never ever having had any tuition and with no musical background at home. His parents were both mystified and delighted he was so musical and had got support from the Ifor Williams Music Awards. I just feel immensely proud and thrilled that music can still transform the lives of kids who yet live in challenging circumstances. This was an almost entirely working class community when I grew up in it and remains decidedly not the Vale of Glamorgan or a leafy borough of any kind.

I am reminded that Venezuela has taken an advanced position in the debate on cultural wealth combating material poverty with its extraordinary ‘La Sistema’ approach which has brought serious ,classical, musical skills to hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers. And transformed their lives. The Williams Awards do not amount to La Sistema! But they are underpinned by the same values. And they could be emulated and scaled up , if others want to help out.

When I see the Welsh government today struggling to make an impact on the nose-diving Welsh economy, now the poorest in the UK or raise the skills levels of kids at the bottom of the pile, I do wonder if there are lessons to be learned from our own little Big Society social enterprise we’ve got going. With a bit more support – from schools for example who seem to be ever more philistine or worried that such music is ‘western’ or ‘middle class’ and thus not suitable for working class pupils today (which is middle class rubbish of course) – we could have quite a big impact. But there’s a deeper thing missing. I don’t think the issue of cultural as well as material poverty is taken seriously nor indeed the idea that building up ‘cultural capital ‘ can help defeat or at least transcend the latter. I know it can. I’ve seen it in my own family and my community. And it doesn’t cost much. What do we want? La Sistema .When do we want it? Yesterday but tomorrow will do. PS :My dad made money from music too:so will some of the kids who win the Wards in his name. What’s not to like?

This is based on a piece I wrote for English Heritage before I left the UK at the end of 2010. It still has resonance , in the UK and Australia I think where housing design and location challenges are also considerable. I draw attention to the bits in brackets pointing out the failings of CLG then and now – and how the same people responsible for messing up then have messed up over planning today . Does no-one senior get whacked for failure in that place?

So attached am I to this house and this place that I bought it for my parents. When they died I kept it to pass to my daughter one day. Its value? A lot more than its asking price, which is about half a pantry in Chelsea. This house is never leaving my family. It means too much. Because it’s not a house, let alone a ‘unit’. It’s a home.

While all of us are sentimental about home, research shows that families languishing eight storeys up a tower block on a ‘brown-field site’ don’t have this attachment to where they live. They hanker to leg it to somewhere like where I’m from. A good family home with garden in a great place. A place where we’d all like to live. A toxic mixture of public policy and the market conspires against that objective.

There’s no place like home – which makes it surprising that this country currently builds rubbish places and homes. Because of the credit crunch I bring you good news and bad. The bad is that we build the smallest, worst-designed, most expensive housing in Christendom – and in places people don’t want to live. The good news? We’ve stopped! Housing delivery in 2008–9 dropped to the lowest levels seen in recent decades and it hasn’t recovered. We must not waste this crisis and return to bad old British ways of building homes ‘fit for zeros’ when the upturn happens. It’s not that we don’t know how to build great places and homes. England’s full of them. But caring about stately homes and historic buildings is one thing: what about stately places, great settlements and the future thereof?

As some kind of advisor to every housing minister between 2005 and 2010, I claim my share of blame, though my crimes are few compared with the planning process, the financial regulations and the house-builders’ business model. These are at the heart of the modern, national failure to build the homes we need, in the right places, to the right quality. The planning process has become too expensive and onerous to navigate and is a barrier to entry for small companies. There is a link between the high transaction costs of English planning and the dominance of six mega-builders who at the peak of the bubble built 50 per cent of the stock. In Australia the top 100 companies built a third.

Planning has given an anti-competitive advantage to big guys and the stuff they build. Before the bubble popped 70 per cent of that ‘stuff’ was one and two bed-roomed flats on brown-field sites at high ensities. The demand was not driven by need but the availability of cheap credit for speculators. Wrong stock, wrong place. What else was wrong? Those who built it, and how. Despite the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and warehouses of guidance – some written by me –  the point is missed. Design quality in the UK is rooted in the housebuilders’ business model and incentivising other models must be the object of public policy.

House-builders have a scarcity model of provision. It was a delusion of the last Labour government to assume on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis that they would increase production to 230,000 extra homes a year. Their model requires a 22 per cent return on capital before they will lay a brick. If by building ‘too many’ in a local market they endanger that return, they stop. They sell on scarcity and will not entertain raising productivity and lowering margins. When commodities are scarce the seller has the upper hand. In government  and in the housing department, we simply didn’t understand then the business model of the house-builders ,though the great Tony Pidgley of Berekely Homes did try and explain it to us. In 2006/7 we just didn’t get it.

