Starmer's Bleak Midwinter
Is support for all Britain's political parties collapsing?
Towering Columns
On ConservativeHome, Miriam Cates says most voters are socially conservative, yet Reform UK is still offering a platform of unpopular libertarianism.
The former is of course not contradictory to liberty. But conservatism recognises that for freedom to flourish, certain moral boundaries and social norms must exist. From the Garden of Eden to Marxist revolutions, despite its promises, throwing off boundaries has made humanity less free and happy.
Unfettered personal freedom, whether economic or social, is ultimately damaging because of its effects on wider society: this is exemplified in the assisted suicide debate where a desire for a right to die risks leaving vulnerable people feeling a duty to die.
Farage has sharp political instincts and I suspect understands this. He has repeatedly opposed the assault on our country’s Judeo-Christian foundations because he recognises it is these which have created the environment for our historic freedoms and prosperity. Here he is in tune with his party’s members.
In The Times, Matthew Syed warns that European economies are in denial about the risk of terminal decline.
The UK electorate is, if anything, even more out to lunch. Not unlike the French, we like to blame “useless” politicians, the electoral system or being inside or outside certain trading blocs, but it’s largely a distraction from the fact that voters have become ever more detached from empirical reality; voters who (as polls consistently reveal) demand Scandinavian public services with American levels of taxation, gleaming new energy infrastructure but not in my backyard, new housing while retaining the local right to veto and triple-locked pensions but not the bill. Look at our anaemic growth, frighteningly expensive electricity and debt interest payments soaring above defence expenditure and behold the wonder of democracy. This is the logical consequence of electoral choices — a feature of our system, not a bug.
Germany has the same root problem, albeit with a Teutonic twist. The nation of Bismarckian realism has spent 30 years ripping off America, the nation on which it relies for its defence, while colluding with the nation that most threatens its security: Russia. Successive leaders have embraced this strategic Ponzi scheme because it enabled them to rig growth figures by outsourcing the costs of protection while embracing dependency on cheap Russian gas, which Putin pitilessly weaponised to weaken European resolve against ever more heinous acts of atrocity. The collapse of Scholz’s coalition is not the cause of the problem; it’s a symptom. Like France and the UK, Germany is an old nation (albeit not unified until the late 19th century) that has drifted into a dreamworld…
…Looking around the world merely amplifies one’s sense of the creeping unrealism in old Europe. India may be poor and hamstrung by the iniquitous caste system but it is building like crazy and determined to become a dominant power. Vietnam is a one-party state but securing huge inward tech investment and growing faster than England in the 19th century. Poland and Romania have been backwaters for centuries, but they feel their time is coming. You go to these nations and hear people talking not about rights and entitlements but responsibilities and duties — and defence. They are not looking in the rear-view mirror or cowering in simpering guilt about histories long gone but reaching into the future with courage so palpable you can touch it.
And also in The Times, Juliet Samuel says Europe is also at risk of demographic collapse.
[E]ven more disheartening than Europe’s economic problems are its demographic trends. A shrinking population doesn’t have to be a problem if it happens gradually. But Europe’s fertility rates are at truly bleak levels — just 1.46 births per woman. A fifth of the continent’s population is now over 65, set to rise to 30 per cent by 2050. Meanwhile, immigration continues at levels that are repeatedly generating electoral rebellions in the form of election results bringing hitherto right-wing political outcasts into the mainstream.
Our civilisation is now one in which millions of women who want babies find their lives take them in a direction that makes it impossible. And, instead of perpetuating our culture, passing on our customs and putting our people to work in decent jobs, nations find themselves adopting the most short-sighted of policies to rely on waves of underpaid foreign-born arrivals to care for our elderly and take out our rubbish. This approach is sold by economists as the fiscally responsible thing to do.
Europe, in short, seems determined to turn itself into a land of the lonely and the old, a place where the playgrounds are empty but the train carriages and roads are clogged, where the lights are dimming and the homes growing colder because there isn’t the energy to power them, while the soldiers are decried and disarmed and the factories are shuttered. The warnings keep coming, from abroad and at home, but, as the saying goes, you cannot wake up one who is only pretending to be asleep.
In The Telegraph, Annabel Denham says cousin marriage is only the tip of the iceberg of the cultural tensions facing the UK.
Press opponents of this practice and you may discover their real discomfort stems not from an arrangement made between two consenting adults, but the failure by successive governments to fully integrate the millions who have flocked to Britain in recent years. UK cities are home to insular communities, where, mentally, some residents are still living in a foreign village.
There are genuine concerns that cultural norms which are anathema to Western liberal values are being imported and enduring through generations, with certain groups as sequestered from wider society as they were two decades ago. Migration Observatory research indicates some 17 per cent of recent migrants cannot speak English well or at all. Over a fifth of non-EU born residents are living in a household where no people have English as a main language.
