When it comes to reconstruction, it is time to put a stopper on the idea that the best thing we can do is Build Build Build.
The construction industry, although given a fairly free hand during this year, is actually one of the least of our worries. It can be slowed down and restarted without losing much in the long run. It can always be redirected into saving the infrastructure we’ve already got. And let’s face it, we are going to end up with a smaller population.
Housing and highways are two big impactors on our lives, our environment and our futures, which are beyond democratic control. Nobody ever questions the need for more housing: the politics is all about who can build most. Nobody ever gets a vote on the latest expansion of the network of tarmac and lights. There is room here for a pause for thought.
Big questions are arising about the homing of the frail. Housing policy plays a big part in the push and pull of migration. And it is a huge driver of energy consumption.
One thing which might help is planning permissions conditional on local sourcing of raw materials in some counties. Instead of cement and tiles produced by burning fuel from start to finish, we should be using local stone and slate, cut and hauled by manual labour, and bricks made with local clay and coal. Perhaps, here and there, we should be encouraging log cabin communities hewn from local timber and paid a little to live off grid.
Supply would be a kind of natural, you might say a healthy, brake on consumption. And the houses you built would be worth more as national investments.
Maybe railway construction could be devolved in a similar way. Devonshire, for example, wants a railway across Dartmoor. Used to have one, built with granite and Irish muscle, and it lasted 100 years. Now it would cost impossible numbers of billions in reinforced concrete. How much cheaper could Devon do it with its own resources – including a lot of unemployed Cornishmen?
Quarrying is a sensible way to make employment. You can measure the output and the carbon savings you are getting for your bucks. And you end up with a resource you can store – and eventually use more than once over the lifetimes before it is rubbish. But it doesn’t have to be stone. Here is an equation I like, from an argument for using thatch. It takes 40 hours of hard labour to crop three acres of reed, which is enough roofing material for a house. Nobody has dug anything up or used any electricity. And it’s hard to fiddle it.
There are other practicable options for tipping the balance a little between people and Earth’s resources – in, for example, manual crop control in farming, highway maintenance, hedging, litter clearance, canal dredging and fishing – all areas where we can see what we are getting for our money, rather than furloughing jobs which will never come back.
Post-Covid, possibly, we are all more in a mood to wind back a bit on what used to look like progress. Given pause before we nip out for a new dishwasher, do we really need one? One of the lessons of lockdown in my house is that you don’t, but you do need a full-time galley hand. There is already growing demand for local kitchens, as opposed to fast food joints. Do we really need a washing machine and a tumble drier in every house, eating up half a room, to do what the local laundry used to do? Has anyone worked out how much metal and energy and international transportation it would save if we employed somebody local to wash our sheets?
My argument is that we should be making small but directionally definite shifts like these rather than setting targets for electric cars in the hope of a miracle. Out here in the real world, we see Boris’s plan to suddenly dump 200 years of engineering as a giant version of the law against old lightbulbs – a footling diversion which has achieved bugger all at great expense, just like smart meters, building regulations, loft insulation, and all the other mistakes which will never be put right.
Outside the city, we also all know that tree planting is another nonsense. Either you are putting them back where your ancestors spent a thousand years digging them out, or you are putting them where they don’t really want to be and most of them die.
We have to drive less. Start from there. Maybe we could try making it electric vehicles only on some roads.
Maybe we should all deal with our own dog shit in our own neighbourhoods rather than solemnly ferrying it across the county to be incinerated. Maybe we don’t actually need all the flying to come back. Almost certainly we don’t want the cruise industry any more. And if all those visitor centres have a future, it is as unit spaces for repair shops.
The labour market is already making massive shifts and there are more to come and we need to help. Politics tends to be about protection of the vulnerable – which is sometimes as it should be but sometimes looks like a competition for the teddy bear vote. Equally important is encouragement of the strong and able – those we will need for reconstruction.
A minimum wage for doing any job at all does not make sense and is a barrier to having a healthy grey economy, which we need now more than ever. But there should always be a minimum reward for honest hard work. How would we pay for it? The flip answer is, the same way as Rishi is paying at the moment, only with more popular support. But there would be savings and gains to set against a subsidy for labour.
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