Britain - The Land That Time Forgot 2: Buses

Last year I did a posting about how obsessed the British were with the past and how we seemed to only be able to derive pride from things that were very dated like pre-decimal currency and I did another similar posting about imperial measurement. Well, all of this stuff seems to be going on but I was alerted this week to a new and more vigorous example of this obsession. When the Conservative candidate, Boris Johnson, a real buffoon who has a made a career in the media of appearing like a real-life version of the 'Tim Nice-but-Dim' character of the comedian Harry Enfield, was elected to be the Mayor of London, he said he would reintroduce the Routemaster bus to London by 2012 and remove the so-called 'bendy bus' by 2015. The Routemaster double-decker bus was produced 1954-1968 and used in London from 1956 onwards up until present day, though they were phased out actively from 2005 onwards. This means that the Routemaster is not a pre-Second World War bus as many people assume. In fact its predecessors were Leyland Titan, in service 1938-9 and the AEC Regent III RT produced from 1942 onwards and used in London primarily 1947-54, though the last RT ran until 1979. They are often mistaken for the Routemaster.

None of these old buses, including the Routemaster was designed for an era in which we are concerned about disabled access. Its aisles are very narrow as is the staircase to the upper deck and it is high off the ground so is difficult for children and the elderly to access let alone anyone in a wheelchair. The Routemaster is open at the back, it cannot be closed against the weather and it allows people to jump on and off while the bus is moving causing on average 10 serious accidents per year and also making fare evasion easier. Every day 1000 wheelchair users travel on buses in London. This is compared to 6 million users in total, but it suggests on average there are 1-2 wheelchair users on every London bus route every day. Obviously this does not take into account the many more pushchair users or the numeous elderly people using the three-wheeled push along supports or people with other mobility difficulties or even luggage to get on board who welcome the low-level floors and ease of access of modern buses. This is why there are only 18 routemasters running compared to 5,197 modern double-deckers and 389 'bendy', i.e. two compartment buses in London, A bendy bus can hold 149 people compared to 90 on a modern double-decker and only 69 on a Routemaster.

People complain that there are fewer seats than on a Routemaster, but have they actually tried to sit in the seats. I am 6'0" tall (1.86m) which is about average height for a man in the UK now. I cannot sit on most Routemaster seats because my knees are jammed so hard into the seat in front, so I have to turn them to one side so I take up two slots or I have to stand anyway. Routemasters are more expensive to run than modern buses. People complain that they are safer on a Routemaster because of the conductor. Well, I know modern buses do not have conductors, but there is no reason why you cannot put one on or have a 'guard' if it makes people safer. I have travelled often on the Docklands Light Railway which is totally automated. There is no driver and all the tickets are bought from machines, and yet often, especially at night, they have a guard to make people feel safer. The structure of a bus does not determine who you put on it. If you wanted to, there is no reason why you could not have four armed guards on every bus. We do not have conductors on underground trains and yet people pack on to those.

You can see how successful modern design buses are if you note that bus passenger numbers are rising faster than at any time since 1946, they carry more people now than at any time since 1968 (when the Routemaster was dominant) and they cover more distance than at any time since 1957. Why is that? It is because they are clean and safe and easy to get on and off.

What is hilarious is that there are more complaints about the abolition of Routemasters online than there are people complaining about inflation. As I have noted before the British will always sacrifice comfort and efficiency for some perverse sense of nostalgia, that it is somehow better to be jammed on to a draughty bus that fills up quickly because it looks 'right' than to be on a modern efficient, safer service that their granny can get on without difficulty. Its removal is not portrayed as a step forward but, and I quote, 'an act of cultural vandalism'. No-one says every Routemaster must be destroyed but there is a difference between things you see in a museum and what you need to get to work or the shops in the morning. It is the same with the old red telephone boxes. They may have looked good but you had to be a weight-lifter to get the door open, not a child or an elderly or even just an average middle-aged person.

Johnson is clever, he knows how masochistic the vocal British public is, in its desire to live in some fantastical golden past that costs more and works less efficiently. His policies pander to that. It is ironic that most of the people who want the Routemaster back do not travel daily by bus in London. It is no different to saying that we should replace modern airliners with the aircraft you might see at a historic airshow or that the British Army should return to scarlet jackets and muskets because we won more battles with that equipment. Nostalgia has its place but not in informing the best approach for tackling the challenges of day-to-day life in 2008 Britain.

