Latest news with #Attlee
Telegraph
15 hours ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Britain's mad planning system is becoming more and more absurd
Across the political spectrum, we don't agree on much. But we can all agree that the UK needs more homes and must start building in earnest. So why is Labour-run Birmingham City Council demanding that Mark Jones rip down the £180,000 two-bedroom 'granny flat' he built in his back garden for his dying father? With bin strikes, rat plagues and near bankruptcy, one might imagine that this particular local authority would have different matters on its mind. Mr Jones said he believed the building complied with planning laws and lodged a retrospective planning application. But the council's officious officers found that the Sutton Coldfield IT engineer has fallen foul of their regulations as it was 'over-intensive', and have ordered it to be demolished by the end of the month. The case shows in microcosm what is wrong with Britain's planning system. Like so much that is wrong on our island, from the NHS to the post-war explosion in council housing, its origins lie with the 1945 Clement Attlee Labour government. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act established our system of planning permission, as well as the modern system of needing consents to build on land. It also meant that all planning authorities had to come up with a comprehensive development plan. Green belts, the listing of buildings and the anathematising of building in the open countryside can all be dated back to this legislation. In some regards, we should be grateful for Attlee's innovation. Anyone who has taken the seven-hour trip from Boston to Washington DC on the Acela Amtrak train will see why. Apart from a stretch along the Connecticut coastline, the prospect out of the windows is of virtually unending urban sprawl. Or contrast the west coast of Ireland with the west coast of Scotland. While the Irish views are endlessly interrupted by the tackiest imaginable McMansions, complete with fake colonnades and naff statuary, the Caledonian vista is virtually uninterrupted. Our planning system has made large-scale developers hugely powerful to a far greater extent than in most other developed countries. Building your own house is straightforward in much of the United States. But then America is a large country with plenty of space, as defenders of the British status quo might point out. The rules in much of Europe, however, are also vastly more flexible. In France, for example, it is relatively straightforward to buy a plot of land on the fringes of a village and build a family home on it. By contrast, in the UK, to build a new single dwelling in the isolated countryside is extraordinarily difficult. One of the very few routes is via what is now called Paragraph 84 consent. This is a rule, first introduced in 1997 in the dying days of John Major's government, allowing for new country houses to be built, but only if they are of 'truly outstanding' design and 'reflect the highest standards of architecture'. We would all, I am sure, like to live in such houses – but to meet such benchmarks requires money, plenty of it. It is not something that rural Mr Joneses, middle-earning IT engineers and their like, will ever be able to afford. The British system places all the cards in the hands of the vast corporate builders, with their new housing developments. Angela Rayner's Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which is now being pushed through the House of Lords, will only make this problem even worse. It will make development easier, and that is indeed a worthy goal. It will make it easier to overrule Nimby-style objections, but its mechanisms are not there to help people who want to do their own projects. It is all about pushing through large-scale plans in the face of local opposition, be they for new homes, wind or solar farms or the latest railway wheeze dreamt up in Whitehall. It is not about allowing Sir Keir Starmer's much-touted 'working people' to realise their own building ambitions. Our planning system might seem to have been more of a success if our post-war homes were exemplars of design. But that is far from the case. Probably the only country in Western Europe that has uglier townscapes than those found in much of Britain is Germany. Walk through Cologne, and outside of its Cathedral and Romanesque churches you would be hard put to find an uglier city with less inspiring buildings. Colognians have a very good excuse. When their city was rebuilt in the 1950s from the ashes the RAF had reduced it to, beauty was not foremost on their minds. We have no such excuse for some of the horrors that urban planning has imposed on our towns and cities. And our planning laws did little to protect us from these missteps. When Nick Boles was housing minister in the Cameron government, he was evangelical about relaxing planning rules in urban and suburban areas. He wanted to allow thousands upon thousands of Mr Joneses to do pretty much as they pleased with their own land and property, and thought this would make a huge difference to our housing shortage. It would also empower local people. Such an approach would clearly be a disaster if applied to, say, the Victorian garden square of London or the Georgian terraces of Bath. They would soon be scarred with endless glass boxes and extensions which would now be on trend, but soon look very dated. If Labour really wants to empower working people, allowing the Mr Joneses to build on their back gardens could be just the thing. But don't hold your breath.
