Big Bureaucracy knows the real enemies: volunteer graffiti cleaners

Times

05-07-2025

What if I told you that there are gangs of young men roaming around London spraying graffiti on Tube carriages, and then immediately cleaning that graffiti up again? You would surely assume that I was mad. And yet on Thursday Andy Lord, commissioner of Transport for London, made that very claim while he was being questioned by members of the London Assembly.
I am grateful to Lord. I think, in his words last week, he gave us a perfect parable for modern Britain.The reason Lord found himself being asked about this issue is that a campaign group called Looking for Growth (which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago) has been cleaning up graffiti on the Tube. Sometimes its members post videos of themselves doing this online to put pressure on TfL to get its act together.
'I, firstly, would ask anybody not to take this matter into their own hands,' Lord told the assembled politicians. 'We also have evidence of people creating graffiti and then removing it, so that is being investigated by the relevant authorities.'
• Jenni Russell: Passive entitled citizens are breaking Britain
The more I think about this reply, the angrier it makes me. It strikes me as indicative of everything that is wrong with our country, in particular with the way that our bureaucracies shirk responsibility and value rule-following above getting things done.
It reminded me of a story last year in the St Albans Times, where a group of locals had decided to clean up a bit of disused council land. They planted wild flowers, installed an arch on which to grow roses and created a vegetable patch. 'These vegetables are shared among residents as well as with a local nursery to teach children about growing your own food,' one of them, Will Wright, told the paper.
How lovely, you'd think, surely. Not the council. It told the residents that this could be considered fly-tipping, and gave them a week to return the land to its former state.
• Charlotte Ivers: These angry young men aren't giving up — they're cleaning graffiti
These stories pop up frequently: people who are trying to make things better, stymied in their efforts because they didn't follow the rules. It would be fine, if a bit sad, if such things were restricted to community gardens. But this attitude bleeds into every element of our public life. I will forever be haunted by the story I was told a few years ago by a man who had been a criminal barrister. He had been representing a client in custody: 19, non-violent, first-time offender.
The young man was being held in a police station opposite the court in which he was due to appear. The only problem was, the contractor that was meant to drive him across the road hadn't turned up, and so he was stuck.
'Please,' the lawyer begged. 'It's a 30-second walk. Couldn't some officers accompany him? It's Friday. If he doesn't appear today, he will be in custody until Monday. He will miss two shifts at work. He might lose his job.' Nope. No joy. Only the contractor was allowed to transfer prisoners.
The young man stayed in custody. The lawyer quit and became a chef. Why had he become a criminal lawyer in the first place? Not for the money or the glamour, that's for sure. He wanted to do some good. But, no, the inflexibility of the Byzantine British bureaucracy made that impossible for him.
Why would anyone bother to try to improve their community, when the system always seems to frustrate them? In the case of the Tube cleaners, the system has gone further still. Lord's response to these people who were trying to make things better was to criticise them. No, actually, not criticise them. Accuse them of a crime.
Can I rule out the possibility that a single mad vigilante has cleaned up their own graffiti? No. But it's a wild claim to make without showing some evidence. If Lord would like to present some, I'd love to see it. But his comments seemed merely designed to undermine the people banging the drum on this issue.
Those people are right, by the way. The graffiti is really bad. In a way it doesn't matter. Nobody has died. The trains still run on time, usually. But it does something to a person if every time they get on the train they think, 'This is a bit bleak,' or, 'God, there will be people visiting from other countries who see this. That's embarrassing.' And then they think, 'I can't believe I've let my expectations slip so low that I don't even care what I and my fellow Englishmen have to put up with. I just worry about how we look to the neighbours.'
It is part of a long, slow decline in our public realm in Britain, which just makes everyone feel slowly, crushingly worse every day. There will be an example of this near you: a dying high street, or a once-green park that looks like a nuclear wasteland. It makes me so angry, because all these things are eminently fixable. What stops them getting fixed is the hulking inefficiency of our bureaucracies. It's just so hard to get anything done, even with the best will in the world.
I feel for Andy Lord, I really do. You go into public life to make the buses run on time, and then you find yourself sitting in front of a committee, telling everyone you think madmen are running round London cleaning up their own graffiti. It could never have been any other way. That's what our bureaucracy does to people who try to make things better.
Wes Streeting told LBC radio this week that 'weight loss jabs are the talk of the House of Commons; half my colleagues are on them'.
He's not wrong. I've been to two Westminster parties recently, and it's remarkable how popular the jabs are in SW1. At one drinks do last week, every time I looked round, an acquaintance would emerge, half the size they were when I last saw them earlier in the year.
None of the other circles I move in seem to have grasped these drugs with the same enthusiasm. You don't get the same experience in rooms full of journalists, or lawyers, or (thankfully) chefs.
I suppose it's the fact politicians are so often in the public gaze. They can't all be taking weight loss drugs for entirely pure medical purposes, otherwise other social groups would likely look the same.
It must also be down to the fact that peer pressure is a big feature among Westminster types. If one person looks to be developing an advantage, everyone soon wants in on it.
There is one unfortunate side effect. Halfway through the night, a friend wandered over. He's recently lost a bit of weight the hard way: slogging it out at the gym and righteously rejecting all offers of dessert. 'It's terrible!' he wailed. 'Everyone keeps asking me if I'm on Ozempic. What was the point in all that work!'