The Petition and the Smoke

This is what democratic societies do to themselves when the habit of association withers and the habit of petition takes its place. Citizens stop combining to repair what harms them. They learn to ask a distant authority to study the harm on their behalf.

Consider who has signed. A hundred and fifty scientists, members of Parliament and activists have asked the government in Westminster to open an inquiry into why the air of England is fouler in some streets than in others. They are right about the facts. The smoke settles most thickly on lower-income and minority-ethnic neighbourhoods. A mother pushing a pram along a trunk road in a poor district breathes what a mother in a leafy suburb does not. Even the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a body whose instinct is for the ledger rather than the barricade, has been drawn into the question. When the accountants arrive, the matter is serious.

Yet look at the form the remedy takes. Those who signed are not the people who breathe the worst air. They are its advocates: learned, articulate, practised in the language that ministries understand. They do not ask the residents of these streets to measure, organise or demand. They ask the state to conduct an examination. The grievance passes from the street to the committee room. In a sense it is translated, and in another sense it is confiscated.

The strongest objection deserves its full weight. The poor, it will be said, have neither the leisure nor the instruments to associate. Air cannot be seen, and a family working long shifts cannot fit monitoring equipment to its windows. Only the central power can count the dead with authority. Asking the afflicted to help themselves is a cruelty dressed as principle.

I grant all of it except the conclusion. Measurement is necessary. But whoever holds the instrument holds the grievance. An inquiry run from the centre will produce a report, and a report is the means by which a democratic government lays a question gently to rest. It will be thorough and humane, and it will be finished. The residents will have been described with great precision and consulted almost not at all. They will learn once more that their condition is a matter for experts, and their capacity to act together will decline a little further, as unused faculties do.

The counterweight is not to refuse the inquiry. It is to insist that the inquiry put monitors in the hands of tenants’ associations, parish councils and congregations, and publish its findings street by street, so that neighbours can carry them to the town hall themselves.

Otherwise the result is easy to foresee. A thick report will arrive in a quiet office, and outside the window, unread, the lorries will keep idling at the school gate.