Con-men cheat you on Westminster Bridge; members of Parliament get verbally abused, occasionally chased, and have their cars banged on as they drive into the Palace of Westminster; people are camping in shop doorways. Westminster in central London ‘has declined into a degree of squalor and disorder’, complains the journalist and Boris Johnson adviser Andrew Gilligan in a paper for the think-tank Policy Exchange, titled ‘Tarnished Jewel‘.
Windows of the great public buildings, broken by protestors, are splintered or patched with duct tape. Anarchist and anti-police graffiti is painted on those buildings’ walls; some of it has been there for more than two years. Urine trickles from the corners. Protestors have privatised the pavement, illegally and for hours blasting out amplified music that hinders the often critical work being done in the offices along Whitehall. Skateboarders use the steps of the parliamentary office building, Portcullis House, as a regular practice area. Gilligan notes the irony that ‘law is often ignored around the very building where the laws are made’, because of a ‘mess’ of governance around Parliament Square, and because, he claims, the authorities lack ‘confidence’.
As for the various authorities, the paper recommends that the ‘controlled area’ around Parliament should be brought under the control of the Parliamentary Security Department; and that the ‘roles of the Greater London Authority, Westminster City Council and (in Parliament Square) the Royal Parks in authorising public gatherings should end’.
Gilligan deplores, to quote the paper’s sub-title, ‘the decline of the streets around Parliament’. He sees the mess and ‘muddle’ as a symbol of Britain; although there are plans to ‘dramatically improve at least the physical environment, removing traffic from two sides of Parliament Square and making the Palace of Westminster safer from terrorist attack’, arising from the ‘car-borne terror attack on Parliament’ in March 2017; those plans have been drawn up ‘almost in secret’, the report adds; and they are stalled because the various official bodies are quarrelling about who should pay for them, the paper complains.
Gilligan calls for ‘zero tolerance’ for obstruction and intimidation around Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster (or for vandalism, illegal street trading or anti-social behaviour. He suggests that Westminster City Council take out a wider Public Space Protection Order (PSPO); and wishes for a ‘dedicated team of police officers, to ‘patrol the area on foot, bicycle and motor vehicle to maintain public order’. With a nod to the ‘broken windows’ theory of crime prevention, he calls on owners of the area’s buildings and structures – nearly all of them official bodies – to ‘immediately repair broken windows and properly remove graffiti’.
The 37-page paper is freely downloadable on the Policy Exchange website.
Picture by Mark Rowe; rough sleepers’ tents near Westminster Cathedral, winter weekday afternoon.
