25 Nov 2012 01:57:38
A while ago I discovered that I have a tiny Wikipedia entry, as small as I have ever seen, whose opening description of me as "a journalist" was recently amended by a hand unknown to read "a leftwing journalist". Well, it could have been worse: if they'd really wanted to jerk my chain, they could have called me "rightwing". It is, however, a bit more complicated than that – as I was reminded when I started reading this book. And after you read it, you, too might start to wonder whether the polar categories of "left" and "right" are adequate.I'd read Colin Ward, who died in 2010, for some time: I used to look forward to his columns in New Society and, later, in the New Statesman when it subsumed that magazine. You would turn to him because you were not only going to learn something useful, but it was going to be expressed in an engaging, clearly written style. (Imagine an Orwell better informed about the intricacies of planning laws.) His schtick was fairly straightforward: he was a left-libertarian anarchist who trusted ordinary people's ability to manage their affairs, and who also happened to be very much in careful command of his facts.
But he cared deeply about how people could live together: and the key to his approach lies in the way he spent much of his professional life writing and thinking about, of all things, allotments. This is important: "All through history in most of the cultures we know about, people have claimed that there was a time in the past when the land was held in common," he writes, and again and again he returns to the straightforward proposition that everyone deserves their own patch, and that it is not a paternalistic state's job to tell them how they should go about it.
Take, for instance, the speech here from 1996 (he was 74 by then, which I mention only to emphasise his cross-generational appeal and tirelessness) given at the occupied Guinness site in Wandsworth, about squatting. In this, he tells us about the mass squatting movements after the second world war, when thousands of homeless people and families took over abandoned military camps. By 1946, the government announced, 1,038 camps in England and Wales had been squatted by 40,000 people; and then Aneurin Bevan – Nye! – told local authorities to cut off gas and electricity supplies to the camps. The rationale was that these were people who were "jumping their place in the housing queue"; but, as Ward points out, they were actually reducing the length of that queue by jumping out of it. Ward managed to enrage many on the left with his dislike of any form of authoritarianism, and this is also why he had cross-political as well as cross-generational appeal. I offer, for instance, this unimprovably beautiful sentiment from Geoffrey Wheatcroft, from a review of a festschrift for Ward some years ago: "And yet the anti-authoritarian tradition of individual initiative and mutual aid has continued to run like a refreshing hidden stream."
There are some writers who should be better known. Ward shouldn't only be better known, he should be compulsory reading (which, of course, he would almost certainly have found a disgusting idea). When you have the text of a lecture delivered, in 1972, in Eastbourne, to the annual conference of the Royal Institute of Public Health and you find that what is being said there still has urgent contemporary relevance, then you have to admit that something important is being said.
I would like, one day, for an annotated Ward collection to be issued. In his opening lecture (these are all the texts of lectures, hence the word "talking" in the title and their chatty readability), he claims that a factory owner chucking cyanide into a river can be fined a maximum of £100, whereas a river inspector passing on an analysis of such pollution can be imprisoned for three months. Is this, or something like it, still the case? If our air and our rivers have got cleaner over the past 50 years, though, then I think we can allow Colin Ward to take some of the credit.
