Rachel from accounts is settling up. In a speech at Siemens Healthineers near Oxford, the Chancellor signalled her commitment to development by backing a third runway at Heathrow, placing her on a collision course with net-zeroers, Nimbys and the other forces of decline. The interests ranged against her are mighty and loud, but if she delivers she will draw crucial battle lines for the next general election: a Labour government that gets things done versus the party of inertia and stagnation.
The UK spent 14 years in stasis under a succession of Tory governments that preferred the maintenance of office to the exercise of power. Reeves has an opportunity to show that Labour is prepared to wield power to build a Britain fit for the future, by doing the hard graft the Conservatives were too lazy to do: revamping and expanding infrastructure, removing the hurdles to house building and home ownership, reshaping the public sector for a growing and changing population, and clearing the way for enterprise, innovation and economic growth. In short, Reeves has the chance to rescue the UK from its long national afternoon nap and let the nation flourish again.
For that to happen, the Chancellor will have to defeat the declinists, not least her cabinet colleague Ed Miliband, a radical climate ideologue whose every instinct is inimical to economic growth and human achievement. It will not be enough to sideline Miliband: Reeves will have to convince the Prime Minister to decouple growth and climate policy, so that the two goals are pursued in parallel but with growth the clear priority. The Treasury’s briefing on Reeves’ speech, which is keen to emphasise that Heathrow expansion ‘must be delivered in line with UK’s legal, environmental and climate obligations’, is an indication of the policy mindset that needs to be overcome. The government’s obligation should be to grow the economy, and any legal, environmental or climate commitments that impede this outcome should be considered for repeal.
Heathrow expansion and the 100,000 jobs the Treasury estimates it will create can only happen if the necessary infrastructure is in place, not least sufficient housing for workers attracted to the local area. The same is true of other projects announced in Reeves’ speech and emphasises the need to make Britain a building nation.
For too long, planning regulations have allowed Nimbys to block new homes and other developments, meaning national priorities can be held hostage by local busybodies hellbent on shoring up the value of their homes at the expense of young couples desperate to buy and start a family. It is madness for any country to let itself be hobbled by such people but positively suicidal for an economy as mired in sluggish growth and productivity as the UK. Nimbyism and the red tape that facilitates it have been socially and economically ruinous to this country, with so much of our current malaise capable of being traced back to our dysfunctional planning regulations. If Nimbys cannot be dissuaded by evidence of the societal harms their actions cause, and if they will not yield to appeals to economic necessity or the national interest, they will have to be stripped of their power to hold this country’s future to ransom. The Prime Minister has outlined legal reforms designed to prioritise ‘builders’ over ‘blockers’, but to rid Britain of its culture of Nimbyism will require more radical changes to planning law.
The road is long and the hurdles many but Rachel Reeves has charted a path that could get the UK out of the economic cul-de-sac the country has been stalled in for more than a decade. The Tories idled, Britain came to a standstill, and it falls to a neophyte Labour chancellor to get us moving again. We have to be realistic: absent a complete transformation in Labour’s attitude to growth, the odds of success are against her. But if she is up for a fight, this is a fight worth having, a fight the country cannot afford her not to have. To outsiders, the UK appears stuck, a going-nowhere-soon nation that has settled into its comfy slippers for a long retirement. What’s worse is that we seem content with this slow fade to black.
Britain is worth saving. Will Rachel Reeves be the one to save it?
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