We're in a bit of a mess, aren't we? Why everything is rubbish and won't get better.

The dominant elite view is anti-growth - and it is - we will see the talk of change but not any actual change. Three years into a Starmer government we’ll be wondering why we bothered changing horses.

We’re in a bit of a mess, aren’t we?

“It is time for the public to understand what the trade-offs are. They need to be told that yes, you can have all the stuff you say you want - nutrient neutrality, silent city centres, triple lock pensions, net zero, protectionism, bans on everything you don’t like, 20mph speed limits, high speed rail, state-run healthcare, more borrowing, more regulation, more tzars, more badgers, more wolves or whatever - but you are going to be poor.”

Chris Snowdon here getting to the heart of our problem. And not just our problem but a problem facing everywhere in the developed world from California to Kyoto. We are entirely wedded to the idea that we can have our cake and eat it. We get phones and gyms and takeaways and weird Disney collectable card games but expect, like some sort of entitlement, loads of free stuff such as health, transport, education and dollops of ready cash so we can have the money to pay for those indulgences. And just like all the houses we need will be built somewhere else, the free stuff will be paid for by taxing someone else, usually some billionaire or other who doesn’t live here.

The other day I jotted down a list of intractable issues, things that everyone knows are a problem but that, when we get to the political crunch, aren’t going to pass the 21st century political test because those voters Chris Snowdon rightly castigates aren’t going to accept the remedy. The list.

Social care

Housing

Transport

Energy and water infrastructure

Acute health services

Immigration

Technology

Economic growth

Having written my list, I was struck that there is a much shorter list - demographics, infrastructure, growth - and that any programme for government needs to start here not with the depressing reality pictured by Matthew Parris:

“New laws to stop whatever abuse has most recently hit the headlines, new laws to be named after whichever child is the latest victim of private vice or public sector incompetence, new laws to bind ministers to their own promises, new laws to prevent ministers from repealing the new laws already enacted”

The media is filled with calls for bans on dogs, vaping, parking, e-scooters, and smoking in beer gardens. Meanwhile those big problems of how many and what sort of people live here, whether we have the energy, roads, water and houses for them, and how we are going to pay for all that get boiled down to vacuous, bland statements. Politicians promise economic growth because they think it sounds good but don’t realise that this growth requires people and infrastructure - or rather they do know this truth but pretend there’s a different way so as not to upset key blocs of voters.

What’s to be done? How do we get over the problem that politicians think sucking up to birdwatchers and mithering about ‘the countryside’ is more important than finding a way to afford the things we need to stand a small chance of meeting the expectations of voters? But then, it isn’t just that voters want more free stuff and lower taxes, it is that they don’t want the infrastructure building to allow that free stuff. People want more criminals locking up but vote against building the prisons we need. People want clean rivers and beaches but aren’t prepared to cough up higher water bills so as to pay for the investment needed. People think rents should be lower and say homelessness is terrible but sign petitions to stop the building of the homes that might fix those problems.

Meanwhile there’s a load of people who, instead of blaming our political leaders for ignoring the truth about demographics and growth, chose to create a new divide in society by blaming old people instead. And in response some people blame the young for not working hard enough and spending too much time and money eating takeaways and drinking coffee. These aren’t the problems either any more than one in twenty 15 year olds trying essentially harmless vaping is a problem.

We face the likely prospect of a Labour government led by Keir Starmer. I don’t want to be harsh but I’ve a feeling it will be a disaster - at least in facing up to the problems of demographics, infrastructure and economic growth. When we look at the things the Labour leadership currently offer, changes they definitely plan to make, what we see is a combination of purposeless spite (scrapping VAT on school fees), self-defeating grandstanding (more windfall taxes), and economically illiterate ideas around energy (almost everything proposed by Ed Miliband). There are no proposals to fix social care or the crisis in acute health services. There is a lot of rhetoric about building houses but nothing of substance about getting a better planning system. And the shadow chancellor babbles on about ‘growth’ without giving even the tiniest hint as to how such a thing might be achieved without reforming how we build infrastructure. 

