The Spectator

The Chicago schoolDavid Cameron has called for the building of a new generation of ‘garden cities’. In Britain the term is most associated with Letchworth, founded in 1903 by Ebenezer Howard, who formed the Garden City Association in 1899. His concept was for a series of towns with populations of up to 32,000, spread over 6,000 acres. — But the original garden city was, ironically, a city now more associated with the birth of the skyscraper: Chicago, which adopted the motto Urbs in Horto, ‘city in a garden’, in 1837, to describe the patchwork of buildings and gardens in its heart. — Howard lived in the city in the 1870s, a few years before some of those gardens disappeared beneath the early skyscrapers.

For the past couple of months, government business has been bogged down in the detail of taxation policy. Higher personal tax allowances, a lower top rate, more stamp duty for £2 million mansions, a tycoon tax — all have been batted across the coalition ping-pong table at dizzying speed. While engaged in this game the government has refused to consider the other side of its ledger: the spending side. This is seen as a great untouchable, thus considerably reducing George Osborne’s room for manoeuvre. This is why this was a Budget that laid the foundations for an economic recovery, rather than starting one in itself. The tax cuts which the Chancellor did make were welcome, as far as they went.