I started getting it when I helped write the Housing Green Paper of July 2007 which called for alternative models to those of the house-builders which led to the emergence of the Local Housing Company model (another great idea of mine which never took off ,partly because of Treasury resistance to new models not thought up  by them and partly through the usual Departmental inertia .I note en passant that the team which brought us that inertia was also responsible for the HIPs fiasco and now the planning crisis in which the Tories find themselves.The Romans used to throw people of the Tarpian Rock to encourage others to do better.Why CLG continues to reward failure is beyond the ken of rational beings).

But there’s more. The model is one of ‘build it and bugger off ’. The house-builder does not want a long-term interest in stock or developments. Speedy disposal is the norm, releasing cash to build another box. The heart of darkness of the British design fiasco is here: the things that create quality homes and places – long-term engagement, a market based on consumer not producer choice – are undermined by this model.

Pleasingly for English Heritage the answer is ‘back to the future’. We know how to do this. The great London squares and model English villages, indeed the great centres created in our cities by Victorian civic leaders, show us the way. We just need to understand the real sources of their design quality and emulate it. That means enabling models that deliver what we want and punishing the rest. It also means empowering consumer choice and accepting the consequences.

What works well? A market of small builders with competing business models offering real choice. Sole traders, cooperatives, self-build. Take an axe to regulatory burdens – and copy the way that Dutch local authorities dispose of land. They don’t sell freeholds to the highest bidder at top dollar and wash their hands as in Britain. They master plan it, put in infrastructure and keep a long-term interest in land. There, a myriad of providers enters the housing market. Diverse housing styles and long-term management result. To be fair to UK house-builders, their failed model is centred on the fact that they have been expected to take too much risk on land. We need approaches that reduce that risk. This is an opportunity as well as a problem – and one that should renew interest in quality private rented provision. The London squares showed what a single owner, leasing land and using a high-quality pattern-book approach to design, can produce. Only four or five types of homes were allowed in such places but all marvellous, using the best in traditional designs combined with innovation. The leasehold arrangement meant long-term oversight and management of quality- of the place and not just the houses. What’s not to like? The single owner need not be private. It can be a municipal or not-for-profit owner such as a housing association. The civic centres of our great cities were built through the municipal model of development with not a house-builder or Treasury official in sight.

So we must restore local government to its historic strength, in control of its own destinies and finances, renewing its own places. Civic renewal and pride require civic freedoms. Localism, anybody? Not a slogan but a necessity if we are to rebuild as well as we first built. Enhancing diversity, local discretion and choice is dangerous. Before we know it people will live where they want in houses they love. There is evidence that the part of the housing market that is still active has turned to seeking land on green-field sites for houses not flats. Where I grew up. Highly desirable, maybe sometimes unsustainable, but where we all want to live. Well-designed homes in good places. It cannot be beyond public policy to enable us not simply to visit excellent houses from the past but live in them in the future. Can it?

Distracted by the carbon issue ,and cowed by how the mining lobby disposed of Kevin Rudd for having the temerity to propose taxing the mining windfall, the Gillard government has sat back whilst the miners filled their boots.It is now clear that policy needs to change swiftly – not just to tax them more to extract long term benefit for the rest of Australia from a short term boom but also, now ,to actively suppress the exuberance of the resources sector as its self-interest no longer coincides with the overall economic interest of Australians.There is no sign of this government doing anything of the kind.

This is partly because of fear of the political and media clout of the mining companies.But it is also rooted in an intellectual error associated with the usual flaw of centre-left governments in these matters. They are in thrall to economic liberalism and the idea that the alternative to their hands off approach to the miners and the damage they are doing the national economy is ‘protectionism’. Apart from noting how well the protectionist ,interventionist , command economy of China is doing at the moment and how few of the developing economies are following the high capitalist/non interventionist approach of the surely now discredited Washington Consensus,I would suggest that the alternative to hands-off is hands-on , not protectionism. It is richly ironic – and not a little sad – that a government in the West is saying it can ‘do nothing’ for the manufacturing economy when the crisis for that sector is being created by the demand for resources of economies in the East which are anything but ‘laissez faire’. They think we are idiots.

I am not arguing for manufacturing companies to be protected from foreign competition(although that is precisely what China is doing through its own management of its currency and its preference for world markets to be open to its products whilst effectively maintaining its own import barriers). I’m arguing for those companies and exchange rate policies which are causing them harm to be stopped by a more active central government fiscal and economic policy. Essentially the sector needs to be taxed properly and the money used to set up a sovereign wealth fund and currency stabilisation fund just as other resource rich countries such as Norway, Chile and some of the middle east oil exporters have done.This will suppress the currency impact of the resources boom and help enable the income to be available for public benefit long after miners have decamped.

