An article and a critique of that article

Do you remember a time when the streets in your town, village or suburb town were kept clean? When there were enough street lights to keep the streets well-lit and safe for women to walk along alone? When flooding was not caused in heavy rain because drains were cleaned on a weekly basis?

When roads were properly surfaced? When pavements were well maintained? Do you remember when public buildings were looked after properly? When there were enough trains to satisfy public demands? When buses were cheap and plentiful? If you do, then you are probably over 40.

Because prior to 1974, that is by-and-large, what happened in the vast majority of our towns, cities and villages. that has been the fate of many urban areas since 1974?

The advent of the Heathite 1974 Local Government Act. This act put an end to the urban district councils and the rural district councils that had served Britain so well since their creation in the late 19th century.

Whilst it may have been true that the system could have benefited from some minor adjustments (due to changing demographics) the truth was that the changes enacted by the 1974 Local Government Act were driven not by a desire to reform but by a narrow-minded wish to drive through ideological changes.

One must remember that, especially in the 1970s, the political scene in the United Kingdom was beset by the economic theory that: “Big was Beautiful” and that “Big was Best.”

The term “Economies of Scale” was bandied about with something that used to be called “gay abandon.” People would try to look as if they knew what they were talking about and say: “Economies of scale. That’s what it is all about. We must put an end to small and inefficient local government units. Instead, we must introduce large and efficient units of local government.”

Were the previous smaller urban and rural district councils really all that inefficient? In the small, but busy market town in which I lived, prior to 1974 if a resident of a council house had a problem with the house, all they had to do was ‘phone up the office, or pop into town and visit the office.

A person who had been a resident of a council house for many years said: “It was really simple. We just went to the office, told someone there what the problem was and they would say: “The lads are out on a job at the moment. I’ll tell them what you need doing as soon as they come back.” Chances were that the job would be
done later that day or early the next morning.”

“What happened when the 1974 Local Government Act was put into force?”

“Oh, that was a nightmare! They centralised all the housing workers in an office ten miles away. If you wanted a job done, you had to phone them up and tell some kid there that you had a problem. They were supposed to tell the repair team to get the job done.

“But usually, nothing happened, so you had to keep calling time after time after time. It became a real nightmare! From getting a job done in a matter of a day or so, it became so bad that sometimes even a very simple job would take them up to a year to do.”

I remember speaking to a manager at the district council housing department. He suddenly, in the middle of the office, lost his temper in a very spectacular way.

“I am sick to death of this bloody department! I am especially sick to death of these lying, conniving little bitches that work here! Well, work is too strong a word for what they do! All they do is answer calls; lie to people when they ask for repairs to be done! They never bother to tell anyone about the calls that they take! They never bother themselves to fill out work report cards, so as a consequence of their bone idleness, the repairs are never done! And of course, because they never give their names to the callers, the poor sods don’t have a clue who they spoke to, so they can’t make a complaint!”

He then turned to some stunned looking member of staff who was carrying a folder and shouted: “And walking round carrying a folder stuffed full of old paperwork might impress some people, but it doesn’t impress ME!”

In quieter tones he said to me: “It never used to be like this when I worked for one of the smaller urban authorities. Everyone knew every one of the clients we had, so they built up a rapport with them. But now, well, there are hundreds of staff and thousands of clients, so the incentive to actually give a damn has gone.

“Most of the staff here just turn up for their wages, they don’t care about the ethos of public service. It’s not a concept many of them are familiar with. I am only talking like this because I am so sick of working with this bunch of deadbeats that I am taking early retirement. I am finishing later this week and I have wanted this shower to know what I have thought of them for several years.”

Up until 1974 the local urban authority (controlled by a comfortable alliance between Conservatives and some fiercely independent independents) had collected and recycled waste paper and had ensured that the streets were properly swept every day, and that each drain in every street was cleaned out every week by a large road sweeping machine.

By 1976 this drain cleaning had been reduced to once a fortnight. Then it was still further reduced to once a month. I can’t for the life of me recall exactly when the district council decided to completely stop the cleaning out of drains, but stop this vital service they certainly did.