Britain - The Land That Time Forgot

This post follows on from the one earlier today about imperial measurements. The title 'The Land That Time Forgot' is from a 1970s film set at the time of the First World War when a German submarine along with some Americans it has picked up arrives at an undiscovered island where dinosaurs and cavemen are still in existence. A similar story is the book 'Dinotopia' which came out in the 1990s but has a happier outlook. Anyway, I am taking it as the theme for my discussion British people's obsession with the past and inability to really embrace what is going on in the world today.

Many countries are founded on perceptions of the past. France in the post-Second World War era based its legitimacy on stories of the Resistance, in a different way West Germany based its on the sense of Year Zero, that the slate had been wiped clean at the end of the war. Israel derives its legitimacy from reactions to the Holocaust; the current state in China from The Long March and the Revolution plus elements of longer Chinese history stretching back into the periods of the emperors and Confucius. Though the states in these countries have been based on a view of the past and it can be controversial when this view is challenged, none of them live in the past as much as British society. I love history, I have a house full of history books and I read a lot about different historical periods in different parts of the world. However, I do not need that history in order to have a sense of pride in what I do and in what the UK is doing. For many people in the UK however, the situation is different.

Whilst surfing the internet I noticed that a university in Berlin does courses on British Studies and in this they have a talk on soon about Britain and Germany in sport 1966-2006. The England world cup win of 1966. (and note, a lot of what is put forward as 'British' history is actually English history, I heard a man complaining recently about Adam Smith appearing on the new £20 note as Adam Smith was Scottish and this man felt the £20 note was 'English money' though it is legal tender in Scotland [though they also have their own notes] and the pound and pence are the only currency in Wales). The chant that Britons often throw at Germans is 'two world wars, one world cup' as a source of pride. Given that the latest of these victories was now 41 years ago and the earliest was 89 years ago, it hardly says much about pride in modern Britain. I accept that 21% of the population of the UK is over 60 and only 20% are under 16, but the majority of the population of the UK was not alive in 1966, so are the people who constantly hark back to that victory saying nothing of value has been achieved in the UK in their lifetimes?

British television is filled with historical drama. I accept it is the case in other countries too, but my argument is that they do not define themselves by portrayals of life among the wealthy classes as shown in dramatisations of the Jane Austen novels which are so popular in the UK; the Sherlock Holmes series keep on being repeated too. Films still set in the Second World War continue to be made and even those made in the USA often feature British actors, such as 'Band of Brothers', 'Pearl Harbor', etc. Television constantly repeats 'Dad's Army' a comedy series about the Home Guard of the Second World War. It ran from 1968-77, so longer than the war itself. Other series such as 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum' set amongst a concert troop in India and Burma in the Second World War ran 1972-85, even longer, then ''Allo, 'Allo' a series about the French resistance in the Second World War which ran 1982-91 and had a follow-on episode in 2007. Now I accept that there might be black humour to be had, but these among many other series produced during those times have remained enduringly popular and many of their catch phrases have entered British language. I accept we are moving away from this, but these things have another life in DVDs and on cable television.

Thus, the culture of many people is shaped by eras in which they did not live themselves. Of course there is always a nostalgia for a Golden Age that never actually existed, in the USA it tends to be the Eisenhower era of the 1950s and in both the UK and USA there is now nostalgia for the 1970s with people forgetting the terrorist activity, the inflation, the wars, the nuclear threat and in the UK the strikes and power cuts. John Major, UK prime minister 1991-7 tapped into this successfully when he referred to a fuzzy kind of 1950s Britain with district nurses cycling home and warm beer in pubs. The sense that if these things were recaptured the plagues of the modern day such as crime and drugs would be dismissed. Of course Britian had those things but they too were in the context of unpleasant things that are now forgotten: continuing rationing (legally the Second World War did not end in the UK until 1955, 10 years after the actual fighting stopped and the last rationing remained until 1956), few items for consumption, Britain being shamed by the world for its imperialistic pretentions, the sliding of competitiveness of British industry, the increasing division of British society and the rise of race riots.