The ‘do nothing’ scenario – which in reality is a ‘help the miners and no-one else intervention’ is damaging Australia . And I don’t just mean damaging those states – Victoria and New South Wales for example – where the ‘two speed economy’ means high exchange rates and interest rates kill their manufacturing industries whilst stoking up the resources boom in Western Australia or Queensland. Queensland’s manufacturing and tourist economies are also wilting under the pressure from the high dollar and property values on the Gold Coast are on the slide. Apart from the 170,000 miners and their families – in a country where 5 times more people work in the Not for Profit sector – , BHP and the airlines flying in and flying out workers each week – meaning country towns and indigenous communities near the mines get few benefits and all the environmental problems – it’s now beginning to be easier to spot the victims of this narrow economic,short term, focus than the beneficiaries.

We have seen the rise and fall before of nations who tie their economic destinies to a single market or sector. I come from two of them and their fates are entwined. Whilst people know that Wales went through a remarkable, heady and short period of mining boom followed by a very long bust , they tend not to see the links in that process to the financial services sector in England or indeed how that latter industry is now going through its own long decline having been favoured by government policy(and active subsidy) for the best part of 150 years.

The Welsh story is simple and mind-blowing. No coal industry to speak of in 1840 ,world dominance in the coal trade by 1900 and collapse in the 1930s .At its peak 150,000 miners were employed in South Wales alone in a population in 1931 of just under 3 million.The collapse saw more than 400,000 people leave Wales and the nation’s population only reached 3 million again in 2010. In the same period the population of England almost doubled.

South Wales did not use the money which made it one of the UK’s richest region to invest in infrastructure or diversify its economy. Despite some government investment in the 50s and 60 s Wales has never managed to escape its fate as a once booming now bust extractive economy with little value added activity- kept afloat frankly by welfare transfers from the English economy . That economy itself became ever narrower in the same period and reliant on a single industry for a massive part of its trade and indeed income. That would be the financial services industry now in some travail in its home-town, the City of London.

Britain as the homeland of economic liberalism and a touching if erroneous belief in Adam Smith’s ‘Hidden Hand’ has never really understood the origins of the financial services dominance it once had in acts of state rather than the free market. Key City financiers’ activities have always been to fund British wars and imperial expansion. At the same time ,government fiscal and economic policy has always been to favour financial services over manufacturing . The former led to and required a high sterling exchange rate and higher interest rates than servicing the domestic or manufacturing economy would have required. The high price of sterling over 150 years –until the GFC – had much more impact on the decline of UK manufacturing than simply competition from abroad. Free trade was only beneficial to UK competitiveness in sectors in which the UK had a comparative advantage. Hence financial services benefited from that too at the expense of manufacturing. That advantage is now receding in financial services too.

The long term result of the favouring of financial services at the expense of manufacturing has not only been to unbalance the economy as was noted by the incoming Tory /Liberal government of 2010, and make it vulnerable to a geographical shift eastwards of financial power ,out of the country.There was also a long term internal geographical effect too,with the manufacturing economies of northern England,the Midlands, Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland,losing wealth,share of GDP and indeed population , to the expanding south-east and the City. The fact that central government than shipped back quite a lot of the lost wealth to those regions by the tax system to support welfare and a state-dominated economy in those areas in no way compensated for the collapse in manufacturing.Moreover,without manufacturing the UK has struggled to create well paid jobs for the relatively un-educated , leaving pockets of worklessness in former industrial regions of 40 and 50% with all the social problems and costs of that .

I assert that whilst some of that decline was inevitable the extent of it has been bigger than it should have been if fiscal and industrial policy has been supportive of manufacturing – as it has been in Germany for example. All my life the ideologues of economic liberalism have been warning of the collapse of manufacturing in Germany and the death of its socio-economic model and all my life Germans have got richer whilst the Welsh got poorer.Moreover, despite financial services being at the apex of the ‘liberal’ economy it has clearly benefited from both direct subsidy – Canary Wharf gave new life and capacity to the Citttivity any and was only feasible because of a £2b public investment in the Jubilee Line connecting it to the City and labour markets – and light-touch regulatory frameworks which greatly reduced commercial risks and costs and attracted investment from more punctilious regimes. Government has played a massive role in the UK in the success of the financial services market.Bad government oversight played a big role in its recent crisis. Whicever way you look at it,the ‘free market’ even in western societies is reliant on state activity and policy and it is a self-delusion to believe otherwise. The developing economies and the BRICS are not deluded.

