and they persuaded the (increasingly-desperate) Tories to listen to them:
Speaking at the Conservative Party conference on Monday, Transport Secretary Mark Harper said he was "calling time on the misuse of so-called '15-minute cities'".
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"What is sinister and what we shouldn't tolerate is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops and that they ration who uses the roads and when, and they police it all with CCTV."
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The creator of "15-minute cities", urban planner Carlos Moreno, issued a statement later on Monday calling on the government to reconsider its stance.
"Associating the '15-minute city' again with so-called 'liberty-restricting' measures is tantamount to aligning with the most radical and anti-democratic elements," he wrote.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66990302Sound idyllic? Not if you’re Rishi Sunak. The prime minister used an interview before this week’s party conference to “hit out” at the 15-minute city concept, saying there was a “relentless attack” on motorists who “depend on their cars to get to work, take their kids to school, do their shopping, see the doctor” – ignoring that this dependence is exactly what the model aims to reduce.
The transport secretary, Mark Harper, went further, telling delegates the 15-minute cities concept was “a Labour-backed movement … to remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want.
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The Tories may be reaching to the right amid desperate polling numbers, but their explicit evocation of a known conspiracy theory is new territory. In an interview with the BBC, energy minister Andrew Bowie said local authorities were “dictating to people that they must choose to access services within 15 minutes of their house”. Challenged that this was a “pretend argument”, Bowie said the issue was “coming up in discussions on forums online”.
“I can’t really think of another example where we’ve had the government in this country lean into a conspiracy,” said Daniel Jolley, an assistant professor in social psychology at the university of Nottingham, who researches conspiracy theories and their social impact. “The government hasn’t generally played into conspiratorial narrative – on Covid for instance, or climate change – so this seems to be a unique spin.”
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2023/oct/07/15-minute-cities-rishi-sunak-tories-conspiracy-theoryYou know that if the Tories have bought into the conspiracy theories, then the Republicans will make it 10 times worse. It needs a new name, or the US media coverage will be swamped with conspiracy theories before there's a chance to explain what it actually means.
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