I grew up in a little village in the north east of England, built around a colliery. My granda on my mum’s side, Jack, had nine children, and as a result, he worked three jobs: down the village coal mine, a ten minute walk from his house, until it closed in the 1960s; at the betting shop, a five minute walk from his house; and at the local working men’s club, also five minutes from his house. He would cook the weekly Sunday roast each week, with vegetables bought from the greengrocers on the high street, five minutes from his front door, and meat from the butchers another minute or so away.
In the village, at the time, there was a corner shop for essentials, a library, a post office, a shoe shop, and a DIY shop (co-owned by my other granda). There was a primary school in the village, though none of my aunties and uncles went to it – it was a protestant school and they were Catholic, so they took the school bus to the next town along for primary school, and a nearby town for secondary school. For most day to day life, Jack had little need to travel outside the village – it had pretty much all the stuff he needed.
Now, obviously what I am describing to you there is a hellscape that would give George Orwell nightmares, where people had zero freedom and were forced to essentially live in self-imposed open-air prisons. Or so you’d be led to believe if you’ve followed any of the panic and protest around the concept of a 15 Minute City.
What is a 15 Minute City?
According to the people working on the concept, by ensuring local neighbourhoods contain all of the basic things you might need for day to day life – such as schools, shops, medical centres, restaurants, bars and libraries – you can design cities for people rather than for cars, meaning people will have less need to get in their emission-generating vehicles to go get the things they need.
The world isn’t built that way right now – it was, once, but without anyone making specific decisions to change that, and without any of us having a say in the matter, distances between amenities have grown. My hometown lost its local shops when big supermarkets set up five or six miles outside of town, and now residents require transport to get food. The nearest shops are in a nearby town, and so are the takeaways and restaurants. If you don’t drive, you’re reliant on the bus service – and even that has been significantly scaled back, with less frequent services and limited routes.
This is the story across the country, from villages to cities, with residents increasingly made to travel distances to access amenities, which is why you’d be forgiven for thinking people would be open to restructuring their local environment to make things more accessible, supporting local businesses and community centres along the way. But if you think that, it’s because you fail to see the bigger picture – the shadowy hand of the new world order. As one viral meme from RedPillConspiracySubstack.com explains:
Climate change lockdowns disguised as 15 minute cities under the UN agenda 2030.
Your Government is pushing ahead with plans to bring 15-minute cities to a location near you. They are a brainchild of the UNs Agenda 2030, and are in effect Climate Change lockdowns. And once combined with a digital ID, a carbon credit score and a programmable central bank digital currency bracket (CBDC) token, you’ve got the perfect recipe for creating a digital open air prison.
It’s a theme that’s picked up by Stand in the Park, the group who spread Covid misinformation during the pandemic by standing in the park and yelling at people (and by turning up to my Glasgow Skeptics in the Pub talk, and yelling at me). They posted a leaflet to their Telegram, which has since bounced around the online conspiracism ecosystem:
Growing paranoia
I’ve been watching paranoia about 15 minute cities grow for months now, tracking it in the various Telegram groups I’ve been following since the start of the pandemic and the White Rose days. The first mention of the idea I came across was on Halloween 2022, with a now-deleted user account posting a Youtube video to the Telegram group “Liverpools Peoples Resistance”:
The video was titled “The new Feudal Age; how the 15 Minute City will mean the return of the Middle Ages to Britain”, from a channel called History Debunked, which has 184,000 subscribers. In it, writer and historian Simon Webb claims that, under the guise of climate protection, cities will be split into zones, with people given a designated zone and discouraged – or even prevented – from leaving it. He incorrectly explains that this is already happening in lots of cities, where you can’t go to certain places unless you’re Muslim or black. He also claims 15 minute cities are deliberately designed to limit our perception and movement, so that we have animosity to anyone outside of our immediate neighbourhood, as people would have had in medieval times.