An interesting comparison between China,Australia and the US shows the differences between them as regards the role of government. Whereas China has spent ,annually, 9% of its boom income on infrastructure – those roads,airports,trains and cities are a product of wise long term investment by the government and its partners – the US and Australia have spent about 2%. According to an excellent book just out by Paul Cleary called ‘Too Much Luck:the mining boom and Australia’s future’, Australia today spends £25b a year less on infrastructure than it did in the 60s and 70s despite it being infinitely richer today. This means that the mining boom is both damaging the non-mining economies and not being used to fund infrastructure or diversify the economy. This is like Wales on a continental scale.

In the case of Australia of course ,being independent and having all the policy levers in its control, it’s not too late to change course. It can reverse its current policy and intervene – to tax the miners, off shore some of the inflationary consequences and embark on a long term investment in infrastructure to provide the basis of a future economy. I have no confidence that the Gillard government or an Abbott government will do anything of the sort. Despite the lessons of the GFC and indeed of China’s progress, and despite the evidence before their eyes of the damage of current policies to the non-mining economy and states , they both remain wedded to a laissez faire approach to the Australian economy when that’s so last century – and not in the national interest. Two speed economy,one track mind.

I’ve just been looking at some before and after photographs of the Cwm Coke Ovens in Beddau, my home village in Wales. The photos show it in its mining era heyday and now when the whole place is in ruins. Have a look at these links (http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/register.php?do=addmember

http://archive.rhondda-cynon-taf.gov.uk/treorchy/index.php?a=forward&s=item&key=FYTozOntpOjA7aToyMzk1MjtpOjE7aTozO2k6MjtzOjQyOiJMb2NhbGl0eSBpcyByZWxhdGVkIHRvIHRoZXNlIExpYnJhcnkgSXRlbXMiO30=&pg=3)

I’m reminded of Ozymandias , the poem by Shelley – a reminder to princes , paupers and politicians of the transience of greatness and wealth,unless they watch out! .

‘I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away’.

The self serving essence to this is obvious to seasoned Blair watchers. One:it’s not his fault as the rioters were not , as has been said by many on the Right, Blair’s children. They were ‘not mainstream’ as presumably the mainstream is OK and thus are ‘his ‘ children. Secondly, his ‘respect agenda’ from 6 years ago was on the right lines but Gordon (‘evil Gordon’, the dark brooding cloud which prevented Blair’s sun from shining more consistently down on us) got in the way. Gordon betrayed the true path when PM. So, Blair was right ,everyone else was wrong .

It’s only ‘two cheers for Tony or maybe 1.5’ however . This is because whilst I buy his cool response to the moral panic being set off about the rioting and I endorse the identification of a particularly anti-social milieu which provided some of the personnel for the rioters, he clearly wants to let both himself off the hook and his friends in the banking world for any part in the ‘de-moralisation’ of the UK which I see as part of the provocation for the riots.

To be clear:the riots were ignited by short term factors and exacerbated by stupid and seemingly cowardly police tactics. Some of the rioters were clearly the kind of people described by Blair. But fires only start when the tinder has been nurtured by dry weather and the general climate in England was sullen and discontented before any police shots were fired at an apparently unarmed bad man in Tottenham. Idle hands make work for the devil after all and with youth unemployment in London at 25% there is plenty of idleness.

I repeat my proposition of last week. The immoral but unpunished UK elite in the City and in Parliament have left the UK morally, as well as economically, depressed and confused .This has an effect on the behaviour of the rest of society. The riots were a by-product of that ‘de-moralisation’ and it’s wrong-headed to ignore it. We need to do a lot more to repair this moral order than imprison people for looting 85p bottles of mineral water.We also need to do more than ‘kettle’ and harass the group of really dysfunctional families in each neighbourhood which Blair wanted to focus on at the time of the Respect agenda.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no bleeding heart liberal on the anti social underclass. They have long been the enemy of progress and indeed of the real working class that’s still left. It’s just that much of the problem is actually an economic one and has to do with the collapse in work opportunities for unskilled male labour .And with the collapse of work came the ending of one key avenue to socialisation for otherwise feral youth. Yes ,single parenthood doesn’t help and yes bad schooling makes things worse and god knows welfare can stop people accessing jobs.But,there just aren’t enough accessible well paid jobs for the unskilled in the UK. And that is a major source of our ‘moral’ problem.

