Central Riga is one of the architectural charms of Europe – a cobbled medieval labyrinth enclosed in a belt of art nouveau houses. But during the mid-1970s, when Latvia was a Soviet republic, the skyline was blighted by a multi-storey concrete shell that became, after many delays, the Intourist hotel.
This eyesore was the subject of a local joke: a tour guide is showing a group of westerners around the city. One asks about the monstrosity looming over the city and is told the truth. “It’s a hotel that they’ve been building for years.” This being the USSR, there is a KGB informant in the group. He upbraids the guide: “Comrade, you have cast aspersions on the efficiency of Soviet industry. Don’t let it happen again!” Sure enough, on the next tour, the same question comes up. “What is that concrete tower?” asks one of the tourists. “I have no idea,” replies the guide. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”
The story captures the way communist central planning combined ineffectiveness and insensitivity to the environment. The Soviet Union was covered in monstrosities that took years to build and then looked so incongruous they might have landed from outer space. Authoritarian regimes can build capriciously. In democracies it is harder.
British politicians might be forgiven for wishing that, where infrastructure is concerned, the dial could be turned a notch away from electoral accountability. The two existing runways at Heathrow were imposed using executive powers drafted for wartime expediency. Different governments have wanted to add a third one for 70 years and been thwarted by peacetime politics. On Tuesday, Theresa May’s government declared that it, too, intends to expand Heathrow, but there will be more consultation, more process.
The underlying tensions have not changed. There are good economic arguments for boosting capacity at an aviation hub near the capital. There are compelling environmental arguments against belching more carbon into the stratosphere. There are local people who would be glad of the work involved in expanding an airport. There are residents whose ears are assaulted enough already by screaming jets overhead. It is because those views are all represented in Westminster – by business lobbies, trade unions and MPs – that there is policy gridlock.
One side will prevail and, although the defeated camp will denounce the outcome as a travesty, none could reasonably say it was perpetrated with undue haste. Heathrow’s third runway, if built, will be the most democratically scrutinised strip of tarmac in the world. It will be a monument to the difficulty of balancing competing interests in an open society, for which no cheers will be raised.
It should also stand as a rebuttal to the view of government as an elite conspiracy. Of course, it will be said that the business-lounge polluters got their way, but it is a weak plot that takes three generations to succeed and works its subterfuge by feeding submissions to endless rounds of public consultation. If the decision hinged on global Illuminati nobbling unprincipled politicians, Boris Johnson would have succumbed years ago. But as the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip he still feels duty-bound to vocalise west London nimbyism. Zac Goldsmith has gone a stage further, standing down in Richmond to trigger a Heathrow-centric byelection.
Theresa May was happy to stand on the 2010 Tory manifesto rejecting a third runway and is happy now to use legislation passed by Gordon Brown to speed up decision-making on major projects – against which she voted – to try to expedite its construction. It would not be the first time politicians have acquiesced to things they once opposed when, in power, they grasp that the available options are all imperfect. Government rarely affords the luxury of easy choices. More often the arguments are balanced and public opinion is no guide. Even in the subset of views confined to the environs of Heathrow there is conflict between job creation and clean air. The same person may want both.
This is the problem expounded by the 18th-century French mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet – electorates do not coalesce into neat majorities and minorities around discrete issues. People can prefer the leader of party X to the economic policy of party Y, which they trust to run the NHS more than party Z, whose leader they like more than party X’s. It is rock, paper, scissors – each beats one of the others but none is supreme.
This is why election winners can only ever claim conditional mandates. They cross the finish line as the least worst option. It is why referendums that scrunch complex choices into binary propositions generate as much conflict as they resolve. A narrow majority vote to leave the EU does not become the indivisible “will of the people” because there is no such thing. There are fluid wills of many people. As the tortuous Heathrow process demonstrates, representative democracy is messy. Sometimes governments have to upset people in the hope that the benefits of a decision will appear over time. MPs might be pulled in different directions by constituents, party members and conscience. There is no formula for balancing that equation.
Yet there seems to be a growing impatience with this complexity, coupled with a tendency to imagine that a decision we don’t like must contain an elemental injustice; that if our own opinion is overruled, somewhere down the line democracy has been subverted. This grievance expresses itself in contempt for the whole system, shading into paranoia – the idea that corrupt elites run everything for their own gain; that “they” have rigged the rules against “us”. There is no template of them-and-us that can usefully describe the political dynamics in a pluralist system. It is a fiction and it nurtures an appetite that is inimical to democracy – a craving for politics without dissent, common to the nationalist right and the Marxist left, where the interests of “the people” are neatly aligned and channelled through infallible leaders.
Democracy is a process, not an event. It doesn’t guarantee everyone protection against the construction of a runway they don’t want. It offers them the right to object and – in the absence of Soviet-style demands to pretend otherwise – the freedom, when it is built, to say in public that the process took years and still could not satisfy everyone.