Of course, without any cleaning out of any kind, the drains began to silt up. Some drains in the area are so badly silted up that plants and even in one drain a small shrub have began to grow. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a former drain?

This has caused much flooding of parts of the area, which have never experienced flooding before. And the pantomime show of council members and officers wringing their hands and crying out: “Oh, dear! How can these floods during times of heavy rain ever have started to occur?” is amusing, in a sort of “Dick Whittington meets Kafka” sort of a way. Unless your home is one that has suffered from flooding as a result.

And there are in the area pavements that have not been resurfaced since the early 1970s. Just think about that for a moment. There have been the last few moon landings, shuttlecraft launches and disasters, The Falklands war, two wars in Iraq, at least six different prime ministers and in that 30 plus years, some pavements in some
of our towns haven’t even been re-surfaced once.

But in the name of all that is good, why? Why is this the case? Because the 1974 Local Government Act created large behemoth ‘non-local’ authorities that were so divorced from the areas that they were supposed to serve that they never bothered to do the simple things. Such as clean drains, sweep streets, look after street lights and maintain pavements. It almost seems as if there came into being a culture of indifference to the squalor that their policies created and a calculated, cruel indifference to the lives of the electorate.

The indifference was brought home to me in the early 1980s, some six or so years after the creation of the megalithic authority that had replaced the former urban and rural district councils. The council had, due it must be said to the ineptitude of its own officials, made a complete mess of the rent payments of a disabled man who was in his mid 90s. The statement that was made to the press said: “We are aware that there are some problems with this rent account. If Mr Bloggs would like to come to the housing offices, we will explain the situation to him.”

How –or why- they expected an elderly man who was totally disabled to make a 25 mile round trip by a non-existent public transport service, so they could explain their mistakes to him was never made clear. But it did bring home to me the fact that the area the council covered was so vast that it seemed unable to effectively provide the services that the residents of the area have paid for through their very expensive rate bills.

Just after the enactment of the 1974 Local Government Act there was a cynical joke doing the rounds that did sum up one of the problems that we are still feeling the effects of: “What is the difference between a Clerk of works and a director of operational services? - About five times the salary.”

The gravy train that was set in motion has sapped a great deal of the resources that should have been available for basic core services. Such as cleaning drains, maintaining roads, resurfacing pavements and looking after housing.

The critique of the article

Writing this article proved not to be quite so easy a task as I had at first thought. Whilst the concepts are fresh in my mind –after all, I had experienced them at first hand, as it where, whilst trying to look at the various drafts from several differing points of view, I began to become aware that I needed to understand that not everyone who would read the article had lived through the events that I had described.

I therefore had to examine the article and to remove some items and words and also to explain some points in ways that I hoped would be clearer. Ways in which I hoped to be able to help the younger reader who had not been born in the late 1950s as I had, to understand that, for example, road drains were cleaned out every week (as a matter of course, not just because they were blocked) and streets swept clean on a regular basis.

I also detected a hint towards the hyperbolic in my writing. Perhaps using three long words when one shorter word would have served my purposes equally well. In fact, would probably have served my purposes much better.

It is all too easy, I now realise, to lose one’s reader in a sea of over exuberant writing, meaning that the point or points one is trying to get across and to explain are lost to the reader, no matter how well-intentioned the concept behind the article.

There is very little –or perhaps no point at all!- in writing something that, no matter how worthy the concept, completely loses the majority of the readers. I have come to understand that it is far, far too easy to lose readers than it is to catch their attention.

It is said that the first sentence is the important one. Catch them with that and you have them to the end of the article.

Having examined my work, my article, from the perspective of a reader (or at least as close to the perspective of a reader as it is possible for the author of the article to get) I finds that the first sentence is important. But then, so is the next one, and the next one and… well, I am sure you get the picture.

Whilst it is true that it  is easy not to attract the attention of a reader with a poor opening sentence it is even easier to lose them through a poorly structured body of an article. Some of the subsequent paragraphs, if you will.

I have struggled with this article, I have to admit. I realise that there are several different ways to see an article. From the point of view of the author, the editor and the reader.