I have no problem with people looking back and in particular, actually learning from history, what my problem is, that does this have to be the only place you can glean some sense of pride in your country. Britain is struggling for an identity and one which is not racist or nationalistic and all it can draw on to give it pride seem to be out-of-date events. This is why the British cling so tightly to medieval hang-ons such as the monarchy, the House of Lords, imperial measures, scraps of empire, though none of these things benefit 99% of the UK population. Being able to rely on these dated things seems to take the pressure off actually seeking to have something to be proud of now. Why can we not strut around saying 'we've got the best health service/education system/transport network/tolerant society/combating of poverty/curing of diseases in the world' now, any one of those I would be more than happy to chant with pride. Let's get out of the past and make the UK a country to be proud of, legitimately, in 2007.

Weighing Up Imperial Attitudes

This post is not about neo-colonialism. It is about the British obsession with the imperial measurement system, this is still in use in part in the USA (though not in the same form as it is in the UK, we use stones where they use pounds and our gallons are a different size), but has not been used in most of the world since the early 19th century. It covers measures such as inches, feet and miles in length; acres in field sizes; pints and gallons in liquids; onces, pounds, stones, hundredweight and tons (as opposed to tonnes) in weight and so on.

The key problem is that each measurement relates to the other differently even when measuring the same thing. For example there are 12 inches in 1 foot; but 12 feet make 1 yard and 1760 yards (or 8 furlongs) make 1 mile. 2 pints (larger than the US ones) make a quart and 4 quarts makes a gallon; 16 onces make 1 pound, 14 onces makes 1 stone and 8 stones make 1 hundredweight and 20 hundredweight make 1 ton (which is slightly heavier than 1 tonne). Unsurprisingly this makes calculations very difficult and error creeps in. As a result, since the 1970s every child going to school has been taught the metric system and fortunately all things in shops now are shown in these measurements. However, street signs, pints of beer, etc. all use the medieval, imperial system, much to the confusion of visitors. Aside from Liberia, Burma (aka Myanamar) and the USA (though they now permit metric road signs and most products have metric as well as imperial labelling) every other country in the world uses metric.

Despite almost 40 years of teaching children about the metric system (and I believe all schools now do this, though I know in the 1980s some private schools still taught the imperial system) yet again in the media there has been calls to stop 'Europe' (by which people in the UK means the European Commission of the EU) from imposing metric measures on market stalls. The EU has given in and this is portrayed as a 'victory' for the British. It is only a victory for those who perversely want to keep us stuck with difficult, archaic methods of doing things. One reason why traders fear the change is that using imperial measures makes it harder for British people to compare costs with other countries. In the UK food (cars, rent, etc.) is very expensive but having to go through into metric conversion, calculate in the Euro, etc. makes easy comparison hard.

It is argued that the imperial system is a distinct part of being British. Well, it shows how stuck in our ways the British are, which is certainly a characteristic. More embarrassingly (and I will return to this obsession with history in the future) it suggests that they only thing the UK has to be proud about is all in the past; that there is nothing in 2007 Britain that we can point to and say 'we did that; we're proud of it'. So, ironically, all of those who bang on about keeping imperial measures are not really patriots. This attitude has long persisted. It took until 1971 for the UK to move to decimal coinage, before then there had be 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in 1 pound, so 1 pound consisted of 240 pence. The only countries not having decimal coinage are Mauretania and Madagascar, hardly economic giants of the world, and even they worked on multiples of 5 rather than 12 and 20. The British obsession with holding on to old things meant that even the sixpence (actually worth 2.5 pence under the new system) was not withdrawn until 1980.

Imperial measures are difficult, confusing and are not something to be proud of. The British obsession with them does not help the UK economy at all. It might make us distinct, but not for something positive, rather for something which is peculiar and eccentric. These things are fine as tourist attractions but tens of millions of people have to work with these things on a daily basis in order to live their lives. Anyone 40 years old or younger has been trained in metric, so stop old fashioned attitudes and a mistaken sense of what is worth being proud about, hold back the UK any longer.