Letter to America: The Fifteen-Minute Conspiracy | Skeptical Inquirer (original) (raw)

“Will the Leader of the House please set aside time in this House for a debate on the international socialist concept of so-called 15-minute cities and 20-minute neighbourhoods?”

This is how the Conservative MP, Nick Fletcher began a question in the British Parliament in February 2023.

The idea of the fifteen-minute city ought to be uncontroversial. Essentially, it means a city in which everything you need to live—groceries, doctors, schools—is only a short distance away, close enough that you don’t need a car. As Lynn Fotheringham put it in a follow-up letter, there’s nothing new about them. “I spent my early childhood in a 15-minute city. It was called the 1950s.”

But: new conspiracy theory! It is, I suppose, broadly related to climate change denial.

Fletcher continued: “The second step, after [ultra-low emission] zones, will take away personal freedoms as well. Sheffield is already on this journey, and I do not want Doncaster, which also has a Labour-run socialist council, to do the same. Low emission zones cost the taxpayer money—simple as. However, 15-minute cities will cost us our personal freedom, and that cannot be right.” Both Sheffield and Doncaster are in South Yorkshire, near, but not in, Fletcher’s constituency, Don Valley. Note: Fletcher’s use of the word socialist is interesting. It’s not usually a scare word here.

You would hope Fletcher’s approach would get a response suitable for, say, one of the amateur orators who used to occupy the now-defunct come-all-ye Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. Instead, Penny Mordaunt, leader of the House—the MP who arranges the government’s business in the House of Commons—seemed to take it seriously: “It is right that people raise concerns about this kind of policy, and where such policies are brought forward, local communities ought to be properly consulted.”

Like all conspiracy theories, this one has a basis in fact.

Usually attributed to the French urbanist Carlos Moreno, fifteen-minute cities existed as a concept even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, as one of several ideas for curbing carbon emissions. The pandemic’s lockdowns gave it new life, as people recovered the time spent commuting and perforce reengaged with their local neighborhoods. As part of the pandemic response, the government called for local areas to reallocate road space temporarily to enable walking and cycling. Some of these changes have become permanent; others have been deemed unsuccessful and reversed.

London had already spent ten years vastly expanding its network of bike lanes. The current mayor, Sadiq Khan, is particularly focused on reducing pollution and car use. Some car drivers resent this. On my area’s NextDoor, in between complaints about cyclists generally, you’ll find people insisting that “no one ever uses the bike lanes” even though I find I’m never alone when I use them. In the wealthy, fast car-owning area of South Kensington, a bike lane transport for London set up alongside its main road was so hated by a small minority of the local population that the local council tore it out after six weeks. While it was in place, it was great; you could travel the whole six and a half miles from Hyde Park to Brentford in safety along one of the capital’s busiest thoroughfares. The number of cyclists per day doubled in the weeks it was allowed to survive.

Resentment over the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) was also an important factor in the Conservatives’ win in the July 2023 Uxbridge by-election to replace Boris Johnson, who had resigned. Social media misinformation may have played a role in this as the Guardian reported.

But this is all a long way from the baseless claim that the government will use fifteen-minute cities to bar people from traveling outside their local area. Though again: there’s a grain of truth deriving from the lockdowns the government imposed during the emergency years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Soon after Fletcher’s speech in Parliament, Jonn Elledge wrote in New Statesman that the assembled MPs listening to him “giggled.” Elledge, who with Tom Phillips, is the author of Conspiracy: A History of B*llocks Theories and How Not to Fall for Them, goes on to suggest some reasons why fifteen-minute cities have become a conspiracy theory. For one thing, the presence among their promoters of international urbanist organizations is a red flag to conspiracy theorists. For another, he says, they sound somewhat like low-traffic neighborhoods, which have been imposed on some neighborhoods that didn’t want them—and that proliferated around the time of pandemic lockdowns. Add in various resentments around car culture, and pass the results through the internet, which, he says, is “the best machine for generating and A/B testing viral conspiracy theories there has ever been” and there you have it. At The Skeptic, Mike Marshall has documented this process in much greater detail.

There’s some question whether Fletcher did have some effect. As 2024 began, the Guardian reported that Fletcher’s conspiracy theory has in fact shifted government policy toward reprioritizing driving. However, a few weeks later, the Guardian reported that government papers show no change in policy, just the rejection of some low-quality proposals.

Still, in October 2023, transport secretary Mark Harper, the Conservative MP for Forest of Dean, pledged to crackdown on fifteen-minute city schemes. Yet the fundamental claim Fletcher and Harper made—that the concept includes extreme restrictions on personal mobility—is a lie. Every MP up to and including the prime minister must surely know this.

Wendy M. Grossman

Wendy M. Grossman is an American freelance writer based in London. She is the founder of Britain's The Skeptic magazine, for which she served as editor from 1987-1989 and 1998-2000. For the last 30 years she has covered computers, freedom, and privacy for publications such as the Guardian, Scientific American, and New Scientist. She is a CSI Fellow.