For context, and for a sense of irony, other videos from the channel claim coverage of the Translatlantic slave trade is a “propagandist racket” designed to give people of African origin preferential status in society, that increasing diversity at universities is a “terrible idea”, and that the attack on migrants in Knowsley was deserved, amid a near-constant stream of anti-migrant, anti-lgbtq+ and anti-diversity rhetoric. Clearly, animosity for those outside of the in-group comes relatively easy to Simon.
In his 15 minute cities video, Simon explains that plans are already underway to turn Oxford into the UK’s first 15 minute city:
A piece from the local newspaper in Oxford explains how the how the whole thing will work. You will not be allowed to leave your road zone by car, or to drive across the boundaries from one zone to another, and if you do so you’ll be fined £70. Residents will be issued with permits which will allow them to leave their zone and visit another part of the city, but only twice a week. After you’ve used up your permit you’ll be fined every time you drive out of your zone. The aim of this is also to ensure that people don’t get jobs outside their zone, their bit of the 15-minute city. Anybody trying to drive every day from one part of Oxford to another to work will be fined £70 for each journey.
This obviously sounds genuinely terrible – to be fined £70 every time you leave your zone of the city would be an enormous infringement on civil liberties. But is that what’s being proposed? Luckily, true to his word, Simon linked to the news story that proved his point. It was in the Oxford Mail, on the 27th October 2022, titled “Anger after travel chief announces traffic filters are ‘going to happen, definitely’ ahead of decision”. In it, the paper quotes Councillor Duncan Enright, of Oxfordshire County Council:
Mr Enright explained in the Sunday Times that the heart of the traffic filters policy was to turn Oxford into “a 15-minute city” with local services within a small walking radius…
People can drive freely around their own neighbourhood and can apply for a permit to drive through the filters, and into other neighbourhoods, for up to 100 days per year. This equates to an average of two days per week.
The alternative is to drive out on to the ring road and then back in to the destination.
Already, the 15 minute city panic is unravelling. It isn’t that people are banned from driving outside of their zone, it’s that they are discouraged from taking the route through the city centre too often – but they’re free to drive around the outside of the city instead.
It’s also crucial here to understand that Oxford is a really small city, of 17 square miles. It is also a medieval city, so it has less than ideal road networks – but for many residents that’s less of a problem, because it is famously a city where cycling is extremely common.
What effect will these new restrictions have? If we look to a map of Oxford, within the ring-road that circulates it, and pick a place very north of the city centre, and plot a route to a location about as far away as possible within the ring road – say, Summertown to Templars Square – we can see that a 4.5 mile route would take 22 minutes to cycle. To do the same journey via car would take 25 minutes… unless you took the ring road, which is three miles longer, but takes just 19 minutes.
And while not everyone can cycle, the Oxford Mail makes clear that the scheme comes with exemptions:
Buses, coaches, taxis, delivery vans, HGVs, motorbikes and bikes are exempt and there are exceptions for blue badge holders and people with caring responsibilities.
People may argue that driving the extra three miles around the ring road undoes the environmental benefits of the scheme, but that’s only if they continue to take car journeys that they might take by foot, bike or public transport, and it’s also not factoring in that part of the emissions issue with driving through the centre of town is in the constant stopping and starting and idling at lights and in traffic – which would be less of an issue on the ring road.
But to be clear, it’s absolutely valid to disagree with or dispute the environmental benefits of the scheme, or its logistical impact on commuting – that’s how policy discussions work, and I’m no expert on the relative merits of varying transport routes across Oxford city centre. But what we can definitely agree on is that it is not going to turn the people of Oxford into an insular tribe that resents and looks down on outsiders. That’s the job of the university.
Still, in his Youtube video, Simon Webb does at least make one true prediction: that 15 minute cities are an idea people would hear a lot more of over the coming months and years.
The 15 minute bandwagon
Around the same time it was surfacing on Telegram, the conservative magazine Spiked began to cover Oxford’s plan, reporting in “The madness of the ‘15-minute city’” that
Under the new proposals, if any of Oxford’s 150,000 residents drives outside of their designated district more than 100 days a year, he or she could be fined £70. Do not leave your allotted zone, at least most of the time – that is the policy.
