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The Old War Office on Whitehall, London
'There have been royal palaces there since the time of King Canute. It became the magnificent palace of Henry VIII. It is the backdrop for Wolf Hall.' Photograph: Alamy
'There have been royal palaces there since the time of King Canute. It became the magnificent palace of Henry VIII. It is the backdrop for Wolf Hall.' Photograph: Alamy

Selling the Old War Office is public theft, plain and simple

This article is more than 9 years old
Anne Perkins
If you thought Margaret Thatcher flogging the GLC building was a low point for public space, try Michael Fallon’s sale of a 1,000-year-old site

Want to buy a used forklift truck? A Kassbohrer Faun 4 axle tank transporter semi-trailer with 62,000kg capacity? A secondhand all-terrain vehicle? An ambulance, perhaps, or a rear admiral’s flag?

Then there is a website for you. Several of them in fact, just type “MoD sales” into your search engine. It’s a new kind of shopping porn for those of us who experience a nano-pang of desire at the sight of anything with a price tag attached.

Today, the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, will announce that he has to flog off more bits of army surplus. It isn’t something that will come hard to Fallon, a minister who has brought a long overdue rigour to the MoD’s notoriously flexible notions of accounting. But the flipside of his political instinct for efficiency is a deeply held belief that there is something wrong about governments owning almost anything.

Being in charge of a department with an almost unbroken record of over-enthusiastic procurement, given to commissioning planes that never quite fly and ships that are too expensive to equip, has given full rein to his enthusiasm for eBay. Even if it’s screwed down, a way will be found to flog it off. There is something rather admirable about such determined house-keeping.

But somewhere beyond the surplus combat trousers, beyond the Brompton Road tube station, a war-time command post which was sold a year ago for £53m, and beyond even the Ark Royal aircraft carrier, sold for scrap in 2012, there are limits.

Austerity has pushed many public bodies towards some hard choices. Croydon council is not the only public body that, to try and balance the books, sold off a precious asset – in its case a collection of Ming china, which was a generous gift made within living memory by a collector who wanted the public to be able to share his pleasure. An appreciation of fine porcelain is, it is true, a minority interest. All the same, to deprive its citizens of the chance to experience it is a kind of theft.

But there is a more extreme and much more common deprivation that has hollowed out city centres for more than a generation, and is now being revived by Fallon’s MoD fire sale. Town halls, the glorious legacy of Victorian civic pride, were wantonly disposed of in the 1960s. It was a move that reached its apogee with the vindictive and conspicuous trouncing of London government when Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council and, in order to perform a kind of victory jig on its grave, sold off its majestic building.

Ken Livingstone used to fly a banner with the tally of London unemployed from its upper floors in what turned out to be a suicidal tease of the Conservative government just across the Thames. In vain, Thatcher’s own ministers begged the prime minister to keep the building for public purposes. Universities beseeched her to let them develop it. One senior minister drew up a plan to use the site to establish an equivalent of the French university for top civil servants, the École Normale d’Administration. Thatcher, appalled at the idea of a permanent base for student demonstrations a stone’s throw Westminster, allowed it to be turned into a hotel instead.

And now this diminution of the public space is back. Michael Fallon has sold off the Old War Office building in Whitehall to be, yes, another sleek and characterless central London hotel. The private is being invited in at our expense, but not to our benefit.

This matters not because the building itself is particularly distinguished. It is important because of where it is and what it represents. It is at the heart of Whitehall, the centre of public affairs. There have been royal palaces there since the time of King Canute. The “white” in Whitehall comes from Cardinal Wolsey’s white stone palace in York Place. It became the magnificent palace of Henry VIII. It is the backdrop for Wolf Hall. Underground passages and vast wine cellars lie beneath the government buildings. The War Office itself was used by David Lloyd George and John Profumo and Lawrence of Arabia.

All public space matters. But public space that has been shaped by a thousand years of history belongs to us. It is part of our shared inheritance. It is not the property of a government that may be gone in a matter of months, something to be sold in a job lot with a couple of redundant water purifiers. Selling the Old War Office is selling our past. It is stealing from the public.

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