A tale of two piers

Peter Saunders, 3 August 2014

Last Wednesday, a fire destroyed part of Eastbourne’s 150 year-old pier.  Within two days, David Cameron arrived in the town and announced that the government would make £2 million available to help with rebuilding.

Four years earlier, just 17 miles along the coast from Eastbourne, Hastings pier was similarly engulfed by fire.  Built in 1872 by Eugenius Birch, who also designed Eastbourne’s pier, Hastings pier was owned by a company registered in South America, and had been badly neglected.  Its poor state of repair had led to its closure on safety grounds just a year earlier, and the damage caused by the fire (much more extensive than in Eastbourne) seemed to have sealed its fate.  The Prime Minister and his cheque book was nowhere to be seen.

Undeterred, a few optimistic and resourceful local people came together to form the Hastings Pier Trust.  They started raising funds to rebuild the pier, opened a dedicated shop, and drew up detailed plans for restoration.  The local newspaper backed their campaign to save the pier, several thousand people demonstrated on the seafront, and Hastings council was pressured into issuing a Compulsory Purchase Order against the absentee owners.  Ownership was then transferred to the Trust which is now restoring the pier and will run it on a not-for-profit basis.

After a visit to the town, the National Lottery Heritage Fund agreed in 2012 to put up £8.5 million provided the Trust raised another £1 million from its own efforts.  This money is now in place and the pier is being rebuilt with the intention of re-opening next year.

The tale of these two piers reminds us of three vitally important lessons about the role of government in a liberal democracy.

The first is that people will come together to resolve common problems, but not if government takes over.  Had Mr. Cameron arrived in Hastings two days after the fire, reassuring everyone that the government would take care of everything, nobody would have bothered doing anything.  There would have been no Pier Trust, no shop raising funds, no information centre staffed by volunteers, no campaigning, no local effervescence.  As Edmund Burke famously observed, the strength of the ‘small platoons’ of community engagement depends on there being something for people to do – and this sometimes requires government to get out of the way.

The second lesson is that politicians never miss an opportunity to use taxpayers’ money to make popular gestures likely to win them a few votes.  Eastbourne is a Lib Dem seat, the general election is less than a year away, and Tory HQ reckons two million quid of your money is a small price to pay if it helps Dave squeeze back into Downing Street.

The third lesson is that governments are forever robbing Peter to pay Paul.  Whenever one special interest group gets paid off, another loses out, and then starts demanding favours too.  This is how government spending keeps being ratcheted upwards.

That £2 million isn’t ‘government money’ because governments have no money of their own.  It is coming out of people’s taxes.  But taxpayers in Hastings (and here I declare an interest, for I am one) might feel somewhat aggrieved that their tax money is being used to renovate Eastbourne’s pier – especially when their own pier received no such generous treatment, and they had to raise their own funds to ensure the restoration.

It is desirable that Eastbourne pier should be saved.  But Mr Cameron needs to learn that not every problem requires that he ride into town offering a solution involving the expenditure of other people’s money.