Selling tube station naming rights is not Conservatism
Kaveh Pourvand, 5 June 2013
Fancy getting on the tube at ‘Virgin Euston’? Wouldn’t Bond Street be better named ‘Burberry by Bond Street’? Or better yet why not rebrand Kings Cross as ‘Kings KFC Cross’?
These, if media reports are right, are the sorts of questions that Conservative party members of the London Assembly are mulling over. The plan is to sell the naming rights to raise £136m with which to keep fares down.
Nor do their plans end with tube names. City AM quote Tory assembly member Gareth Bailey as triumphantly announcing: ‘We have the potential to command tens, if not hundreds of millions of pounds through sponsorship deals on stations, lines, trains and bus routes’.
Writing in the Evening Standard, Simon Jenkins worries that: ‘it can only be a matter of time before MPs rename Westminster Bridge after the Fiji Development Agency and Waterloo Bridge becomes Diageo Drag… How to stop this slide into squalor? Unless someone believes in, articulates and then enforces some ideal of visual dignity, London’s public spaces will always be vulnerable to another salami slice.’
Quite.
There is something inherently discomforting about how blithely some politicians are prepared to change the name of public landmarks, turning them into commodities to be bought and sold. It shows disrespect for the inherited traditions and symbols that define the identities of London residents. The names of underground stations are not just functional. They are part of what makes London what it is. Those names are part of what an individual affirms when they say they are a ‘Londoner’.
What is striking is that these measures are being proposed by members of the Conservative party. Social conservatism’s principal concern, from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott, has been to protect inherited social institutions. Central to this is the protection of the names and symbols that define a community’s identity combined with an instinctive scepticism of initiatives to change these for short-term reasons, particularly short-term financial gain.
Things like ‘place’ and ‘identity’ are supposed to matter to Conservatives. But they don’t for the Tory members of the London Assembly. Whatever they are doing, it is not political conservatism.