My stress on ‘England’ was deliberate. Scottish and Welsh voices have been raised saying that they don’t have the same problems there and that’s why the riots never happened.This is also self-serving and wrong. I agree rather with my colleague and friend Professor Dave Adamson in Wales who got into a bit of bother for saying Wales was lucky not to have a riot as we have many of the same problems and indeed lots of young people who are unemployable now.

The Welsh children’s commissioner had a go at him for ‘writing off a generation’ but Dave was right. Dave was actually saying that we only escaped the riots in Wales because although we have urban problems we don’t have an urban scale so that towns are just too small to create the conditions of anonymity in which rioters thrive.

London’s town centres are big and no-one really knows you that well.It’s not as visible a terrain as a Valleys town and the familiarity of the latter inhibited anomic behaviour. But do not think we don’t have the same problems as the English inner city. We do – and have even less prospect of jobs. Dave also stressed that in a place like Merthyr where teenagers know there are no jobs for them at 18, performance at school goes off the rails widely at 13 and 14. We then blames those kids for ‘their failure’ when the failure is that of the national economy and its political leaders. His call was actually for Wales to lift its game to provide jobs for those kids who are not going to riot but are as lost as any stone throwing oik on the streets of Hackney.I agree.I just don’t see any evidence that Wales is going to lift its game and make that happen.

The task in the Valleys of Wales is enormous. A recent study showed that just to bring worklessness levels up to the UK average there would take 70,000 new jobs – in an area which has been losing net jobs for decades.

The result ? Poverty,poor and worsening social and health outcomes – and no prospect of ‘regeneration’. Come to think of it ,the place needs a revolution not a riot.Neither sound Welsh to me, sadly.

Modern British urban regeneration , and the massive reinvestment we saw in UK cities in the last 25 years, was that response. Both the Cameron government and Ed Miliband should dust off Heseltine’s paper and have a look at it again because it’s a better response to our urban crisis than I’ve heard from either of them in the last week.

Somehow I doubt that they will. The non metropolitan one nation conservatism which Heseltine embodied – influenced strongly in my view by his being Welsh and from Swansea – has few followers in today’s Tory Party. Meanwhile Mr Ed is too worried by what the Daily Mail or floating voters might say to say anything other than that the police need more resources. Heseltine’s point was that whole areas of the UK needed extra resources, economic uplift and social transformation– and that It Took a Riot for us to realise we had left these places go to rot.

I recall there being little in It Took a Riot about the source of the problem of urban Britain being the survival of Original Sin or indeed the revival of Primordial Evil. It set out a calm analysis and a programme for intervention. Almost three decades later we could do worse than revisit it. Not for its programme but for its spirit and determination that something could and should be done to re-animate and include these lost places back into the nation.

‘Regeneration’ , for all the flaws in that programme and that concept, was the response of a part of the British political elite a generation ago. Not just denunciation and denial. Action, imagination and investment. And our cities were brought back from the edge. Where is a renewal of this spirit to come from today? Heseltine at least gave the impression that these places and communities mattered and were integral to the nation. Sorting them out was the basis of national renewal and needed a comprehensive set of interventions rather than merely a police or a welfare response.

Now all the political elite see is a criminal underclass needing a cosh and vindictive welfare ‘reform’. The first eviction from social housing of the mother of an 18 year old rioter is under way as I write.

We need to do better than this. Demonising and punishing rioters is an inevitable first wave response but it won’t suffice. An emotional spasm is scarcely ever a good basis for effective public policy.

We need to understand more of not just how this happened but what it is that happened. I do accept that there has been a fundamental break down – but not in the morality of rioters. Many ordinary, blameless people throughout history can in the wrong place, at the wrong time, become rioters. Opportunity and contingency usually characterise the moment of rioting and indeed looting. The contingent fact in the current UK riots was the uselessness of police tactics. The primary break down has been in the moral order itself. Those bankers and politicians who have looted the country and got away with it have effectively destroyed the legitimacy of the rule of law.

I’m not aware of a single UK financier who having defrauded clients and bankrupted the national economy has paid any penalty. Most have not even lost their jobs or bonuses let alone their freedom for their criminal and anti-social behaviour. At the same time the rest of society is paying the price in slashed public services and increasing worklessness.

Does no-one think these matters go un-remarked or have no influence over the behaviour of the lesser orders?  The moral order is essentially a contract between elites and the rest, the rulers and the ruled. Lehman’s and Goldman Sachs ripped up that contract long before the 13 year olds of Hackney started stealing trainers from JD Sports 75 yards from my flat in Hackney.