Every day, the same doom and despair. Every day, a new bouquet of pessimism. The latest GDP figures show the economy shrinking. The latest polling figures show Reform surging. We’re told that Keir Starmer doesn’t have a narrative, or any charisma, or an ideological grounding. It’s all drifting towards disaster.
British progressives are so used to despondency that we’ve forgotten how to experience anything else. We’re so good at dejection that we don’t want to give it up. So instead, we slink back into our armchairs and slump down on our pub stools and grumble about how hopeless everything is and how likely Labour is to lose the election in five years time.
But what happens if we take a different approach and look at what the Government actually did this week? A striking picture emerges. Instead of seeming small and timid, it seems vast, ambitious, radical. When you look at what it is actually doing, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party does not appear like this timid little mouse people seem intent on painting it as. It’s engaged in one of the most far-reaching governance projects we’ve seen in our lifetime.
In some areas, the critics are right – Labour’s agenda does seem unplanned and sudden, the product of insufficient thinking before the election. That’s the impression you get with some of the economic policies, like the winter fuel allowance. It’s also what you see in more obscure areas, like the tentative and half-hearted steps towards constitutional reform. But in certain key areas, like housing and the environment, they are doing something else entirely. Their approach is planned, co-ordinated, laser-focused and thoroughly thought-through. It is the product of years of work, much of which took place well before the election.
On Thursday, the Government unveiled its new National Planning Policy Framework. It involves housebuilding targets for every part of the country, with some councils having to raise development rates by five times their current performance. There are sanctions for local authorities who block new housebuilding, and fast-tracking plans for freight and logistics hubs. The plan is to build 1.5 million homes by 2029.
On Friday, it unveiled its “Plan for Change” on clean electricity, which aims to double onshore wind and triple offshore wind and solar power. The ambition here is pretty much off the scale. It’s taken 20 years to get offshore to 14.8GW. Labour now plans to get it to 50GW in the next six years. It’s going to have to overhaul the national grid to rationalisation production and usage – a fiendish technical problem. It will require co-ordinated progress across a range of areas, from smart metering to EV charging. And it will demand that local communities cannot scupper the whole thing by mounting resistance. It is a vast project.
What are the benefits of accomplishing it? Cheaper electricity in the long run, with a more secure and predictable energy market that no longer relies on countries like Russia. More work, more investment, more training, more skills. And all of it in an area where there is significant international demand, meaning we can then export knowledge and skills. And then, of course, the small matter of preventing climate change. Of showing that Britain can still be a world leader, not through rhetoric or jingoism, but in the more old-fashioned sense of noticing problems and quietly getting on with doing something about them.
There are problems in both these cases. The planning programme is proceeding with such a frenzied sense of pace that it seems likely to jettison a concern about beauty. This is often treated as a bourgeois concern. It is not. Homes and neighbourhoods should be humane and pleasant. People deserve a beautiful place to live. They must not feel that their town has been stamped over it in a hurried act of bargain-rate identikit design conformity.
The clear electricity plans are so ambitious they are probably undeliverable on this timescale. They could be derailed by any of one of dozens of potential obstacles, like so many big projects before them. If so, Labour’s ambition will have proved self-defeating, undermining net zero and playing in to the hands of the smirking populists.
But whatever the problems, you cannot challenge the ambition. And you cannot challenge the radicalism either.
In every one of these cases, Labour’s programme is based on market failure. It is a far more left-wing political project than the one conducted by Tony Blair in the New Labour era. Blair instinctively assumed that markets were more efficient and the state less efficient. Starmer instead believes that state involvement allows the markets to work at peak efficiency.
So for instance, the Government has introduced higher reserve prices and increased the budget at clean energy auctions. It’s looking at how to pinpoint state investment so it can “crowd-in” private investment. Port infrastructure can facilitate offshore wind farm investment. Charging points can encourage electric car purchases. Loan guarantees for carbon capture and storage can reduce the cost of capital and de-risk private sector lending.
It’s perfectly sensible to ask what happens if the Government fails. But at some point we might like to ask ourselves: what if it succeeds? What if the next five years actually sees these projects triumph?
There is a staggering disconnect between what the Government is doing and the manner in which it is discussed. These are big projects. They are generation-defining political events. Labour’s critics would be more convincing if they showed some awareness that they were even taking place.
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