Spectator
3 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Keir Starmer is seriously stupid
Sir Keir has returned from his worldwide statesmanship tour. Barely the edge of a photograph went ungurned in, not a bottom went unkissed, no platitude went ungarbled. Now – lucky us! – he was back in the House of Commons for a good long crow about his achievements. As always, there was an obsequious toad ready on the Labour backbenches The PM began with the usual Starmerite guff production. The man is a veritable Chinese Power Station of pompous pollution. This, however, was more smug than smog. It began with a round-up of how crucial he'd been in every negotiation and discussion. 'We're following in the footsteps of Attlee and Bevan,' crowed Starmer. Well, up to a point Comrade Copper. I mean, his cabinet hated each other too. Apparently, the G7 was going to 'follow Britain's lead' on controlling illegal migration. I genuinely think he didn't see the irony in this. What's next? The G7 to follow North Korea's lead on free speech? Nato to follow Spain's lead on afternoon productivity? Dick the Butcher, in Henry VI, Part 2, famously exclaims 'now let's kill all the lawyers'. It was this energy and spirit which Kemi Badenoch sought to channel as she stood to respond to the Prime Minister's 12-minute self-paean. 'What we need is a leader, instead we have three lawyers', she said, referencing the PM, Lord Hermer and the Sage of Tottenham, David Lammy. The PM's slavish following of legal advice was a major theme of her speech. A picture emerged of a man who, if some UN precedent could be found for it, would crawl up and down Pall Mall in a leather gimp-suit singing 'I'm a Little Teapot' and then claim it as a stunning victory for soft power. Dame Emily Thornberry also invoked the 'soft power' geopolitical sugar plum fairy. Perhaps to distract from her troublemaking over welfare cuts, she put on a sort of sickly-sweet Pollyanna-ish voice to ask her non-question. Normally her mode of delivery is like a buffalo that's just smoked 100 Superkings. More soft pitches were thrown in Sir Keir's direction by Sir Ed 'Babe Ruth' Davey, who, while ostensibly asking questions on behalf of the Lib Dems, had as his most used phrase today 'I agree with the Prime Minister'. As always, there was an obsequious toad ready on the Labour backbenches to perform the act of ego-stoking necessary to keep the leader's sense of self intact. Enter John Slinger, who decried petty party politics, then praised the Prime Minister for the unique 'human empathy' he had brought to international diplomacy. Slinger is apparently MP for Rugby. I had assumed he actually represented the underside of a rock somewhere in the deepest, darkest Amazon because that appears to be where he has been living for the past 12 months. There was even a gentle backscratcher of a question from Rishi Sunak about Iranian sanctions. Would anyone in the House follow Mrs Badenoch's lead and try to pop St Pancras's very own pig's bladder of pomposity? Step forward, Stephen Flynn. The SNP's Westminster leader resembles an apoplectic egg and is the only person in the chamber who appears to hate the PM more than Kemi Badenoch and Big Ange do. How could Sir Keir make his arguments about foreign policy on moral grounds when he was about to cut aid to the disabled, he asked? Cue more fleshy clucking from Starmer. At the end of his rant, Flynn was called what had become the word of the day in this nightmarish episode of Sesame Street: 'unserious'. For all his capacity to render himself ridiculous by his legalistic pomposity, there is always potential for the PM to add to it. He is particularly keen on affecting the air of a self-important substitute teacher when addressing the Leader of the Opposition; 'not angry, just disappointed'. Inevitably, the PM also accused Badenoch of being 'unserious'. Further irony there of course, because as every good comedian knows, nothing is more ridiculous than someone going about something innately stupid – self destructive even – with the utmost seriousness.