Nowhere is this bifurcation from society and our economy more pronounced than among women, with the worklessness rate for those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage much higher than among white or Indian women. This flows into other areas: under-fives of Bangladeshi heritage are much less likely to be in formalised childcare, meaning they risk missing out on bonding with peers at an early age. The Left might argue these cultural practices are a welcome by-product of our multi-ethnic society, but they call into question our hard-won progress in areas such as gender equality.
Also in The Telegraph, Rian Chad Whitton says falling British steel production is not the result of true market forces but of artificial demand suppression.
British Steel’s malaise is a particularly acute example of general steel production declines in Europe, caused in part by Chinese overproduction. China produces over 50 per cent of the world’s steel, roughly 1.4 billion tonnes. While most of this is consumed domestically, nearly 100 million tonnes, two-thirds of Europe’s total consumption, is exported.
Powered by cheap coal, this steel puts downward pressure on producers in Europe. This is compounded by European governments placing significant policy-related costs on their producers. ThyssenKrupp, Germany’s largest steel producer, is slashing 40 per cent of its steel division’s employees.
Struggling at home, Europeans export to the one place with higher energy costs: Britain. MakeUK calculated that, after taking all exemptions into account, British energy costs were 50 per cent more expensive than in Germany and France. Carbon taxes, which until 2027 are applied to domestic producers but not imports, exacerbate this problem.
Finally in The Times, Robert Colvile makes the case for relaxing the planning rules protecting the green belt.
There are now 14 green belts in England, covering some 13 per cent of its land area. That is far more than the area we have actually built on: the green belt around London, for example, is more than three times the size of the city itself. Green belts surround pretty much all our major cities, and many minor ones.
The planning rules in these green belts are doubly restrictive. First, councils cannot build on such land save in exceptional circumstances. Second, they do not have to meet their housing targets if it would mean building on green belt land. So a place such as Sevenoaks, which is essentially entirely green belt, is not forced to make up its housing quota by building 50-storey towers on its slivers of unprotected land.
But there’s a problem — one that has become more severe as the years have gone by. The green belts were originally set up on the understanding that there would be development beyond their borders, in particular via the creation of the new towns. But the people living near these new towns didn’t like that. So we stopped building them. And we also wanted to preserve the character of our existing cities, rather than permitting them to become more dense. In other words, we stopped our cities — in particular London — either growing out or growing up. That meant we had more and more people, both from this country and overseas, wanting to live there but nothing like the level of housebuilding required to cope. Which helped contribute to a historic rise in house prices and millions of people paying eye-watering prices to live in tiny homes.
Wonky Thinking
Create Streets and Britain Remade published Creating New Towns Fast and Well. The report makes the case for twelve new towns, focusing on building integrated and connected communities where demand is highest.
For the first time in 50 years, there is a national commitment to building a new generation of new towns. With the severity of Britain’s housing crisis, this is exciting news. But as history shows us, the location and design of new towns is critical to them growing into prosperous and liveable communities. They can fail.
This paper lays out principles for selecting the location and design of new towns, along with policy changes that will make it easier to build new towns quickly, well and with the maximum boost to British economic growth and productivity. We then use these principles to produce a shortlist of twelve new towns from a long list of 50 options that were identified through a combination of internal workshops, spatial analysis, and desk-based research.
New towns should be located in:
• Places that are in an area with acute housing need;
• Places with strong links to existing cities or towns, especially those which have a large housing shortage;
• Places with room for at least 10,000 homes today and future expansion opportunities;
• Places where new homes can be popular and successful by using existing or planned infrastructure rather than spending extra money and time developing major new projects;
• Places that make use of existing plans or proposals that can be developed at pace, rather than creating completely new plans;
• Places that do not need to expand into National Landscapes, flood plains or Sites of Special Scientific Interest in order to grow (though these places can be ones that need to use green belt land to grow); and
• Places with good public transport links to encourage sustainable lifestyles, not just collections of poorly-connected sustainable buildings.
To speed up delivery of new towns, we suggest the Government should:
• Use its mandate to draft Acts of Parliament to supply infrastructure and speed up planning;
• Amend the National Planning Policy Framework to designate new towns as critical national priorities to reduce uncertainty and speed up approvals when Acts of Parliament are inappropriate;
• Revert the duty under section 85 of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 to requirements made before 2023 as the change could damage the viability of new towns by requiring developments to pay millions if they are near national landscapes;
• Commission an independent review of the scientific evidence base that underpins habitats regulations to help remove any restrictions that are not robust, reasonable, and effective;
• Make a Written Ministerial Statement to exempt the towns from nutrient neutrality regulations that can hold up delivery;
• Empower elected mayors and unitary authorities to develop aligned approaches to transport, housing, and place-making;
• Extend the power of development corporations to include transport in addition to planning and let more homes be jointly consented with nationally significant infrastructure projects;
• Create a pattern book of pre-approved street and building types to empower small and medium builders; and
• Adopt a strategic, low-risk approach to environmental assessment for the entire development.