Whether the author knew at the time that this was not remotely true, or was too incompetent and partisan to bother checking, is anyone’s guess. The article was written by James Woudhuysen, “a visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University”, though it’s also worth mentioning he’s a GBNews broadcaster (more on them later), and actively campaigns against measures to tackle climate change.
The next time the notion surfaced in my conspiracist Telegram channels was 17th November, when Debbie Hicks, armed with a speaker and a microphone, doorstopped Duncan Enright at an Oxfordshire County Council cabinet meeting to yell at him about how terrible it is that he’s splitting Oxford into six zones.
When the accusations are put to Enright, he points out that no, he isn’t splitting Oxford into six zones, and that nobody is, and that that was never the plan. “But you said it in the Oxford Mail!” he’s told. “Well, you can’t believe everything you read in the media” he replies.
Debbie Hicks, for context, was previously ordered to pay £1000 in fines for aggressively confronting two NHS workers while filming inside a hospital in December 2020, when she went to show that it was not busy with Covid patients. She is appealing that decision, and raised £8,000 on CrowdJustice to cover the costs of a Judicial Review.
From November, things really started to ramp up. One video shared to Telegram by Wide Awake Media shows people walking down the street, while facial recognition pops up their name, age and gender, and matches them to a database, tracking how many people are using each street, and breaking them up into demographics.
Is this possible? I’d say it’s not beyond the realms of possibility, and it is something I think it’s fair to be concerned about. But for this to be a legitimate fear specifically about 15 minute cities, you have to believe that this kind of facial tracking system exists, works in real time, but can’t be scaled up to even a county-wide level, let alone a country-wide level. The only bit that needs to scale here is the size of the database it’s referring to – as soon as those cameras have access to a bigger dataset, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve walked 15 minutes or 15 hours to get somewhere.
Familiar names got on board with the 15 minute city panic. David Avocado Wolfe started sharing videos to his prolific Telegram channel, as did anti-5G activist Mark Steele and Covid conspiracist Kate Shemirani and the British Nursing Alliance. The Light Paper began promoting ‘yellow card protests’ that warned about the dangers of the 15 minute city agenda. Katie Hopkins (remember her?) started making videos where she pretended not to understand the function of a ring road. GBNews and TalkTV ran segments calling the plan an illiberal attempt to restrict our movement. In essence, the existing network and infrastructure of Covid deniers and antivaxxers kicked right into gear, shifted their focus, and began to aggressively promote this new fear – whether they truly believed in it, or were merely willing to pretend to be outraged in the pursuit of attention and followers.
On December 31st 2022, Jordan Peterson took time away from his celebratory New Year’s steak to tweet:
The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you’re “allowed” to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea–and, make no mistake, it’s part of a well-documented plan.
In doing so, he retweeted a retired scientist who shared a map of Oxford city centre, a map of Canterbury city centre, and the message: “It’s already happening…. #GreatReset #JailSchwab”
A quick look at this chap Peterson plucked from obscurity and shared to 7.6m people shows a feed filled with Covid conspiracy theories, climate change denialism, and GBNews videos where Neil Oliver warns about the oncoming inevitability of rationing. How Peterson came to find and share a message from someone so thoroughly down the conspiracy theory rabbithole speaks volumes about the Canadian culture warrior’s news diet.
Beyond the digital
As we’ve seen so often with conspiracy theories in the pandemic and post-pandemic world, these paranoias rarely stay limited to the online world. In Colchester, at a council meeting, people turned up to hold up yellow pieces of paper with slogans about resisting restrictions. Do those ring a bell?
One protester interrupted the council meeting to talk about his “god given right to travel freely… it’s in the constitution”. “We haven’t said you can’t travel anywhere”, he’s told. “Not yet, but we know it’s coming”.
