I’m going to start this post with a story which points to
many of the problems I want to briefly discuss. My swimming training takes
place in the pool of a local school that my coaches hire out. Just before
Christmas the boiler broke down so the pool was closed down. We rolled our eyes
because if a swimming pool boiler breaks down then invariably it’s not easy to
fix. When the kids returned to the school for their prelim exams in January the
boiler was still not fixed. For two weeks kids sat freezing in classrooms,
struggling to write their exams because their hands were so cold, and
collapsing in class due to the fumes from the emergency gas heaters that had
been dragged in. Eventually this lurid story hit the local press and the school
was eventually closed, the boiler repaired (temporarily) and the school and
pool reopened. During this enforced break from swimming I eventually lost
patience and went to the Royal Commonwealth Pool for a swim. As I got out to
get changed, I noticed the lockers had ESPC adverts on the end of them. I’ll be
honest, as a subject of global neoliberalism, my immediate thought was “ooh,
good idea. Why aren’t there more adverts around here to keep prices down and
keep the place open? Rebranding it “The Speedo Royal Commonwealth Pool” would
probably pay to keep it open for a couple of days”.
I know as a good left-winger I should have been shocked and
appalled by this creeping privatisation of “public space” but I wasn’t really.
But this concern – that we’re selling our cities to private companies – is becoming
much more part of public debate in Edinburgh, and Scotland as a whole. The
examples we are getting are not quite as egregious as some of the stories you
hear from London, or the infamous cases of Liverpool One and Cabot’s Circus in
Bristol, where entire city centre blocks have been sold to private developers,
but we are getting smaller examples, such as "Edinburgh's Winter Festivals" (courtesy of Underbelly).
The stories seem to be particularly emerging in Edinburgh
because the cut-and-thrust of this sort of capitalism rubs up against heritage,
particularly in the New Town (never mind that the New Town was a speculatively
built development, and when the banking crash of 1825-6
happened it was partly driven by this speculative development and stalled the
Scottish economy for decades, as you can see on Claremont Street [thanks Eleanor!]). Local
hyper-local the Broughton Spurtle
has been doing it’s usually stirring raising quite a few concerns about how the
Business Improvement District Essential Edinburgh have been using Saint Andrews
Square and how the Council more broadly are using the city centre to lever in
more resources – the latest being the proposal to wrap our shiny new trams in
advertising.
Now, much as I didn’t bat an eyelid about ESPC advertising
to me in my swimming trunks, some of these changes do concern me – I’m not such
a pragmatist that I’d be that right-wing. However, there’s two ways, as I see
it, of unpacking this. Firstly, that this is just part of global trends of city
competitiveness, and this quite rightly should be resisted. However, in the
case of Edinburgh and most other cities in the UK, I do think we have to have
an honest discussion about how we pay for our cities.
It’s easy to presume in Scotland that cuts to local
government are something that England has to deal with – the Scottish
Government has fully-funded the Council Tax freeze, hasn’t it? The reality is
quite grim, as the Accounts
Commission report into Edinburgh Council and reporting of recent cuts has
made clear. The City of Edinburgh Council itself has to lose 1,500 staff.
If you played around with the council's online budget calculator, the one thing you had
to do was cut services somewhere and somehow. I have my differences with the Scottish
Improvement Service for local government, but last week they posted this
very impressive bit of work demonstrating how local authorities in Scotland
are meeting the challenge of the “scissors of doom” – declining budgets and
rising demand for services. But there's only so much of that sort of stuff local councils can do before services start to suffer.
If a local authority, like Edinburgh, has to cut over 10 per
cent of its budget, while in real terms costs are increasing, then it needs to
find some way of funding very expensive services like a city centres. Put
simply, the grass in Saint Andrews’ Square is not going to mow itself (unless
we invest in a city centre flock of sheep). This is related to the general mess
of local government finance in Scotland and the fact that the Council Tax
freeze has left local authorities completely powerless to do anything – on this
I
could not agree with Ken Gibb more. But it also raises a much simpler
question – if the people of Edinburgh, or any other city, want a nice city
centre, without private sector investment in the form of advertising and things,
then we will have to pay for it through higher taxation. And, as with all
tax/spend political debates, this is a debate we’re utterly unwilling to have.
We’ll happily rail against the commercialisation of city centres without
suggesting an alternative of how else the services that keep it going can be
paid for. And unless we do consider coughing up more money in tax, then this
creeping commercialisation will happen. Either that or our city centres will end up looking like the worst American downtown, and then we'll really be complaining. So, to go back to my swimming pool - what would I rather have, a closed broken pool, or some adverts?
As a concluding statement, I just want to reflect on who
pays. One thing that concerns me at the moment is that even anti-austerians on
the left don’t really push at who is
paying tax. Increasingly the tax base is being shifted to labour; in the UK
through income tax, national insurance and VAT. Tax on capital (particularly Corporation Tax) is falling. This
is in a world where the returns to labour (wages) are falling, whereas the
returns to capital (profits) are rising. This is why I’m against a basic income
– capital deserves to pay labour a good return for its labour through wages,
and a basic income paid for through taxes on labour completely fails to do
this. How does this link to my city centre services? Well, if you thought
Council Tax was a complete mess, don’t look at Business Rates, possibly the
biggest example of an utterly disastrous tax in the UK.* The vast majority of it
is paid to central government and then redistributed to local councils. This
was done in the 1980s to stop Militant councils using increases in Business
Rates to pay for improved services. So, if we were to increase Council Tax, or
another local tax on labour, to pay for city centres then effectively it would
be yet another redistribution of the profits of labour to capital. So, while
the voluntary payment by businesses of improvements to city centres – through BIDs,
sponsorship etc. – might not be ideal, at least it’s not a tax on labour.
* honestly, the more I hear about Business Rates, the more I just end up thinking "what?", "eh?", "really?", "why on Earth?" etc. etc.
