Happy Christmas - here's to less planning and more chainsaw wielding libertarians

If I were to have one Christmas wish fulfilled, it would be that fewer people spent a lot less time knowing better how you should live your life while being almost entirely wrong.

I’ve been awarded a prize. It came on ex-twitter where a vociferous planner dubbed me a “crypto-NIMBY” for the terrible crime of thinking that centralised strategic planning is a bad idea.

“@SimonMagus Narrowly beating @freddie_poser for #CryptoNimby of the year - the prize for weakening the #Yimby Cause immeasurably destroying alliances with all other pro housing groups;  by opposing the only proven historically proven means of building an extra  2.6 million new homes - new towns and strategic planning  - due to extremist chainsaw welding libertarian Austrian economics BS”

I feel just a bit seen here. Not because I’m some sort of ultra-libertarian (the planning chap helpfully illustrated the prize award with a picture of Javier Milei waving his trademark chainsaw) but because I really do believe the actual evidence about the impact of planning policies on housing affordability. It hurts people who make their living from telling people how they should live when we point out that it really is none of their business. I’ll refrain from pointing out that Britain’s planning system has led to a shortfall of 5 million homes not 2,6 million, or indeed that this problem was pointed out to the planners as long ago as 1961 (and I know that is a long time ago because it is the year of my birth).

The problem with planners is that they want too many objectives. Not only do they think they can fix the housing crisis (hint: they can’t) but they all believe they can save the planet, sort out local government, and probably improve Father Christmas’s route management. They can do none of this so fall back on fussing over whether Mohammed Hussein can have shutters on his shop front and if Geoff and Mary should be allowed to put up a fence in the back garden of their egregiously listed cottage. Planners like to pretend that they are about economic betterment, environmental goodness and protecting us all from the Mad Max world of free markets, but the truth is that their comfort zone is telling you that, no, you can’t do that and if you have then you should take it down.

Decent people head off to university with their Geography ‘A’ Level and end up sucked into the crazy vortex of the planning world where the reason that there aren’t enough houses is that we haven’t planned for there to be those houses. Then, clutching an MA in Town Planning, these once proud geographers find themselves in a tatty 1960s office block charged with deciding whether stressed homeowners can be allowed to build an extension. This is the reality of what planning means. It is probably less harmful than allowing such indoctrinated people to, as the saints of the profession like Le Corbusier demand, plan entire communities. Towers filled with peons, transport nodes and corridors for the peasants to flow along, carefully allocated spaces for workers to enjoy leisure and tiny homes based on the latest research showing how much room a family with a three-year old and a five-year old need to exist.

But, hey, it is Christmas and someone is giving me a prize! I should accept this thing gratefully and head to the pub waving my gong above my head and singing Bubbles. And nobody really cares much about planners awarding snide prizes to retired councillors and believing it’s a big win. We are about to celebrate the salvation of humankind, so me getting all big about being “crypto-NIMBY of the Year” needs to be put in some sort of perspective. I don’t think the gods or the planet give much of a toss about people who think they know better how to fix the problem that too many people can’t have the home they want or, sadly, the family they desire.

If I were to have one Christmas wish fulfilled, it would be that fewer people spent a lot less time knowing better how you should live your life while being almost entirely wrong. My fear is that this kindly authoritarianism - “this is for the common good”, “everyone will benefit”, “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”, “community safety”, “social justice” - takes the ascendancy in democracies. Fearful people are battered by a pandemic, the closeness of wars, rising prices and a sense that lawlessness is rampant, so cynical politicians - left and right - pour out the snake oil of ideological salvation. Not, of course, because those politicians believe all this stuff but because they hope it will give them the vain satisfaction of power.

Planners of all sorts are part of this authoritarianism. It may seem petty to rage about the fussbuckets who stopped Mohammed having shutters on his shop but it doesn’t seem that way to the man himself when he looks at the broken window and empty shelves then cries at the cost of insurance to cover the inevitability of this happening. Strategic planning, treating the world like a board game, is a still more dangerous pastime. “We need strategic planning” screams the expert as he sharpens his pencils and cracks open a new packet of coloured pens. Yet the lessons from strategic spatial plans are that they don’t work because the world - even the small part of the world that is England - is not a board game, it’s a magnificent tapestry made from billions of choices made by millions of people. If you think you can plan that then you are a fool - an arrogant fool.

So have a great Christmas and look forward to the New Year ahead. Live your life not the life those arrogant fools, fussbuckets, worrywarts and planners want you to live.