When you’re short-sighted, everyone seems attractive; for this reason, I don’t often wear my glasses, as I think myopia has a felicitous effect on my attitude to life. However, after a whopping 28 years living in Brighton & Hove, it’s dawning on me that this has coloured my view of my adopted hometown too.
I love living in Brighton and wouldn’t dream of moving anywhere else. But I am privileged to do a thing I love for a living, when and where I want; for people who need to get around it on a daily basis, Brighton is an increasingly unpleasant place to be. A good deal of this is the fault of the Green council, the UK’s first ever; looking back on their recently ended rule, it feels like the city was overcome by an invading force who tried their best to destroy it, leaving residents looking around in dazed disbelief.
Oddly, considering the party’s name, the natural world appears to have been one of their main targets. The Greens had something of a slash-and-burn attitude to local flora. Hedges, bushes and even a bowling green, which had been standing for years, were eviscerated. Dutch elm disease ran riot: the council refused to properly treat all of the affected trees, some of which have now been chopped down.
Angry men on bicycles are the kings of our seaside urban jungle
Most perverse was the destruction of a large part of the oldest and longest ‘green wall’ (a vertically built structure intentionally covered by vegetation) in Europe in the spring of 2021, during nesting season for the hundreds of birds who inhabited it. Perhaps as it was established by the Victorians, it was probably a nasty colonialist nature reserve and deserved to die? One specimen of local flora which the Greens did like was weeds, which took over to the point of being a health hazard. Still, if you’ve righteously cracked down on herbicides, who cares if a few old ladies are hospitalised by nasty falls? The council even blamed Brexit for the weeds they had so lovingly nurtured.
In contrast to the disregard shown to the elderly, Brighton’s huge student population was endlessly pandered to by the council, who focussed on expanding student accommodation in the city practically to the exclusion of all other. Students often ride bikes; the justification for slashing the living wall was that it could allow a cycle lane to be built. This wasn’t a surprise: cyclists are the only beasts who have protected status here. Angry men on bicycles are the kings of our seaside urban jungle; it’s a cliche that fellows in flash cars are trying to compensate for inadequacies elsewhere, but a quarter of a century in Brighton has convinced me that this is equally true of grown men who ride huge bikes on pavements. It’s not like there aren’t any enough cycle lanes; in fact, there are so many that they regularly help bring our traffic to a standstill, causing extra congestion and pollution from cars.
Exorbitant parking fees imposed by the council are estimated to have cost us more than £1 million in day-tripper revenue over three years, but gridlock was nevertheless a regular occurrences. Some dunces suggested that this chaos was a sign that Brighton was a successful city. Another of the clowns, councillor Sarah Nield, had to apologise in 2020 for tweeting ‘laughed at queue of cars’ while observing how many freewheeling cyclists were around.
It was the stated aim of some Green councillors in 2020 that the city could be ‘car-free’ within three years. Luckily, the loonies were kicked out this May. The prospect of a crackdown on cars might have been appealing for the student population, but it would have effectively curtailed the movements of the old and the physically disabled. As is usual, it was one rule about transport-induced climate change for us and another for the planet-huggers, as we’ve seen with the globe-trotters of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, whose Instagram feeds often resemble recces for a re-make of Around The World In 80 Days. The leader of the city’s Green council had to apologise for a ‘major failure of judgement’ after being caught flying to a Cop conference in Glasgow on the same day he criticised the government for a ‘lack of action’ over climate change.
The old saucy Brighton was anathema to these pronoun-ed puritans
Apart from students, there were few people the Greens actually liked having here in Brighton. Those made to feel unwelcome included those who were born here (priced out), the working-class young (ditto), tourists (they planned to close public toilets) or those who preferred the naughty seaside-postcard town before Green Year Zero.
The old saucy Brighton was anathema to these pronoun-ed puritans who even attempted to ban the Christmas Day charity swim for ‘health and safety’ reasons. Why would you move to the louchest city in Britain and attempt to turn it into Gilead-on-Sea?
The list of Green idiocies and inefficiencies goes on forever, but thankfully I’ve got limited space. There was the infamous bin strike described so memorably by resident Lynne Truss:
‘The place turned into Armageddon…a tide of used teabags, eggshells, soiled kitchen paper, banana skins, smelly tin cans, and used sanitary towels advanced in such a determined and menacing manner down nice residential streets, you could almost hear it breathing.’
Somehow we managed to achieve one of the lowest recycling rates in England – 29 per cent whereas the national average is around 45 per cent. The pathetic and pointless British Airways i360 tower, opened in 2016, cost a fortune and is barely used. The decrepit West Pier once stood out; for the past decade it has fitted in perfectly as the city became a ghost of itself. When the Royal Albion Hotel burned down last month, it was found to be full of asbestos, making Brighton literally as well as figuratively toxic at the height of the tourist season.
Now the smoke has cleared and the future looks brighter. The Greens were sentimental sadists when they were in charge: sweet words smeared over actions of cruelty and callousness. A friend who moved to Stockholm told me: ‘The UK Greens seem to use ecology as an excuse to ruin people’s lives while the Swedes make the green thing about enhancing people’s lives.’ She’s right.
Brighton still shows up in national surveys as one of the best places to live; it’s a hopeful city, which has none of the feeling of ‘managed decline’ which other once-thriving cities have. My local heroine is the independent councillor Bridget Fishleigh, who never ceased drawing attention to the way the Greens were running the city into the ground. ‘Like many residents,’ she said, ‘I have high hopes for the new Labour administration – they have fresh ideas and aren’t tied to Labour of the past.’
Council leader, Bella Sankey, appears to be doing all she can to distance her party’s policies from those of the disgraced council; this feels very much like what will happen nationally at election time, when Keir Starmer will put clear water between himself and any Green policies in order to win back the Red Wall. Labour’s leader knows that yapping on about a better future is incompatible with delivering a net-zero one at great expense to an impoverished population.
The only fly in the ointment is the fact that the ghastly Eddie Izzard is planning to stand at the next election as a Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion – the seat of the country’s only Green MP, Caroline Lucas. Talk about being caught between a frock and a hard place; hasn’t my beautiful, beleaguered, bashed-about city suffered enough? But, short-sighted though it may be, I still wouldn’t live anywhere else.
The sell-out Brighton Fringe show AWFUL PEOPLE by Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven plays at Brighton Pier on the 22nd September
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