Milestones or millstones?

Who said history never repeats itself?

In Whitehall, Gordon Brown was known as “the Great Clunking Fist”. Now, in his “Plan for Change” speech last Thursday, Sir Keir Starmer promised that his plan would “land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down”.

He promised his “mission-led government” would be dynamic, more decisive, more innovative, less hostile to devolution, creative and would rethink services.

“We must also tear down the walls of who let the nation build its capacity from partnership,” said the transcript of his Pinewood speech, whatever that means.

Sir Keir set out his six “milestones” for this Parliament, most of them admirable and, with the right policies, mostly achievable. But his commitment to clean power by 2030, would ensure that “never again can a tyrant like Putin attack the living standards of working people” would, however, seem to reflect a degree of naïvety about the realities of world security.

Yet, of course, it’s his Mileston No.2 – “Britain rebuilt with 1.5 million new homes” – where the shoe is likely to pinch hardest in terms of achievability, the environmental destruction involved and the inevitable opposition.

Sir Keir delivers his “Plan for Change”

“Some people may say… building 1.5m homes is ambitious,” he admitted in a rare moment of honesty. “A little too honest perhaps. And look, I’ll be honest… they’re right.”

They are, but his motivation here is a confused mess. He started by saying the “base camp aspiration of home ownership” shouldn’t move further and further away from working-class families like his own. OK, so it’s about home ownership? But a few sentences later he was bemoaning waiting lists over seven million. Ah, so it’s actually about building social-rent?

In any case, Sir Keir is now employing language apparently written for him by Tufton Street lobbyists.

“Take our planning system,” he moaned. “A blockage in our economy that is so big… it obscures an entire future… stops this country building roads, grid connections, laboratories, trainlines, warehouses, windfarms, power stations. You name it. A chokehold on the growth our country needs. Suffocating the aspirations of working families.”

Then it was on to infrastructure and the lack of new reservoirs for 30 years and the £100m HS2 bat tunnel. (Someone please break it to him that HS2 projects tend to be, er, ruinously expensive).

This is so breathtakingly numb-skull, it could only have started life in a neoliberal “think-tank”. No, Sir Keir, effective planning is essential to getting all those things efficiently. Destroy it and all you will get is an ill-judged mess of unco-ordinated and expensive projects which fail to achieve the basic things intended. More Dounreays, more urban motorways leading nowhere, more derelict out-of-town shopping etc..

But what really stands out is Sir Keir’s child-like 1960s vision of a future built around motorways, sprawl housing, nuclear power stations and massive HGV-dependent distribution sheds. All coupled with a 1980s vision of a free-market economy.

Is there no-one in our government who can gently take hold of the “heavy thudding gauntlet” and explain to its owner that the 20^th century, with its disastrous economic, environmental and social failures, is over? The challenges of the coming decades have no need of new motorways and warehouses.

We shouldn’t need to be building reservoirs below current sea-levels in the Fens because the Government has decided its key growth-area should lie on some of our most productive food-producing land – in one of the first areas to be lost to the sea when Antarctic ice-sheets start to fail, as they now inevitably will. This is basic PLANNING and your Government is already failing.

Sir Keir, you addressed a “very clear message to the nimbys, the regulators [!], the blockers and the bureaucrats” that they no longer have the upper hand.

Ask any regulator, conservationist or environmentalist whether they’ve had any sort of upper hand in recent decades. They will laugh at you.

So, on behalf of the “nimbys” and the “blockers”, we will fight you if we have to, but the need for sustainable development instead of the 1960s brutalist mess you seem to admire should be evident to a man of your intelligence.

Judging progress by building raw numbers of any sorts of home anywhere, and by planning consents for any form of infrastructure anywhere, is just plain barmy. These are millstones, not milestones.

Safeguarding and improving the lives of millions, as you rightly aspire, will need very different solutions in the mid-21^st century to the late 20^th.

It’s time, Sir Keir, you had the courage to find out why.

Jon Reeds