Our design principles to ensure new towns are popular, productive and attractive places, while requiring less land are:
• Take a town first, not a field-led approach, to site selection;
• Build healthy places in which it is easy and safe to move about by foot or cycle in addition to cars;
• Create communities, not just homes by focusing on different tenure types;
• Create green places lined with gardens, garden squares, street trees and parks;
• Make sustainable places, not just sustainable buildings;
• Create new towns, not just collections of spread out homes, by building gentle density development of three to eight storeys; and
• Make mixed-use places by building offices, commercial and residential in the same neighbourhoods.
We have used our location and design principles to shortlist twelve new towns, which can be prosperous, liveable, and well-connected communities. The twelve proposals are:
• Greater Cambridge: an expansion to the city to unlock more homes, laboratory space and innovation.
• Tempsford, Bedfordshire: a well-connected new town making the most of new infrastructure with excellent access to Cambridge, Oxford, and Central London.
• Winslow, Buckinghamshire: an opportunity to ‘mirror’ the town across the newly restored East West Rail that runs to Oxford and Milton Keynes.
• Cheddington, Buckinghamshire: a new town built along the West Coast Main Line, which will greatly benefit from increased capacity once HS2 opens.
• Salfords, Surrey: this new town could relieve the housing crisis in Brighton and London while helping fund upgrades to the nearby Brighton Main Line and the M23.
• Greater Oxford: an expansion to the city to unlock more homes, laboratory space and innovation.
• Iver, Buckinghamshire: plenty of land right next to two Elizabeth line stations.
• Hatfield Peverel, Essex: a new town ‘mirrored’ across the railway line, which is well served by the A12 and the Great Eastern Main Line.
• Bristol Extension: help to alleviate the worst housing crisis outside the greater south east by building on one of the most restrictive green belts in the UK.
• Chippenham, Wiltshire: organically extend the market town to its east with a new gentle density expansion.
• York: extend the beautiful city to its ring road, helping to ease the worst housing shortage in the North.
• Arden Cross (Birmingham Interchange): build a new town adjacent to the new HS2 station, Birmingham airport, the M42, A45, and a potential tram extension to Birmingham centre.
We anticipate that these new towns, when fully completed, will add £13-28bn per annum to the UK’s GDP and over 550,000 new homes.
Book of the Week
We recommend George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell’s ground-breaking journal on the realities of working-class life in the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire remains one of the most powerful depictions of poverty and social injustice in English literature.
When the miner comes up from the pit his face is so pale that it is
noticeable even through the mask of coal dust. This is due to the foul air
that he has been breathing, and will wear off presently. To a Southerner,
new to the mining districts, the spectacle of a shift of several hundred
miners streaming out of the pit is strange and slightly sinister. Then-
exhausted faces, with the grime clinging in all the hollows, have a fierce,
wild look. At other times, when their faces are clean, there is not much to
distinguish them from the rest of the population. They have a very upright
square-shouldered walk, a reaction from the constant bending underground,
but most of them are shortish men and their thick ill-fitting clothes hide
the splendour of their bodies. The most definitely distinctive thing about
them is the blue scars on their noses. Every miner has blue scars on his
nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which
the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over
it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is. Some of the
older men have their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this
cause.
As soon as the miner comes above ground he gargles a little water to
get the worst of the coal dust out of his throat and nostrils, and then
goes home and either washes or does not wash according to his temperament.
From what I have seen I should say that a majority of miners prefer to eat
their meal first and wash afterwards, as I should do in their
circumstances. It is the normal thing to see a miner sitting down to his
tea with a Christy-minstrel face, completely black except for very red lips
which become clean by eating. After his meal he takes a largish basin of
water and washes very methodically, first his hands, then his chest, neck,
and armpits, then his forearms, then his face and scalp (it is on the scalp
that the grime clings thickest), and then his wife takes the flannel and
washes his back. He has only washed the top half of his body and probably
his navel is still a nest of coal dust, but even so it takes some skill to
get pass-ably clean in a single basin of water. For my own part I found I
needed two complete baths after going down a coal-mine. Getting the dirt
out of one's eyelids is a ten minutes' job in itself.
At some of the larger and better appointed collieries there are
pithead baths. This is an enormous advantage, for not only can the miner
wash himself all over every day, in comfort and even luxury, but at the
baths he has two lockers where he can keep his pit clothes separate from
his day clothes, so that within twenty minutes of emerging as black as a
N**ro he can be riding off to a football match dressed up to the nines. But
it is only comparatively seldom because a seam of coal does not last for
ever, so that it is not necessarily worth building a bath every time a
shaft is sunk. I can-not get hold of exact figures, but it seems likely
that rather less than one miner in three has access to a pithead bath.
