Selina O'Grady (London, author): A letter from the council, a future Prime Minister and the absurdity of officialdom all made for an unusually political moment in my habitually social visits to the shops last weekend. I used to pine a bit for the Starbucks, delicatessens and boutiques full of taps, tiles and Victorian board games that the more fashionable bits of Kensington acquired. Here, we have Tastebuds for colesterol breakfasting, Dar al Hijab for Muslim fashions, Mick and John at Allen Foster Butchers, supplier of Quality Meats and Navneet Kishore at the newsagent/post office.
At first, when I returned to London from San Francisco, I didn't use the shops much. But like a wild animal slowly getting accustomed to its environment, I started to buy our meat from Mick and John. Everyone seems to wave at John as they go by. The local drunks are often there, chatting or buying absurdly small quantities of food. So are the estate mums and grandmothers at the counter, with Mick and John behind it, and a fluid door out to the pavement.
When Dar El Hijab took over from the greengrocer, Mick and John started keeping a few boxes of vegetables on their piece of the pavement outside the shop. Fine vegetables.
Navneet in the post office supplies the estate in benefits - don't try buying a stamp on a Monday morning, when the queues of the cash-short and time-long are intolerable to our rushes. He supplies newspapers and basics. He started stocking the Economist as soon as I asked for it. He and his wife work very hard - they have had 2 holidays in 19 years.
I see these shops performing a larger, or social, service. They represent multi-culturalism at its best. Ethnies, incomes and classes mix. The lonely, the bored, those who want to buy chicken thighs without having to pay for organic-grain-fed-barn-housed-Beethoven-listening limbs, those who just want to shoot the breeze and find a piece of humanity beyond the tele screen ...we all come here for a moment of sociality. Navneet, Mick and John make society. I want all my middle class neighbours to shop here. I rarely see them. Lots of Ocado vans double parked on week-day nights, though.
Last Saturday, John the butcher and Navneet the newsagent were perturbed. Neil Bates, our local Council Enforcement Officer, had sent them a threatening letter telling them the shops have no right to use the piece of pavement outside. Section 148(c) of the Highways Act, 1980, you see.
Tastebuds had been told they weren't allowed to have a table and a couple of chairs outside either.
I hadn't really noticed Navneet's storage box before. I asked him what it was, and how much money he made from the advertisement on it.
"Oh no. I don't make any money. You see, another company puts it there, and I put the power to light it up. Look. It has a cupboard in the side. The newspapers get delivered there at 4 am, and it is locked up. So I don't need to get in too early, and the company that owns the box sells the advertising. It's a swap...''
One of those neat things the market really is good at discovering: a little niche of win/win that really does work all-round. No losers. Mutual benefit? In steps the Council.
So why is the Council doing this? John the butcher told me that Neil, the man from the Council, had intimated that a license, a £700 per year license, could resolve the issue.
So here, apparently, we have it: local authorities have almost no power to raise taxes, and certainly no ability to do so efficiently or according to a method that is locally decided. This obliges a council to look for any money-raising opportunities it can create. If revenue from Highways licenses are there for the council's taking, you can bet that the council is going to find lots of infringing activity going on. It has high symbolic power but is deprived of the means to raise the resources it needs to deliver, a mix that is bound to mean its policies will be twisted senseless.
So while the Council should be recognising that these local shops deliver benefits to the community beyond anything that Tesco or Sainsbury can offer in so-called "planning gain''; while they should be if not subsidising these shops then certainly going out if its way to assist them, the council in fact finds itself, in its powerlessness, seeking stealth taxes from them. The weak, in a selfish bid for whatever semblance of power is on offer, prey on the weaker yet.
I strolled down again later that day to pick up some bacon. It felt like the first day of summer. Back in Mick and John's there was a middle-aged dad in baggy shorts disguising a slight paunch. I am sure I know him. Is he the new neighbor? Should I say hello? I go into Navneet's for the Saturday Guardian - I like the crossword - and it dawns on me. David Cameron is in the butcher's. Just then, he too comes into Navneet's wheeling his son. I harangue him:
"How can you stand for this. A Tory council, too. Destroying the fabric of our neighbourhoods? All for pathetic, grasping coffer-filling behaviour. When will Westminster set us free?''
Navneet shows Dave his letter.
Seignorially, Dave agrees:
"That's not right. Let me talk to them. I'll fix it.''
Is this what he does for a quiet Saturday? In any case, John, Mick, Avneet and I are thrilled. We talk excitedly for a long time after the event. He seems to care. We touched power. It is electrifying.
Only afterwards does it all start to worry me. This is patronage not local politics. It shows who is really in charge. Needs must, I don't regret our appealing to him. But if we succeed it might justify our spontaneously petitioning him, while the problem itself arises from over-centralisation. Here we have the leader of the national party ready to intervene on our behalf. Is that really how our democracy is meant to function? And what about all those shop frontages where Dave doesn't turn up? Surely we should let councils raise the money they need and spend it as they are elected to do. Then these interventions of the seigneur will not be needed and we'll feel responsible ourselves.
Let the inhabitants of this corner of North Kensington debate and decide: should we support, tax or even subsidise the shops on the corner? It's nice to have our very own Daveus ex Machina turn up and save the day (...does he deliver?), but now that it seems likely to be their turn let's hope that between Dave and Boris, we can at last allow this country to grow up about local issues and decentralise.
