Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek Read Free Book Online

minister from 1982 to 1994 led the free-market charge, declined my interview request. Neelie Kroes, who pushed through the privatisation of the Dutch post office under Lubbers in 1989, had the excuse that she is a European commissioner.
    One morning I went in search of the last left-winger to run the Dutch mail, Michel van Hulten, who had the post office in his portfolio until 1977 in the government of Joop den Uyl. I boarded one of the yellow double-decker trains that tick across the Dutch countryside and set out for van Hulten’s home in the town of Lelystad. At some point a change in the light made me look up from my book. The landscape had altered. To the right of the train was a flat plain dotted with rows of boxy houses. There was something raw and fresh about the land, like some stretch of the American prairie that had only just been settled by Europeans, and something strangely familiar about the low-rise, flat-roofed, cuboid form of the houses, even the way they were spaced: it looked like Milton Keynes.
    To the left, towards the sea, the view was disorientatingly different. It reminded me of an illustration in a book I had as a child of how the north European plain would have looked at the end of the Pleistocene era. Under a grey sky, the flatlands stretched off towards the bright horizon, dotted with isolated trees, bent over by the prevailing wind, like some Friesian veldt. The spring grass, sprouting bright green out of the cold soil, was being cropped by huge herds of deer, shaggy, long-horned kine and wild ponies. It was a primeval scene, a few minutes north-east of Amsterdam; only the mammoths were missing.
    This, as van Hulten explained to me in the kitchen of his Lelystad bungalow, was Flevoland. It’s artificial, the result ofperhaps the most grandiose act of intervention in nature by a twentieth-century government: the creation of new land out of the sea in the form of two great polders, together about the size of South Yorkshire. The kitchen where we sat eating toast and cheese and drinking coffee was, when van Hulten was born in the Dutch East Indies in 1930, several metres under the salt water of the Zuiderzee. The deer, ponies and cattle I saw had been imported and left to run wild in a nature reserve, the Oostvaardersplassen. And Milton Keynes? ‘The English new towns were an inspiration for us,’ van Hulten said, and he smiled at me kindly as though I were a long-lost relative. He was one of the architects of Flevoland, and one of its early inhabitants. He and his wife were among the first four hundred settlers of this new world in 1972, as his brief political career began. The virgin lands he helped to create are a memorial to the era of government intervention, of belief that the state had the power, the right and the duty to make a better world for its citizens. The building of the dam across the Zuiderzee began as a Great Depression work programme, and the appearance of the polders above the waves coincided with the high-water mark of progressive socialist optimism in the 1960s and 1970s.
    ‘In the beginning, the state did everything,’ van Hulten said. ‘It was a state enterprise and fully paid from the state budget. When you needed money no one in the Hague was interested why: you got it.’ Marxist and New Testament ideas mingled in van Hulten and the spirit of Paris was palpable in Holland in 1968, when the non-aligned group he was one of the leaders of, the Christian Radicals, became a political party, the Political Party of Radicals or PPR. A series of accidents led to his getting a seat in parliament and in 1973 he found himself, to his surprise, the minister for transport in a left-leaning coalition government, responsible for, among other things, the Dutch post office.
    In the 1970s the Dutch, like the British, experienced high inflation, rapid industrial decline, strikes, a vague sense ofnational failure and a reaction against the dirigiste, technocratic governments that built new