The government has yet to formally announce its widely trailed decision to expand Gatwick, Heathrow, and Luton airports. But that hasn’t stopped six MPs from writing to Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander with a pre-emptive attack. The four Green MPs, perhaps, plus a couple of anti-capitalist hard left Labourites? Nope. Four Lib Dems and two Conservatives – one of whom is, astonishingly, Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Business Secretary.
The idea of the Shadow Business Secretary campaigning against a core component of economic growth would be funny if it wasn’t so utterly damning
Griffith tells Alexander that local residents’ “life is blighted every single day by the noise of take-offs and landings at Gatwick Airport.” You might think that goes with the territory when you choose to live near an airport, but heh ho. (Responding to the revelation of his letter, Griffith, whose constituency is near Gatwick, said he would be happy to see Heathrow expanded, just not Gatwick – as fine an example of NIMBYism as anyone could want.)
The idea of the Shadow Business Secretary campaigning against a core component of economic growth would be funny if it wasn’t so utterly damning of the current state of the Conservative Party. The last time a Shadow Business Secretary was focused on attacking ideas that help business was when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, and the likes of Clive Lewis and Rebecca Long-Bailey held the post.
But it’s not just Griffith’s stance on airport expansion that is the problem for the Conservatives. It’s that it is entirely unsurprising, since in so many core areas it has been approaching the government from the left.
It’s easy to dismiss this as an ideologically driven left-wing government, because in many ways that’s what it is. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, for example, is a wish-list of teaching union demands. And Ed Miliband is a walking disaster in charge of energy policy.
But if you look through another prism the picture is very different – and shows the government outflanking the Tories in boldness and a willingness to tackle vested interests.
For all the outrage, for example, over the abolition of the winter fuel payment, it was an anachronistic legacy of Gordon Brown’s 1997 budget, when 45 per cent of pensioners were living in poverty. But pensioner poverty today is 16 per cent, and pensioners’ income is already boosted by measures such as the (equally bad) ‘triple lock’. Allowing for family size and housing costs, the median pensioner today is better off than the median working-age family. But instead of preparing the groundwork for a more interesting to approach to tackling poverty, the Conservatives (under Rishi Sunak as Leader of the Opposition) simply went for knee-jerk opposition and voted against the cut.
Earlier this month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting agreed a deal with the private sector to tackle hospital waiting lists and to offer patients greater choice over where they are treated. The NHS and private sector will align their digital systems so they are all compatible with the NHS app, and there will be a series of longer-term contracts to ensure growing private sector investment in NHS capacity. It’s reminiscent of the Concordat signed by the then Labour health secretary Alan Milburn in 2000, which entirely wrong-footed the Tories, who had no idea how to respond to something far bolder than they had ever dared to contemplate.
In housing, the government is paving the way for a huge building boom, taking on the entrenched interests to which the Tories capitulated. Labour is looking for an average of 370,000 homes to be approved every year through a redrawing of planning rules. If certain basic pre-requisites are met, there will be “significant weight in favour of the grant of permission” – including on some green belt land.
A sensible opposition looking to build a clear stance for the future would welcome the government’s intentions and hold its feet to the fire – not least because one key reason support for the Conservatives hemorrhaged was the housing crisis. Instead, Shadow Housing Secretary Kevin Hollinrake walked right into the government’s trap, accusing it of waging a “war on rural England”.
Whatever their ideological leanings, the government is wising up to easy wins. Last week, for example Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that she is going to water down Jeremy Hunt’s abolition of non-dom tax status, which she pledged in last autumn’s budget to remove by April. Even Ed Miliband, that most dogmatic of ministers, has abolished the Tories’ ban on all new gas boilers from 2035.
In other words, it is myopic to focus only on Labour’s statist and ideological policies. The government is in the middle of a “zero-based” spending review that requires every pound spent to be justified. Yes, this is a tax and spend government. But what will be the Tories’ response to a plausible scenario in 2026/27 when the spending review has had an impact, when the NHS is visibly improving, when house building is everywhere, when Liz Kendall’s vaunted welfare reforms have kicked in – and when Rachel Reeves’ pre-election budget knocks a penny off income tax?
Kemi Badenoch has the strategic sense to see all this, and she is sensible not to commit to specific policies now. But it’s not too early to start shaping a serious response to Labour. Indeed it’s vital, before it becomes too late.
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