The Independent
27-03-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Why Keir Starmer is more like Clement Attlee than you think
Keir Starmer has been compared to several Labour prime ministers, including Tony Blair because of his shift to the centre ground, and Harold Wilson thanks to his hope that artificial intelligence will deliver economic growth akin to the 'white heat' of the technological revolution. As a professor teaching the history of prime ministers since 1939, it seems inescapable to me that he most closely resembles Clement Attlee. Both were born and raised in and around London. Both practised law before politics – the grounding in detail is obviously helpful when switching to government. The commitment to facts and clear exposition demanded in a court case probably also accounts for at least some of the inscrutable and dispassionate greyness of their public speaking, heightened when they faced the expansive oratorical styles of Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson across the despatch box. Another emerging similarity between Starmer and Attlee is the forging of their top teams. Attlee's no-nonsense style has been rightly lauded: 'You've had a good innings; time to put your bat up in the pavilion' was one of the more pleasant dismissals, while 'not up to it' was his response to another who asked for feedback. 'The best butcher since the war' was Wilson's conclusion. Compare this to Starmer who now has a track record of not always choosing the right people first time, but who is fast and ruthless in his despatching of those deemed the wrong fit or having crossed a line, as Sue Gray and Louise Haigh found respectively. Attlee was blessed with ministerial giants he led such as Ernest Bevin, Hugh Dalton, Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps, a cabinet that was to go down in history as delivering the NHS and wider welfare state, Indian independence, Nato and setting the path to a British nuclear deterrent. Though the current Labour government started really quite slowly, it has been in power for only eight months and demonstrable results are understandably few. The competent team that is now looking strong on the foreign policy side took time to be assembled – and I am told by experienced eyes that they are beginning to be impressed by the team forming at the centre. In both eras, defence spending posed huge challenges for the Labour cabinet – the need for a significant modern-day uplift to the defence budget will involve considerable challenge. But this is not new, and for the immediate postwar government it was even more acute. On 13 August 1945, the world's greatest economist John Maynard Keynes warned Dalton, the incoming Labour chancellor, 'without exaggeration', of the likelihood of a 'financial Dunkirk'. Britain had gone all in during the Second World War, becoming effectively bankrupt around 1942 and dependent on US aid, which was abruptly cut off when the war ended. Though an economic humiliation on the level of the 1940 evacuation was immediately avoided, both the 'convertibility crisis' of 1947 and the abject devaluation of the pound from $4.03 to $2.80 in 1949 were evidence of enduring weakness. It was said that the UK's reserves were so depleted, not least because we were also feeding our zone of German occupation, that in the late 1940s, we were on occasion only six weeks away from famine. Moreover, any hopes that victory in Europe and Japan would lead to a peace dividend were dashed when, a week before Keynes's warning, the first nuclear weapon was dropped on Hiroshima, leading to a new arms race and the start of the Cold War. Attlee and Bevin responded in part by facilitating the creation of Nato in order to keep 'the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down' – so similar to today except for the need for the Germans to step up. When war broke out on the Korean peninsula in 1950, which many thought the first skirmishes of the third world war, Attlee ordered a 50 per cent increase in the defence budget. This last point in particular had a long-lasting coda as controlling public spending across the board led to the imposition of spectacle and denture charges in chancellor Hugh Gaitskell's 1951 Budget, which resulted in Bevan's resignation from the cabinet and heralded a decade-long power struggle at the top of Labour. Food for thought for Starmer and his own chancellor Rachel Reeves as they cut the welfare budget. A last point is that both prime ministers won big general election victories: Starmer's majority of 174 is the second largest of the modern era, with Attlee's 1945 victory of 146 the fourth biggest. With the British electoral system being what it is, and the currently divided opposition, it is almost inconceivable that Labour will not form the next government. But though Attlee did not lose the 1950 election, it was a close-run thing, and he felt that the 1945 mandate had evaporated, leading him to call another election in 1951 which he narrowly lost. More for Starmer to contemplate.
