Why It Has To Be Labour (Alas)

The Strange Death of Tory England

It’s been nearly a century since George Dangerfield published his seminal book on the downfall of the British Liberals. The Strange Death of Liberal England tells the story of how a mighty force of 19th century politics was set ablaze by infighting and incompetence. Squeezed on the right by the Tories and on the left by an emergent Labour, the party Gladstone called home went from landslide to near irrelevance in less than two decades. 100 years later and history is contemptuously self-plagiarising. Except for today’s Tories it’s all happening rather quicker. Bring it on.

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On the 4th July I’ll be voting Labour. Not you understand, with much enthusiasm, more in desperation. On the most important question of the day - planning reform - Labour has far more to say than anybody else. We haven’t built enough houses, railways, energy capacity or reservoirs in recent decades and it is making us poorer, sicker, and more miserable.

Starmer is a self-confessed Yimby, and Rachel Reeves hasn’t disguised her belief that the current planning system is holding Britain back. Five years ago Labour’s manifesto read like the output of an AI trained on dog-eared back issues of the Morning Star. This one is a plan for government. Labour promises to get Britain building again, bringing back mandatory housing targets and supporting the construction of vital national infrastructure.

I’ll stop you before you say that we’ve heard all this before because of course we have. In 2019 the Tories came forth with similar pledges to build 300,000 homes a year, Boris Johnson loved a big infrastructure project. And yet housebuilding targets have been abolished, reforms watered down, and HS2 cancelled. We have scarcely managed to hit 200,000 homes a year. This time feels different though, because whilst Labour’s planning policy is not perfect it does give us some idea of how the party will meet its targets.

Councils will be forced to produce up to date plans on how they will meet housing need, and if they do not then plans will be forced on them from Whitehall. If local authorities cannot build enough houses on brownfield land then the party will turn to the greenbelt.

Rather than allowing this white elephant to keep our cities in a vice-like grip, Labour are pledging pragmatism, the release of “grey-belt” land, the huge swathes of the greenbelt that are neither green nor pleasant but are instead disused car parks or derelict buildings. Infrastructure projects of national importance meanwhile, will be given a presumption in favour of approval under a broader rework of the planning framework. Pylons, power stations, and data centres, go forth.

The vibes are good also for Labour to follow through on their promises. Whilst the Tories talked of building homes, their MPs went back to their constituencies and campaigned against them on behalf of the retired homeowners who vote blue. Labour’s voter coalition is a different demographic, skewing younger, much more likely to rent, not drawing their income from pensions or investments.

Labour also needs economic growth if they are to fix public services, this isn’t 1997 and there certainly isn’t any money to be chucking around. Our planning system has had our economy in a chokehold, Starmer and Reeves seem to get this. Planning reform is a priority for the first 100 days of an incoming Labour government, you don’t put it so high up the list unless you mean business.

None of which is to say that the manifesto or their planning policy is perfect. I’d like to see the whole discretionary system ripped up in favour of a ruled based one with an across the board presumption in favour of building. I’m concerned that 5% deposits on houses will trap people in negative equity as the supply of homes increases. The idea that “local people” should get first dibs on new build housing seems destined to further depress the dynamism of the British labour market.

Then there’s industrial strategy or picking winners in the private sector, which just doesn’t work. Or the embrace of the “we must do something about this” approach to politics where policies are considered entirely based on the gross size of their positive impact with no regard to the net tradeoffs; Cigarettes are bad for you therefore they must be banned, regardless of whether this clamps down on individual freedom or leads to a boom for the black market. There will be more named laws than you can possibly imagine. The state may ensure you can own a home, but it will also become your parent.

Some or all of this might once have given me pause for thought before my X went in the Labour box. But planning reform is too important. Labour could get much of the other stuff wrong, but if they get Britain building they will have cleared the path to a better future. Regardless, haven’t the Tories been much the same over the past decade and a half? It’s them who introduced levies on sugary drinks, banned legal highs, and raised the spectre of a cigarette ban.

It’s the Tories who’ve wrapped businesses in regulations, and inflated the housing market with demand side measures like help to buy. It really shouldn’t be this way round. Economic growth should be unleashed by the right, property owning democracy should be our preserve. In past elections, the aspirational have voted Conservative. If you’re aspirational in 2024 you’d be a fool not to vote for somebody else.

Over the last 14 years the Tories have delivered socialism for the old and rentier capitalism for everybody else. The average pensioner has seen their household income rise by £510 a year since 2010 whilst a working family with two kids has found itself £375 a year worse off.

Child poverty is now almost double the rate of pensioner poverty, whilst the tax burden has hit a record high for workers, the triple locked state pension is being spewed out to the 25% of pensioners who are millionaires. Capital investment has plummeted, housebuilding stagnated, tuition fees trebled, all whilst handouts to the elderly increased and healthcare spending became an albatross around young people’s necks.

It didn’t have to be this way, the Labour party spent the entirety of the 2010s in disarray and decisions that promote economic growth are always popular in the medium term when the benefits are felt. The Tories have chosen to take the easy path not the necessary one. I hate that I’m left with this choice but I’m not going to vote for a party that has punished me repeatedly just for wanting a better future.

After this election the centre-right will need rebuilding from the ground up. Not by the regressive politics of Braverman and Farage nor the damp one nation thinking of Onward and its supporters. If the Conservative party is to survive then it will do so by embracing an aspirational, optimistic, and above all economically liberal vision for Britain. The irony of Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England is that despite the book hanging around, most of his conclusions have been dismissed by historians.

It was not the suffragettes or the militant trade unions that cost the Liberal party so many seats. Instead, it was because the party stopped being the home of those with liberal values, overtaken on the left by Labour and the right by the Conservatives. A big Labour victory is no guarantee that the Tories will learn the right lessons from defeat, they may still blame the quangos, the civil service, and “woke culture”. But it will shatter any illusion that the party can avoid taking a long hard look at its mistakes in office. And hey if nothing else at least I might be able to afford a house.

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