The ghost of Ramsay MacDonald

I’ve no idea whether it’s true or not that deputy prime minister Angela Rayner actually threatened to quit when she twigged the Government’s 1.5 million house building target by July 2029 is completely impossible and had to be talked out of it by Tony Blair. But it’s plausible.

The story appeared in an updated biography of Keir Starmer penned by Lord Ashcroft, a political opponent, so perhaps one should take it with a pinch of salt. It’s anyway hard to know how highly the feisty Rayner rates Blair’s reputation, which has taken another knock since then with his ridiculous comments about climate change.

Nevertheless, Rayner isn’t a complete fool, so she must have twigged by now the pup that lobbyists batting for commercial developers and Tufton Street think-tanks sold Starmer while leading Labour in opposition was a pile of baloney.

Builders are already trotting out their excuses – not enough building workers, materials in short supply, the economic situation… plus the usual massive lie about it all being the fault of the planning system. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves must be about the last politicians in Britain who actually believe that last one, although the lobbyists and influencers are still churning it out for the gullible.

The massive mistake the two made in opposition was not just believing this well-crafted campaign, it was putting their party’s faith in the UK’s commercial house building industry, whose ability to do exactly what it wants and wave two fingers at the government of the day, is legendary.

All Starmer and Reeves needed to do, before pissing off every environmentally minded person in the country by calling them “blockers”, would have been to ask how many unbuilt housing consents had been left by the increasingly damaged and free-for-all planning regimes their predecessors created. The answer, by last year, was well over a million.

Why was this? It’s very simple: builders don’t build if it suits them not to build. That’s not an unreasonable stance – their first duty (after obeying the law) is to their shareholders. Their potential customers are well down that list; gullible politicians across the House come nowhere.

So basing an unreachable building target on the noises made by builders’ lobbyists was, at best, a high-risk strategy, at worst complete idiocy. Everyone in the sector knows that those very high targets can only be achieved by building huge numbers of social-rent homes, as happened in the post-war decades. But the chances of Rachel Reeves’ Treasury allowing that are about as high as Tufton Street think-tanks converting to environmentalism.

The country is certainly getting many ill-planned blobs of “red box burbs” on its productive farmland – the sort of totally-unsustainable-and-very-little-use-in-meeting-housing-need houses builders like because it’s most profitable to drop such blobs at car-dependent locations lacking much in the way of services. But 300,000 a year? Time for those who lead the government to have a rethink.

Perhaps they could have a think about the fate of Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 government. Then, a prime minister and chancellor alienated their party by moving to right-wing economic policies at a time of instability, and splitting it badly. Macdonald ended up leading a “national government” which was essentially the Conservatives and handfuls of other right-wing politicians.

They say history never repeats itself. Don’t bank on it.

Jon Reeds