It wasn't fair; it wasn't jolly well fair; it wasn't bleeding well fair. Edward Pilgrim, like any victim of perceived injustice, could not let the thing go. He had written to the town council, to the newspapers, the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister, and the Queen, to protest "the unfairness and unjust predicament one of her British subjects has been forced into," but he received no satisfaction. He spent the two days before September 26th, 1954 "wandering about looking at that land" - then strode back on to it, went into a builder's shed, and hanged himself: a martyr to bureaucracy.
Pilgrim was killed by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, an attempt by the post-war government to tackle severe housing shortage while dealing a blow in the class war. It vested all development rights in the State, which would determine what could be built where and would acquire land to achieve these plans - compulsorily if necessary. The land would be bought, not at its value for development, but at the value for its current use - say, as pasture or forest - thus saving the government money and preventing "feudal" landowners from "exploiting" society's pressing needs. All apparently desirable goals, supported by a large majority of voters.
Pilgrim didn't know anything about that; a working man in the modest London suburb of Romford, he'd bought the vacant lot next door so that kids wouldn't play ball against his house. The price was surprisingly low, although he still had to get a mortgage for it. But you can't put a price on peace and quiet, can you?
The local council certainly could: it bought Pilgrim's lot compulsorily for a tenth of the money he'd paid and put up an apartment building tall enough to stop light from reaching his windows. His protests availed nothing: as far as the authorities were concerned, he was simply a property speculator too incompetent to read the small print. They wished he would go away - though not in the manner he chose.
Edward Pilgrim became a cause célèbre after death; Winston Churchill snapped briefly out of senility to accuse the Home Secretary of killing him. Promises were made to reform the system - though not retroactively, nor in Pilgrim's own case. His story provided the basis for that of Arthur Dent, protagonist of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whose eviction notice was "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'." The dangers of over-reaching bureaucracy were strikingly clear.
So where stand things now? The same British state that victimized Pilgrim now mandates, not just what is built where, but who should get to go to college. It bans individuals from certain places or activities through "Anti-Social Behaviour Orders." It is creating a national database of all people who "come into regular contact" with children, from mothers who volunteer at school to visiting authors who come to do a reading. It monitors the population through closed-circuit television, with one camera for every fourteen people.
Whose fault is this? Ours - thanks to our mutable sense of "We" and "They." "We" are decent, law-abiding, self-sufficient people who ought to be allowed to go about our business without interference - except when we need to be protected from Them. "They" are interfering bureaucrats - except when They are overpaid fat cats, or feral youths, or immigrants, or snooty people who don't like our kids playing ball. Yet, when We are providing a service or trying to enforce regulations, They become the troublesome exceptions who complain, or don't cooperate, or (as the town clerk said of Pilgrim) "make a lot of fuss." This is a natural, if unadmirable, human instinct: we want unfettered freedom for ourselves, while others should be prevented from bothering us through repressive authority.
We will commit the least injustice when we can take the most responsibility for ourselves. So remember Edward Pilgrim the next time you catch yourself thinking "they ought to do something about it" - because They will.
If you enjoy such stories of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.
