The Greater London Council is mobilising for a blitzkreig on London. The wonderfully misnamed planners, are creating a motorway system which will destroy the homes of 100,000 people, callously dissect living communities and obliterate acres of London's precious open space. In the face of this threat to the pattern of city life the Left has been incredibly quiescent, leaving protest entirely in the hands of middle class owner-occupiers whose houses are directly threatened. This is all the more amazing when by far the greater havoc will be let loose on the working class areas of inner London.
It seems that too many people have got the idea that opposition to the motorway plans is, and must necessarily be, reformist; that to combat them is to try and achieve no more than a localised alleviation of the squalor of capitalism. This is a mistake. It is an attitude that can be maintained only by those who fail to recognise three important, and not by any means unobvious, aspects of this perversion of town planning. First, London's motorway box, coyly renamed ringways one and two, as well as similar projects, are essential for the general stability of the existing economic structure and for the particular well-being of the car manutacturers, the construction, steel, oil and rubber industries, and a variety of industrial and commercial concerns. Second, these projects involve a vast diversion of state funds for the ultimate benefit of the private sector. Third, that to obtain this public expenditure the interests involved have had to pressure and manipulate the supposedly democratic structures of local and national government to an unusually great extent.
To challenge the motorway scheme successfully would send a sizeable shock-wave through the whole present pattern of investment. To challenge it unsuccessfully would be to carry our a userul task or caucation, I is tererore vital that the full political implications of it are grasped and explained, and that motorway plans are not seen as some technical or bureaucratic error of 'modern life'.
The plan for London emerges directly from the entrails of capitalism it illustrates its values and priorities. For British capitalism it is an essential committment: it can be postponed, it can be varied, it cannot be cancelled. It is one of the minor contradictions of the system that these roads will be sweeping through the back gardens of some of the bourgeoisie (and more significantly devastating property values). This has produced an opposition to the plan which is reformist but the collosus will bear down on its progenitors however much they fill the correspondence columns of The Times. It is not for socialists to throw themselves. suicidally, into the defense of such a loosing What is needed is to make it clear that the entire place of motorway construction in the economy distorts and destroys its productivity as well as one of the most important relations of social life - the environment. Preventing the construction of the motorwav box would only be a beginning. Once socialist priorities establish a completely democratic use of resources, even existing motorways may have to be pulled down. From this position of total opposition to the system of capitalist expenditure on transport, a vigorous revolution ary resistance can be developed free from the fatalism and passivity of opponents of the scheme like Douglas Jay. cater for a socially less efficient means of transport.
MECHANICS OF MANIPULATION It was not particularly difficult for the motor manufacturers lobby to win acceptance of the general case for urban motorways at the relevant Ministries. But the co-operation of the local authorities, the L.C.C. and later the G.L.C., was also needed. Finally, though this may never have been a consciously formulated objective, this massive programme had to be capable of being presented as having been democratically evolved by the elected bodies ostensibly responsible for it First there was the London Traffic Survey carried out by consultants under the control of the then L.C.C. after the basic decision to create a motorway system had been taken. This duly produced the "predictions" on which the motor routes were based. Then there was the impressive omission by the G.L.C. bureaucracy to contemplate real alternatives to private transport, or even adequately to study the effect the motorways would have on existing public transport systems. In this context the Highways & Transportation Department withir the G.L.C. grew triumphantly to dominate planning.
Throughout the period in which the plans were evolved steady pressure was maintained by the British Road Federation. The most effective and clear-sighted of the road lobbies, this group represents a wide range of commercial, interests having a direct concern in creating, in their terms, a more efficient' system of vehicular transport. Its vision extends a long way beyond the monthly car sales figures, although it is based on this preoccupation. Along with the G.L.C. it has been able to see that limits must be placed on car use. Like the G.L.C. the Federation is prepared to accept that a large percentage of potential car journeys to the central area must be "controlled out of existence". Homes, parks and football grounds can make way for cars, but not the office buildings of the commercial core of London.
THE MOTORISED CITY The immediate effects of an urban motorway system add up to a substantial and measurable lowering of the standard of living whether in de-sacs, and car free zones to a full scale town planning operation to re-arrange the over commercialised centre of the city. They include minor improvements to public transport, and more dramatic possibilities such as subsidising the system of making it entirely free. Theso answers would be more satisfactory, but they would not be more satisfactory to everybody, and to see why not it is necessary to look asa du are burpose buse motorways Who will benefit from the motorway box? Certainly not commuters or shoppers. The G.L.C. themselves say that 80% of working commuters and 80% of shoppers will be unable to use the ringway system as it is inadequate to cope with this demand. Restrictions will have to be imposed at all times, with particular severity at peak load times, in the form of a policy of road pricing. But then of course, the system was not designed to solve the problems of commuters or shoppers in London.
It is the stated priority of the plan to facilitate the un-interrupted flow of through traffic. This means that the distributive network for goods must be streamlined to allow for rapid transfer from point of manufacture to point of retail or export outlet. Nothing must impede the efficiency of the business machine and one of the criteria of business efficiency is speed of delivery.
One glance at the proposed road network is sufficient to realise that the G.L.C. wants to play its part in consolidating Britain's business strength after entry into the Common Market. The obstacle of the English Channel will be overcome by the tunnel, and the G.L.C. is determined not to allow London to stand in the way of the great European business race track The businessman's speed of delivery, and hence his profit, is achieved by the massive injection of of public funds at the expense of housing, hospitals, schools - and London.
The Motorway Box is not being constructed for the benefit of Londoners. It is not being constructed for motorists, although no doubt it will be accompanied by a great fanfare of phallic ideology on the freedom of the roads. It is not being constructed for its use value at all. It is being constructed in the interests of British Monopoly Capitalism.
JOHN CARVER
The Black Dwarf has sent the first British committing war crimes in an attempt to last year that an article in The Times began.
The Black Dwarf 23rd March 1970 Page 7 Wilson, Healey and Stewart, and to their