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One mitigating factor here is that Labour consciously sacrificed vote share by making policy declarations that would allow them to win in the constituencies they needed to pick up. The Corbyn strategy of loading the manifesto with pledges popular with their base saw them pile up enormous majorities in urban centres whilst leaving swathes of middle England a few % out of reach. Hopefully Starmer's pragmatism will extend to his premiership.
I voted Labour and really hope we do see some decisive action. Starmer has clearly been tight lipped on policy details as part of his campaign strategy so it'll be interesting to see how things pan out. House of Lords reform is a near certainty but hopefully we'll see ambition in other areas.
Personally, I'd love to see him crush the NIMBY malaise, bulldoze the greenbelt and get infrastructure and housing being built once again. Significant investment in nuclear power would also be fantastic.
The game theory is quite fun here I think. The Labour and Tory parties are committed to FPTP in part because changing to a PR system would inevitably result in schisms within their own parties. Unity is only maintained by the knowledge that breaking away leads to near certain electoral death.
I hope one day the somewhat sensible Alliance party can grow into being a serious party of regional government.
Yup. "Punch the far-left wing of your party as hard as you can as fast as you can" turns out to be a really good strategy for left-of-center parties.
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Apologies if I'm misrepresenting your preferred policies, but the constant insistence that we need to build more annoys me. I grew up in quite a nice part of the countryside. How about we leave that the way it is, and we don't import 600,000 people every year? The population of native British people is shrinking - we don't have a housing crisis, we have an immigration crisis and an economy that encourages treating shelter as an asset.
Infrastructure and nuclear, granted, we need.
Something that seems to be neglected in NIMBY discourse: there's no reason beauty and building have to be mutually exclusive!
We are a far richer and mightier civilisation than the one that actually built all the pleasant Cotswolds stone villages and so on! There is absolutely no reason we couldn't build enough housing in a way that was actively aesthetically pleasing - possibly at greater cost than horrible concrete, but nothing compared to the effective cost of building being mostly illegal - if we wanted to.
Of course, we'd have to turn the architectural establishment on its head, but we should do that anyway. I propose an Ugly Tax.
In theory, I agree. The conservatives tried it with the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission but like so much else they failed to follow through. The head of the Commission (Sir Roger Scruton, the UK's equivalent of Thomas Sowell) was monstered on twitter using misrepresented quotes and the 'moderate' wing of the Conservatives instantly fired him (within five hours of the first tweet). I remain flabbergasted by the sheer wasted potential of the last 5 years of Tory government.
If Labour picked up the program, I would still argue for getting the population under control before doing lots of building, but I would be much happier with a proposed building spree.
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It's not either or. Our population has already grown, and we need to build houses for these people. Even if we got net zero migration, faster housebuilding would bring prices down for current residents faster.
Plus, the green belt was a bad idea to begin with. Allowing cities to expand allows people to live and raise children near to where they work. Instead, we force them to live in far away towns and make them take long, misery-inducing commutes while prime land outside of productive cities is used to grow turnips instead of housing humans. I live in a popular city and am currently looking for a house. It drives me mad that you can drive for 20 minutes from the city centre and be surrounded by cows instead of suburbs. What a waste!
If there is beautiful land that we want to preserve, we should make it explicit with national parks and the like, not by freezing all of our cities at the size they were in the 1950s.
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