“Answer me this”, the protester continues, “Who does this committee work for? Does it work for us, or for a private corporation?” Which, for those who aren’t steeped in pseudolegal rhetoric, is clearly a reference to Sovereign Citizen / Freemen on the Land beliefs.
Elsewhere, the Telegram group Wide Awake Media shared a video of someone “smashing down the Ultra Low Emission Zone cameras in London”, explaining: “
The Ultra Low Emission Zone is an area in London, England where people are fined extortionate sums of money for driving cars that don’t meet arbitrary “minimum emissions standards”. Basically, it’s a stepping stone towards ’15 minute cities’, being used to desensitise the sheep to the idea of “climate-based” restrictions on their freedom of movement.
What is that, if it’s not setting fire to your local 5G mast? It’s clear we’re seeing the pandemic protest playbook being recycled for the new Big Bad.
It even came up in parliament, with Nick Fletcher, the Conservative MP who won his seat in Don Valley in 2019, asking on February 9th:
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? Ultra low emission zones in their present form do untold economic damage to any city. The second step, after such 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.
A week later, there was a rally which saw thousands of people headed to Oxford, presumably by car, to explain how they’re pretty sure the locals didn’t want these traffic calming measures. Antivaxxer and climate change denier Piers Corbyn was there. Failed Mayoral candidate Lawrence Fox was also there, saying he objects to being told where he can and can’t go (which is understandable, as I imagine most people who meet Lawrence Fox tell him where to go).
The crowd carried placards with scary slogans, like “Smart cities really means open prisons”, and “Global fascists want us terrified”, and “Zero Carbon means Zero life”. There were multiple placards bearing the words “Wanted: Duncan Enright. An enemy of democracy”. Which is a little unfair on Duncan Enright, Deputy Leader of the West Oxfordshire District Council, and man who has been on camera saying no, this isn’t what you’re saying it is, and it’s not happening anyway.
One video of the rally, produced by Childrens Health Defense, run by antivaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr, was titled “12 year old girl DESTROYS concept of 15 minute cities”, and was shared to Telegram with the message “OXFORD PROTEST Got their own Greta”. In it, a young girl screamed “How dare you?!” at Klaus Schwab, chair of the WEF, in her best Great Thunberg voice, while the crowd roared with laughter.
The rogue’s gallery
It is worth reflecting for a moment on the many names who have come up in relation to the 15 minute cities panic: The People’s Resistance, Stand in the Park, David Avocado Wolfe, Kate Shemirani, Mark Steele, The Light Paper, Lawrence Fox, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Katie Hopkins, GBNews, Spiked Online, Piers Corbyn, the lady who shouted at NHS workers during a Covid shift. To those we can add others who are just as on board, like David Icke, Jim Corr, Matt Le Tissier, Right Said Fred, and more. These are the same names we’ve covered for years for their Covid and vaccine conspiracism.
The fact that there are so many antivaxxers and Covid conspiracy theorists involved in this whole movement shouldn’t be a big surprise: for the last three years, those communities have come together with a sense of taking direct real action against the perceived bad guys, forming networks and support structures along the way. They burn down infrastucture they deem to be evil, they mob council meetings, they doorstop people to grill them on their conspiracy theory talking points, they rally in city centres, and they film and upload everything to Telegram, where they are constantly posting.
They did that with Covid in mind, but of late they’ve been forced to shift focus, because people aren’t dying in their hundreds of thousands from the virus or from 5G, the predicted totalitarian ‘forever lockdowns’ simply didn’t happen, and the freedoms that were restricted during social distancing are back. The bad guys didn’t take more, they didn’t step into outright fascism… that time. So, where do they turn next? They need to find the next thing that will get the band back together and keep the conspiracism rolling.
With their biggest fears around Covid and its effect on society fading back or proving overblown, rather than seeing people go back to their previous lives, we’re seeing the antivaxx and conspiracy theorist communities staying together and maintaining those strong communal bonds. Which is ironic, because supporting and strengthening communities is precisely one of the aims of 15 minute cities in the first place.
