The Burghers of Rutland

I was saddened, as no doubt were many, just before the New Year, by the death of Neil Innes, variously described as the Seventh Python or the Sixth (or Seventh) Beatle, and always as a really nice guy and talented musician who didn’t really receive the recognition he deserved. One of my favourite vignettes was of his Walrus-inspired song about the “Montana Café“, released in the late 70s, which shortly afterwards encouraged me to do a painting called “Sunray Café”. 

“Sunray Café” (detail) © R. Abbott 2020

The location is semi-fictional, Warren Street, or thereabouts, and the slightly Modigliani-ish figures are the consequences not of astigmatism but of inability. However, like the Montana, it’s a café where a sad man could seek solace, a fry-up, and a quiet smoke.

As well as Bonzo Dog, Innes will always be associated with The Rutles, for which he provided the principal musical input, with his accurate Lennon vocal impersonations and Beatles pastiches as group member “Nasty”, including such classics as “The Knicker Elastic King” and “Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik”. The Rutles were of course intimately associated with Rutland Weekend Television, a series which managed extremely successfully to combine Pythonesque humour with parodies of the loveable absurdity of the later Beatles, and to put England’s smallest county on the map of popular culture.

Rutland hit the headlines again this week, in news reports that the local council were meeting to discuss the proposal to build a drive-thru McDonalds on the northern outskirts of Oakham, Rutland’s county town. As a planning dispute there was something most unusual about it, namely that both sides of the debate were respected and the inevitable outcome – approval – was received graciously. More specifically unusual was the nature of the argument against the plans, which we will come to in a moment.

In most disputes of this sort there is a strong, positive, objective, forward thrusting, carefully costed, computer modelled proposal to build something – a fast food outlet, a by-pass, a wind farm, a housing estate, a runway, a high speed railway – which it is claimed is desirable, and will improve local conditions, benefit transport, bring in investment and jobs, provide “green” energy, create money, and overall be a good thing. Opposing it is a weak, subjective, negative, backward looking, vague, intangible, highly subjective argument that the proposed construction will spoil the neighbourhood, mean the loss of something valued, damage a treasured view, upset a colony of rare newts, generate traffic and noise and litter, be a waste of money, and overall be a bad thing. The proponents normally have access to all kinds of professional support, including lawyers and people with strong presentational skills; they will in all likelihood have done this kind of thing before, know all the arguments, know all the tricks, be well placed. They will be prepared to play fast and loose with the truth, whatever that is. The opponents are usually ordinary honest people, fearful, defensive, inarticulate, on the back foot, presented with something they don’t want, who rapidly have to learn tactics from first principles, get little help from anyone, endure stress and expense they can ill afford, and can only put together an amateurishly mumbled and feebly hand-drawn objection. The outcome is almost inevitable.

In the Oakham instance there were worries about litter and traffic, but since the proposed site, at Land’s End, on the A606 by-pass is away from housing, on an essentially greenfield site but adjacent to a filling station and other commercial retail premises, those sort of objections were minor. McDonalds is something of a symbolic red rag for people who don’t like matters corporate and in particular American, and it has also been associated with arguments about its employment policies, and about the nutritional quality of its principal products, especially as consumed by young people. Those factors were aired too. People interviewed in the street had differing opinions, many seeing both sides of the debate. Many, especially those with children or grandchildren, could see the attraction of an edge-of-town vendor of fast food. Salivating already.

What was very unusual about this case, though, was the main “soft” or “subjective” argument, the one that normally gets sneered at as mere nimbyism.  Specifically, the defence as to why the proposed development should not go ahead was that Rutland was the last county in England that did not already have a McDonalds, and therefore that it was “special”, was “different”, and it ought to remain that way.

 
So in this instance it was heartening to see the “subjective” case perceived as perfectly valid, unique as it was, and when – as expected – it was defeated, the good citizens of Oakham seemed not unduly troubled. The whole business was civil in  both senses of the word, as befits such a delightful English county. I’d like to think that Neil Innes would have been pleased with the outcome too, the only possible improvement on the situation being that, instead of being just another outlet featuring the Golden Arches, it could be named the Montana Café instead.