But, of course, none of this matters because the voters are not interested in fixing those intractable issues, they are interested in not changing the views on their dog walk, in getting cheaper - or better - free university education for their grandchildren, and in whatever the latest moral panic on the BBC is promoting. Even the voters in big cities who might be most interested in growth and infrastructure are more bothered by train fares, arguments between cyclists and delivery drivers, and ‘net zero’. Plus whatever is the latest episode in what gets called the ‘culture war’. It isn’t that none of these things aren’t important, it is that the dull stuff about demographics, infrastructure and growth really are more important. Or should be.

In this world of entitled rage, upset and annoyance, voters are looking for easy answers (or, as we see from Keir Starmer and his largely anonymous team, not actually giving any actual answers at all). So we see the appeal of what might be called iPhone communism, the sorts of ‘yah socialism dude’ types who flocked to Jeremy Corbyn until he got shown up as an old-fashion commie racist. These folk now cluster round the more lunatic parts of the green movement, agitate against the capitalism that is the only way out from the problems they scream about, calling for the overthrow of the system that made it possible for them to afford to do not very much for more money than they deserve.

Meanwhile a familiar and old-fashioned (not of course that communism is somehow new-fashioned) set of simple solutions emerges from the populist right. The causes of our problems are immigration, foreigners selling us things and a vaguely defined concept called ‘globalism’ which is, when you peel its skin off, no different to the capitalism that the socialists and progressive lefties badger on about. The problem is caused by rich and powerful people sitting in nice Swiss ski resorts and discussing things. We get the same, albeit slightly differently flavoured, attacks on billionaires, international finance and the system of world trade. The answer doesn’t lie in building great infrastructure and supporting world-beating businesses but rather in keeping out all that foreign stuff so we can pretend, a bit like the old Chinese empire, that everything is fine and we don't need what those foreigners have got.

Despite all this nonsense, the clever men and women in the centre haven’t twigged because, instead of posing that old Tony Blair question - what matters is what works - they opt instead for policy development by opinion poll. You only need to look at the output of influential think tanks, charities and foundations to see that policy is developed by asking the public what they think of one or other, to use Chris Snowdon’s description, ‘high status’ opinions. Unsurprisingly the public choose to go with the trendy idea they heard about on the BBC or read about in one of our increasingly identikit national newspapers. Because why wouldn’t they? David Attenborough or Robert Peston or Emily Maitlis said what a spiffing idea this is so obviously the people go along with these icons of high status opinionising.

The result is that we get policies designed to achieve the opposite of what is needed. On social care, instead of telling the asset rich to use their assets to fund care in their old age, we get inadequate dollops of extra cash into a broken system and part fund it with an additional levy on council tax. For housing, instead of planning reform that legalises the idea that someone can build a house on land they own, what we get is endless tinkering with a sclerotic system of planning permissions. And when the chance comes to free up a block to 250,000 new houses the Labour Party, fresh from saying how committed it is to fixing the housing crisis, votes against removing that blockage.

There’s endless chatter about new transport infrastructure (although not the roads we also need) but nobody is saying that we need to stop local activists and councils blocking new railways, tunnels, bridges and aqueducts - when they break off from blocking the building of prisons, hostels, phone masts, warehousing and undersea cables. There’s a more-or-less agreed proposal for a new aqueduct in Cambridgeshire. Agreed, that is, apart from a series of consultations, public enquiries and planning processes all of which are designed to favour the minority who don’t want it built over the majority who’d like better water supplies. Nobody is proposing to change this process. And if they did someone else would pop up with an opinion poll arguing it is unpopular so we should do something else.

Everywhere you look you will see calls for new hospitals, new roads, new railway stations, better sewers and improved school buildings. But none of this happens because we have a system of policy making, planning and policy delivery designed to prevent development and investment in development. And this won’t change because too many of those people with high status opinions, the ones working for big ‘environmental’ pressure groups like the RSPB and CPRE, the leaders of big charities like Oxfam, National Trust and the Wildlife Trusts, are invested in the idea that their job is to prevent development. So long as the dominant elite view is anti-growth - and it is - we will see the talk of change but not any actual change. Three years into a Starmer government we’ll be wondering why we bothered changing horses because nothing else changed.