Donald Trump’s macho populism is catching on. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, has caught it bad. His mission for the economy is to grow, baby, grow. His abuse of his perceived enemies is relentless. He doles out not so much policies as Labour passion projects: Heathrow expansion, onshore wind turbines and Ed Miliband’s pylons plan. As for consequences, they are for wimps.
Hardly had Trump ended his inaugural rant than Starmer launched another assault on his pet hates, “nimbys” and “blockers”. They join a burgeoning parade of his selected victims such as farmers, private schools, planning committees and any defender of the green belt or countryside. But with these latest scapegoats, he seems to be assembling a gallery of people to blame if growth fails to happen.
Like many a populist, Starmer has made large infrastructure projects his favourite toy. Contractors and the media love them, while boring small businesses can be taxed and public services starved to pay for them. Nonetheless, this week the health secretary, Wes Streeting, announced that work on some of the “40 new hospitals” that Boris Johnson promised to build by 2030 would not begin until 2039. The budget for that infrastructure project, he said, was a Tory “work of fiction”. Labour will put £15bn into each of the three waves of spending on the project over the next 15 years.
The country desperately needs that money, yet Starmer lacks the guts to kill – or at least stall indefinitely – David Cameron’s vanity project, the HS2 railway. With no friends left even in Whitehall, it is already stalled north of Birmingham. At present its track-laying is using up Streeting’s £15bn roughly every two years. Continuing the tunnel to Euston alone will cost an estimated £1bn. Nor is there a penny extra for England’s desperately needed care homes, only a three-year wait for an inquiry into them.
The next Labour vanity project is reported to be a third runway at Heathrow, the HS2 of airports. The second most polluted part of the capital is to be further fouled. Airports are glamour infrastructure, but they are anti-green and have little to do with growth. They are essentially a tourism facility, overwhelmingly used by Britons for their leisure. Even at England’s premier “business” airport, Heathrow, only 19% of passengers are travelling for business. Polluting and persecuting west London merely to appease airline executives just shows a lobby talking.
As for nimbys, Starmer is right that planning rules can stifle new building, but there is no case for his patent assumption that every planning application merits approval. Bad planning decisions can waste resources, destroy beauty and deny the importance of reusing old buildings. The appeal process should be shortened. One appeal, properly conducted, should be enough. But that should not mean insulting anyone objecting to a forest of wind turbines in their village or another Labour project for giant pylons in East Anglia.
Delays in planning, especially of grand infrastructure, are more because of central rather than local government. Whitehall is the imposer of many of the most onerous environmental surveys, “bat corridors” and impact assessments. The city of Leeds had to wait 11 months for the government to decide even whether it would decide on an expanded Leeds Bradford airport.
Now Angela Rayner, as secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, intends to go further. To punish local planning committees for their failure to do the government’s bidding, she is disbanding the majority of them in favour of larger units of local government, those of half a million people or more. These will be under a new breed of regional mayors, working to central targets.
North Yorkshire was stripped of all eight of its county, borough and district councils, which were combined into one authority. Hull is to be submerged into “Hull and East Yorkshire”. Mayors throughout history have been identified in the minds of voters with towns or cities, not territorial regions. Political accountability for compact cities is the essence of mayoralty in France, Germany, the US and elsewhere. English democracy is being eroded.
Rayner’s evisceration of English local government will disrupt and impoverish an already blighted sector of public life. Her department previously oversaw 15 years of unprecedented cuts in local services under the Conservatives. Day-to-day spending was slashed by a quarter to a third between 2010 and 2021. Youth clubs and old people’s services have vanished. Police stations, care homes, galleries and museums seem to close by the week.
No democracy should strip its villages and towns of control over their environs. Planning has been the last area in which local people – combined in an identified town or “district” – have enjoyed some genuine discretion over the character of where they live. They have been able to conserve what they want to conserve, welcome what they want to welcome. This freedom has been crucial in retaining a sense of contrast between rural and urban areas, even in so crowded a country as Britain. I am sure even Trump would not mess in this way with the map of US democracy.
Now, to redraw the map of local Britain and deprive its citizens of control over their communities may seem trivial from the corridors of London power. But it is a truly drastic step, being taken so Starmer and Rayner can force through grandiose targets and vanity projects in the belief that they will somehow deliver growth. As it is, I doubt that disempowering local people will silence them. It is more likely to enrage them. Indeed it should prove a gift to Britain’s more authentic populists: those of Reform UK.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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