On Trenton Oldfield

You know who Trenton Oldfield is. He's the Australian guy who swam into the path of last year's University boat race in Great Britain. He was jailed for six months as a public nuisance for his trouble. He presents himself as an "anti-elitism activist" who objects to such elitist activities as University rowing. This makes him some type of hero among rusted-on leftists and dreadlocked ferals, but on the whole he is reviled in Britain as the pages and pages and pages of abusive, derisive comments in on-line forums makes clear. Undeterred, Oldfield believes that he, somehow, represents "the people" - whoever they might be. The news this morning is that the UK government has decided he is an undesirable and a troublemaker and are kicking him out of the country. I say, fair enough. He has demonstrated total contempt for the country in which he is residing and an on-going unwillingness to abide by the laws of the land. If he was a right-wing ratbag then the chattering class would be baying for his neck. As it is, he's a left wing ratbag with the characteristic narcissism and self-righteousness that goes with it.

I have a personal interest in this case because Oldfield is that new phenomenon, an activist town planner. I am very familiar with this type because, for several years, I have had to work side by side with them. While once I worked in an appropriately titled Department of Humanities, teaching literature, history, philosophy etc., various bizarre restructurings have left me stranded in a 'Department of Arts and Planning'. The traditional disciplines have all been downsized and the Planners are the new kids in town. Arts & Planning? When I tell people I work in Arts & Planning they usually fall about laughing at the incongruous stupidity of it, or they ask the obvious question: what has urban planning go to do with Arts? It's a good question. In part, the answer is that it is a case of administrative convenience that has no connection to reality at all, a bit like a government department of 'Youth, Immigration and Inland Drains'. It might make administrative sense to the bean counters, but otherwise no sense at all. Pedagogy? What's that?

But I've come to realise that the town planners are, in fact, right at home here because they are an extension, a new expression of, the social sciences. The discipline of Geography went by the wayside years ago, but it has reemerged as "Planning" which is, it seems, a revamped Geography with an in-built activist left-wing agenda. The connection is social engineering. The social science people and the planners have this in common: an overwhelming desire to control other people's lives. They are activist academics. They want to use their positions in academia to remake the world according to their own criteria. In this, they are self-appointed. No one asked them to do this, and in fact - as we see in cases like Oldfield - the great unwashed public don't actually like what they are about. These are the people who want to stop you driving a car and who spend their days working out new and inventive ways to coerce you into riding a bicycle. Social scientists want to shape your life with various "programs" and "educational" campaigns. Planners want to control your life by designing funny shaped roads and cul de sacs.

Even so, you might think Planning is relatively benign, but these days it is an ideologically driven field of study. Oldfield, for example, does his "research" on the "socio-economic history of fences and railings." He's against fences and railings. He sees them as symbols and instruments of class division and inequality. People like him find their way onto local councils and onto planning committees and then foist their agenda upon both landscape and community. Such people are the authors of the endless red (and green) tape that seeks to regulate what you do with your own backyard. They are on a mission to save the planet - from people like you and me - and they take very seriously the dictum 'Think globally, act locally.' They're crusaders and have the crusader's zeal. What if a community doesn't care for the Planner's urban dream? Well, they need "re-educating."

In fairness to Oldfield, the flip-side of his "anti-elitism" is that it wants to do something about poverty. A noble cause. I want to do something about poverty too. There are lots of people who want to do something about poverty. Most of them roll up their sleeves and do something practical, like starting a shelter for the homeless, or a food kitchen for the hungry, or a system of micro-loans for the self-employed, or training schemes for unemployed youth. They realise that these sorts of activities are far more constructive than attacking the rich and befouling national institutions. What Oldfield did, as the woman judge who sentenced him said, quite correctly, was just vandalism, pure and simple. He's no different than someone who thinks it helps the poor to throw rotten eggs at a rich man's Mercedes. His claim to moral superiority is entirely mistaken. He has the morality of a vandal and nothing more.

Imagine for a moment if some white-skinned do-gooder was to run onto the field in the middle of the AFL Grand Final and make off with the ball as a protest against the treatment of Aborigines in Australia. Would it advance the cause of Aborigines? Not a bit. Would it invoke the ire of the Australian public? You bet. Would people forgive him because it was "in a good cause"? Not a chance. The really remarkable thing about activists like Oldfield is their total lack of powers of self-reflection. It never, never, never occurs to them that they might be mistaken. Even when the very people they claim to represent loathe them, it is like water off a duck's back. They really have no idea just what a small and generally disliked minority they are. In their own eyes, they are heroes. The UK should move to get rid of people like Oldfield (and many others), but in his case it probably means that he will be back in Australia. We don't need any more professional troublemakers either. Beware of Planner-activists.