The Guardian
17-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
In the rush to build houses, let's remember what communities need
The rationale for the planning and infrastructure bill is that planning is the main reason for the tardy rate of housebuilding (The Guardian view on the planning bill: new towns must be for people who need them, 11 March). Removing red tape, it is supposed, will facilitate the market speeding up housebuilding. In reality there are more than 1m plots of land that have planning permission and have not been built on. That's because housebuilding is dominated by large-volume builders that build at a pace and scale to maximise profits and shareholder dividends. The solution to what's called the 'housing affordability crisis' does not lie in the market. It lies with making social-rent council housing the priority, as the Attlee government did. Angela Rayner cannot deliver a 'council housing revolution' without funding it. Instead, Labour has maintained the Tory definition of affordable housing that includes funding affordable rent, shared ownership and affordable private rent. None of these tenures should be funded by the government. Funding should only go to social-rent homes. It will save money on the benefit bill and is most affordable to tenants. As we approach the 80th anniversary of Attlee's government, we should remind ourselves that, in far worse economic conditions, Aneurin Bevan managed to persuade the then chancellor Hugh Dalton to triple funding for building council housing. To facilitate it, he followed a policy of cheap money (low interest rates). Councils got grants for 60 years and were able to borrow from the Public Works Loan Board to pay the costs of building. The funding of grants for building/acquisitions on the scale of 100,000 a year can be found, if it is a political priority, by returning to a progressive taxation system, taxing wealth and ending corporate WicksSecretary, Labour Campaign for Council Housing The success of planning reforms will hinge on creating sustainable communities. In the government's rush to build houses, we can't forget that what we actually need is homes for people – and people need to be part of a community. Schools, healthcare and essential retail are often left out of the conversation or abandoned to the whims of the market, but this social infrastructure is vital, as are energy, transportation and water. With more than 1m empty homes in England and the significant carbon impact of construction, the focus should be on incentivising retrofitting of empty homes and upgrading existing infrastructure – especially when it is already at the heart of a community. We must address the housing crisis, and home building could unlock economic growth. But our lodestar must be growth that is Dillon-RobinsonPrincipal urban planner, Ramboll I read your editorial and was amused by the thought that 'protection of nature' should be an essential part of proposals. The Labour-controlled council in Lincoln has begun a development (with a local building company) of 3,200 homes, plus necessary infrastructure. The first part of the project was to create a new road and 52 houses. In doing so, eight magnificent oaks were felled (at least one ancient) – all with tree preservation orders. Dozens of other trees were destroyed and hundreds of naturalised bulbs dug up. I walk past the site daily and am still mortified 18 months later. I have resigned from Labour in SandersLincoln As a leaseholder myself, I strongly agree with Harry Scoffin (A two-tier housing market will be the result of Labour's half-baked leasehold reform plans, 13 March) that this medieval system needs to be abolished once and for all – not just for new and future homes but for all the millions of homes currently trapped in it. The whole concept of leaseholding is, when looked at objectively, a grotesque financial con trick: how can it be said that I and my wife are 'homeowners' when a few decades down the line the leasehold runs out and presumably we will be dispossessed of our legally purchased property? What is stopping the government doing the decent thing? Daniel GriffithsColchester Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
75 years ago: Greenock welcomes Prime Minister Attlee to Town Hall (1950)
MR CLEMENT ATTLEE, the Prime Minister, got a warm welcome when, accompanied by his wife, he arrived in Greenock yesterday to address his first meeting of his election tour in Scotland, in the Town Hall, in support of Mr Hector M'Neil, Minister of State. Crowds outside the Town Hall cheered when he arrived, and the main hall was so packed that an overflow had to be accommodated in the Saloon, to which Mr Attlee's speech was relayed by loud-speaker. (Image: Archive) When he came on to the platform there were loud cheers from the packed audience, and it was some minutes before he could start his speech. Only discordant note was struck by the presence of Communist agitators, who bore placards with slogans like "The Atlantic Pact means War-Stop It." There was booing from some of the people in the crowd, but it never reached large proportions. In his speech, which lasted for about half-an-hour, Mr Attlee dealt with the main points in the Labour programme, and urged upon the audience the necessity for supporting Mr Hector M'Neil. MORE ARCHIVE NEWS: Past Morton goalkeepers and a new Greenock factory (1950) "When Mr M'Neil came before you at the last election," said the Prime Minister, "he was a young man of promise. Now he comes before you as a man of performance." When the Labour Government was formed, he continued, he asked Mr Ernest who he would like as Under Secretary at the Foreign Office. Mr Bevin, who was an extremely good judge of men, said that he would like Mr Hector M'Neil, a decision with which he heartily agreed. Since then Mr M'Neil had taken a very prominent part in the country's affairs. Even as Under Secretary he had a heavy job. Mr M'Neil had done a fine job, and Greenock could be proud of him. Greenock had done many services for this country, and not the least of these was sending Mr Hector M'Neil to Parliament. Mr Attlee said that Scotland had borne its full part in the recovery of Britain. But Scotland always did bear its full part. Wherever he went he found people from Scotland in pretty important positions. MORE ARCHIVE NEWS: A Greenock ship sunk after collision on the Clyde (1900) Mr Attlee said: "There is nothing more dangerous to the peace of the world than the extreme nationalism that tries to put a ringed fence round each nationality. "What we are trying to do today is to build up a world of free peoples, freely cooperating. That the purpose of the United Nations, and is the purpose and achievement of the British Commonwealth of Nations." This story first appeared in the Greenock Telegraph on February 14, 1950.
