Imagine an old-fashioned British country town. Good citizens strolling down the high street to their friendly baker, grocer and butcher, relaxing in pubs and on cricket fields, their children walking to school, “old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist” as John Major, quoting George Orwell, once put it. This, surely, is the sort of thing Conservatives like.
But no. According to Nick Fletcher, Tory MP for the South Yorkshire constituency of the Don Valley, this way of living is an “international socialist concept”. Specifically, he fears and loathes the idea of the “15-minute city” developed by the Colombian-born Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno, which proposes that most of what you need or want – places of work, homes, shopping, education, sport, social life, pleasure – be within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride, as in a traditional town or city. This, says Fletcher, who seems to be drawing on some of the nuttier claims on the internet, “will take away personal freedoms”. It’s a case of lunacy on stilts as virtuoso as any in the world of conspiracy theories. It also highlights a central question of modern conservatism: do they actually want to conserve things?