Probably a large majority of miners are completely black from the waist
down for at least six days a week. It is almost impossible for them to wash
all over in their own homes. Every drop of water has got to be heated up,
and in a tiny living-room which contains, apart from the kitchen range and
a quantity of furniture, a wife, some children, and probably a dog, there
is simply not room to have a proper bath. Even with a basin one is bound to
splash the furniture. Middle-class people are fond of saying that the
miners would not wash themselves properly even if they could, but this is
nonsense, as is shown by the fact that where pithead baths exist
practically all the men use them. Only among the very old men does the
belief still linger that washing one's legs 'causes lumbago'. Moreover the
pithead baths, where they exist, are paid for wholly or partly by the
miners themselves, out of the Miners' Welfare Fund. Sometimes the colliery
company subscribes, some-times the Fund bears the whole cost. But doubtless
even at this late date the old ladies in Brighton boarding-houses are
saying that 'if you give those miners baths they only use them to keep coal
in'.
As a matter of fact it is surprising that miners wash as regularly as
they do, seeing how little time they have between work and sleep. It is a
great mistake to think of a miner's working day as being only seven and a
half hours. Seven and a half hours is the time spent actually on the job,
but, as I have already explained, one has got to add on to this time taken
up in 'travelling', which is seldom less than an hour and may often be
three hours. In addition most miners have to spend a considerable time in
getting to and from the pit. Throughout the industrial districts there is
an acute shortage of houses, and it is only in the small mining villages,
where the village is grouped round the pit, that the men can be certain of
living near their work. In the larger mining towns where I have stayed,
nearly everyone went to work by bus; half a crown a week seemed to be the
normal amount to spend on fares. One miner I stayed with was working on the
morning shift, which was from six in the morning till half past one. He had
to be out of bed at a quarter to four and got back somewhere after three in
the afternoon. In another house where I stayed a boy of fifteen was working
on the night shift. He left for work at nine at night and got back at eight
in the morning, had his breakfast, and then promptly went to bed and slept
till six in the evening; so that his leisure time amounted to, about four
hours a day--actually a good deal less, if you take off the time for
washing, eating, and dressing.
The adjustments a miner's family have to make when he is changed from
one shift to another must be tiresome in the extreme. If he is on the night
shift he gets home in time for breakfast, on the morning shift he gets home
in the middle of the afternoon, and on the afternoon shift he gets home in
the middle of the night; and in each case, of course, he wants his
principal meal of the day as soon as he returns. I notice that the Rev. W.
R. Inge, in his book England, accuses the miners of gluttony. From my own
observation I should say that they eat astonishingly little. Most of the
miners I stayed with ate slightly less than I did. Many of them declare
that they cannot do their day's work if they have had a heavy meal
beforehand, and the food they take with them is only a snack, usually
bread-and-dripping and cold tea. They carry it in a flat tin called a snap-
can which they strap to their belts. When a miner gets back late at night
his wife waits up for him, but when he is on the morning shift it seems to
be the custom for him to get his breakfast for himself. Apparently the old
superstition that it is bad luck to see a woman before going to work on the
morning shift is not quite extinct. In the old days, it is said, a miner
who happened to meet a woman in the early morning would often turn back and
do no work that day.
Before I had been in the coal areas I shared the wide-spread illusion
that miners are comparatively well paid. One hears it loosely stated that a
miner is paid ten or eleven shillings a shift, and one does a small
multiplication sum and concludes that every miner is earning round about L2
a week or L150 a year. But the statement that a miner receives ten or
eleven shillings a shift is very misleading. To begin with, it is only the
actual coal 'getter' who is paid at this rate; a 'dataller', for instance,
who attends to the roofing, is paid at a lower rate, usually eight or nine
shillings a shift. Again, when the coal 'getter' is paid piecework, so much
per ton extracted, as is the case in many mines, he is dependent on the
quality of the coal; a breakdown in the machinery or a 'fault'--that is,
a streak of rock running through the coal seam--may rob him of his
earnings for a day or two at a time. But in any case one ought not to think
of the miner as working six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Almost
certainly there will be a number of days when he is' laid off'. The average
earning per shift worked for every mine-worker, of all ages and both sexes,
in Great Britain in 1934, was 9s. 1 3/4d. [From the Colliery Tear Book
and Coal Trades Directory for 1935.] If everyone were in work all the
time, this would mean that the mine-worker was earning a little over L142 a
year, or nearly L2 15s. a week. His real income, however, is far lower than
this, for the 9s. 1 3/4d. is merely an average calculation on shifts
actually worked and takes no account of blank days.
Quick Links
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Independent MP Iqbal Mohamed defended first cousin marriage in the House of Commons.
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