The Greens Studied France's Banlieues, Concluded The Problem Was Insufficient Funding And Not Enough Cycle Lanes, And Have Budgeted £2.3 Billion To Build Britain's Own No-Go Zones — The Architectural Renders Are Genuinely Stunning

The Greens Studied France's Banlieues, Concluded The Problem Was Insufficient Funding And Not Enough Cycle Lanes, And Have Budgeted £2.3 Billion To Build Britain's Own No-Go Zones — The Architectural Renders Are Genuinely Stunning

Good morning, and welcome to what we at The Greens Win are calling the most cheerful guided tour of an entirely preventable catastrophe since someone in Whitehall approved the design of the Ronan Point tower block and said 'yes, this seems structurally sound.'

Today we're visiting Britain's exciting new Community Integration Housing Zones — a flagship Green Party infrastructure project that, if you squint at it from exactly the right angle while ignoring seventy years of French urban planning history, looks almost like a good idea.

Please keep your hands inside the vehicle. Emergency services response times in these areas are, as you'll discover, somewhat theoretical.

A Brief History of How France Did This First (And What Happened)

In the 1950s and 60s, France had a labour shortage and a housing crisis. The solution — and bear with us here, because this will sound familiar — was to build large, cheap, high-density housing developments on the outskirts of major cities and fill them with migrant workers from North and West Africa. The developments were called banlieues. The policy was called pragmatic. The outcome was called, by everyone except the people who designed it, a catastrophe.

Here's the sequence, because sequences matter when you're trying to avoid repeating them. Concentrated poverty plus geographic isolation plus welfare dependency plus cultural insularity plus chronic underinvestment equals communities that begin to operate by their own rules. Not metaphorically. Literally. By the 1990s, French police had informal maps of areas they wouldn't enter without significant backup. By the 2000s, fire engines attending call-outs in certain Paris suburbs were being stoned. By the 2005 riots, 274 towns were affected, nearly 9,000 vehicles were burned, and the French interior minister used a word to describe the rioters that ended his presidential ambitions.

The French government has spent, conservatively, hundreds of billions of euros trying to fix this. They have not fixed it. The banlieues of Clichy-sous-Bois, Seine-Saint-Denis, and Grigny remain, forty years later, places where the French state's writ runs at roughly the same strength as a politely worded suggestion.

The Green Party studied all of this. They took extensive notes. They apparently wrote 'do more of this, but with better signage' and moved on.

Britain's Version: Same Ingredients, Fresher Branding

The conditions for replication are not difficult to identify. In fact, if you were a policy analyst trying to recreate the French banlieue model in a British context, the Green Party's immigration and housing agenda reads like a fairly comprehensive instruction manual.

Step one: Abolish No Recourse to Public Funds, ensuring that new arrivals have immediate access to housing benefit and Universal Credit with no qualifying period. This guarantees a steady supply of people whose housing is entirely state-funded and who have no economic incentive to move to areas of higher employment.

Step two: Dismantle the Home Office, removing the administrative capacity to track, manage, or redirect settlement patterns. People settle where they know people. People who know people tend to settle in the same places. Concentrated settlement in specific postcodes follows as surely as night follows day.

Step three: Remove minimum income requirements for visa holders claiming benefits, ensuring that the economic profile of newly settled communities skews heavily towards welfare dependency rather than labour market participation. This is not a criticism of individuals. It is a description of what happens when you design a system with no structural incentive to work.

Step four: Add a post-growth economic policy that actively discourages the private investment and business development that might otherwise create employment in these areas.

Step five: Build 47,000 new 'community housing units' in existing high-density urban areas in Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds, Leicester, and Luton, specifically targeting areas with existing migrant communities because the policy is called 'integration' but the mechanism is called 'concentration.'

Step six: Stand back and wait approximately fifteen years.

The Architectural Renders, Though

We should say, in the interest of fairness, that the renders are genuinely lovely. There's a community garden on the third-floor terrace of the Birmingham development that looks absolutely delightful in the CGI. There are cycle lanes — of course there are cycle lanes, there are always cycle lanes — rendered in a tasteful terracotta. There is a mural celebrating 'the rich tapestry of Britain's diverse communities' that, in the render, appears to have been painted by someone with access to approximately forty colours and a great deal of optimism.

The render does not show what happens in year twelve when the community garden has been absorbed into a grey-market economy, the cycle lanes are used exclusively by food delivery riders, and the mural has been partially painted over with the name of a gang that didn't exist when the building was commissioned.

The render never shows year twelve. That's what renders are for.

What The Emergency Services Think

We asked. Or rather, we noted what French emergency services discovered, and applied basic pattern recognition.

In Clichy-sous-Bois in 2006, firefighters responding to a call in the Chêne Pointu estate were attacked on arrival. In Seine-Saint-Denis in 2020, police reported that certain streets required three vehicles minimum for any response. The French term for this is zone de non-droit — lawless zone. The British planning documents, refreshingly, use the phrase 'community-led safety frameworks' which means roughly the same thing but with better grammar.

Britain's police, already stretched to the structural breaking point by a decade of austerity and a Green-mandated 'restorative justice' approach to crime that has made arresting anyone administratively equivalent to climbing Everest in flip-flops, have been asked to manage this. They have not been given additional resources. They have been given a diversity training module and a strongly worded commitment to 'culturally sensitive engagement.'

The ambulance service has been given nothing except a new target: respond to 70% of Category 1 calls within fifteen minutes, excluding areas where the vehicle's safety cannot be guaranteed. The exclusion list is growing.

The Green Councillor Who Designed This

Somewhere in a converted Victorian terrace in Hackney, a Green councillor named something like Rowan or Sage is looking at the French data and concluding that the reason the banlieues failed is that France wasn't welcoming enough. That if only there had been more community liaison officers, more culturally sensitive policing, more investment in 'participatory urban design,' the outcome would have been different.

Rowan or Sage has never been to Grigny. Rowan or Sage has never spoken to a French firefighter. Rowan or Sage has, however, written a 4,000-word Medium post about decolonising urban planning that got 340 claps and a comment from someone at the Guardian.

The £2.3 billion has been approved. The renders are beautiful. The cycle lanes are terracotta.

See you in year twelve.