Tom Jones is Councillor for Scotton and Lower Wensleydale and author of the Potemkin Village Idiot substack.
Should the government be funding its’ own opposition? It seems like a good idea, but I’m not sure it’ll catch on.
And it seems the Government agrees with me. Natural England (NE), the body set up to ‘help to protect and restore our natural world’, has blocked construction of some 160,000 homes, helping to drive housebuilding down to their lowest levels since the 1920s – despite the Government (until recently) having a target of delivering 300,000 homes a year.
Since NE acts as the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England, its’ primary focus is on rural areas. These saw a 24 per cent rise in homelessness last year. On top of the high prices, low wages, higher costs, and increased demand from second homes and holiday lets, people looking to buy a home in the countryside can now also look forward to en-masse blocks against housing across vast swathes of the countryside.
The body has previously blocked thousands of homes near the New Forest and Chilterns ‘because of their potential to draw walkers to the nearby countryside.’ Some 15,000 near the New Forest, to be exact, and a further 20,000 near the Chilterns. It also halted the construction of thousands of homes across vast swathes of Norfolk for an entire year, leading developers to warn that NE meant they built “very few homes and absolutely no affordable homes”.
NE gives responses to major projects that planners rarely overrule. The reason for objecting to these rules is nutrient neutrality laws. These laws mean that new development can only occur if the increase in nutrient load – such as phosphates and nitrates – generated from an increase in wastewater from new homes is mitigated.
But a recent joint report from the House Builders Federation and the Land Promoters and Developers Federation found that whilst DEFRA – the government department that provides Natural England’s funding – believed that the majority of nutrient pollution in Britain’s waterways were caused by agriculture and a lack of investment in waster water treatment infrastructure, Natural England had “acted exclusively against home building”.
Despite being based in Yorkshire – the heartland of non-nonsense rationalism – this institutionalised NIMBYism is about to get even worse. Council leaders are predicting the number of homes blocked by NE ‘is likely to increase by 20,000 every year.’
But this is very much a case of new liver, same eagles. Poppy Coburn has written in detail about the increasing examples of the state ‘directly sending its taxpayers’ money to fund a charitable organisation to campaign against the Government’s immigration laws — and against what most of the electorate professes to support.’
Meanwhile, in the arts sector, the Arts Council has been ‘captured and degraded by activists’. It now prioritises political over artistic goals. 80 per cent of the Arts Council’s £1.34 billion budget comes from central government. As I’ve written for CapX, the amount of money the Conservative government lavishes on the ‘woke agenda’ it apparently hates – and which certainly hates it – is staggering:
The Conservative Way Forward report Defunding Politically Motivated Campaigns worked out the total spend across government on politically motivated activities at a staggering £7 billion a year. For a Conservative government to be funding an entire sector weaponised against conservative values with nearly £20 million every day is not just bad tactics, it’s fragging.
As my mother occasionally reminds me, you can’t ride two horses with one arse. Neither can government. Yet the Government is spending billions of pounds to undermine its housing policy, fight itself in court, promote artwork criticising government ministers, and funding a whole industry that exists not just in opposition to it but in order to oppose it.
These billions are being spent in a Britain where the average working-age person is about to face the biggest fall in living standards on record; where the tax burden is set to be the highest since World War Two; and where a 27-year-old today is receiving about the same level of state support as someone did ten years before the welfare state was invented.
Conservatives have to recognise that much of this failure arises from our failure to tackle government by quango and New Labour’s political settlement, which Peter Burnham called ‘the politics of depoliticisation’. He described it as ‘the process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making’, in which ‘state managers retain arm’s-length control over crucial economic and social processes whilst simultaneously benefiting from the distancing effects of depoliticisation’.
But Conservatives no longer benefit from the distancing effects of depoliticization. In fact, given the public sphere is markedly more left-wing than it was when we entered government, it’s not clear we ever have. The institutions and bodies that the Government has outsourced too are now operating with increasing independence and with increasing hostility to government policies and aims.
The problem is not just bureaucratic incompetence. This is the foundation – and continued empowerment – of ‘The Blob’, which inexplicably continues to be staffed by the Conservative’s political opponents.
The only way to eliminate ridiculous clashes of government like this is, as Paul Goodman argues, to reduce both the demand and supply of government. We need a much smaller state, performing a much smaller role – but much more ably.
But this isn’t just about the size of the Government. Conservatives need to take a long, hard look at their record in government and ask why every policy was a struggle, every new idea was resisted, and why a Rolls-Royce Civil Service handled like a Lada. Unless we come up with a new political settlement it won’t matter if we are elected at the next election. We’ll only be able to offer two things: nothing and bugger all.
Tom Jones is Councillor for Scotton and Lower Wensleydale and author of the Potemkin Village Idiot substack.
Should the government be funding its’ own opposition? It seems like a good idea, but I’m not sure it’ll catch on.
And it seems the Government agrees with me. Natural England (NE), the body set up to ‘help to protect and restore our natural world’, has blocked construction of some 160,000 homes, helping to drive housebuilding down to their lowest levels since the 1920s – despite the Government (until recently) having a target of delivering 300,000 homes a year.
Since NE acts as the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England, its’ primary focus is on rural areas. These saw a 24 per cent rise in homelessness last year. On top of the high prices, low wages, higher costs, and increased demand from second homes and holiday lets, people looking to buy a home in the countryside can now also look forward to en-masse blocks against housing across vast swathes of the countryside.
The body has previously blocked thousands of homes near the New Forest and Chilterns ‘because of their potential to draw walkers to the nearby countryside.’ Some 15,000 near the New Forest, to be exact, and a further 20,000 near the Chilterns. It also halted the construction of thousands of homes across vast swathes of Norfolk for an entire year, leading developers to warn that NE meant they built “very few homes and absolutely no affordable homes”.
NE gives responses to major projects that planners rarely overrule. The reason for objecting to these rules is nutrient neutrality laws. These laws mean that new development can only occur if the increase in nutrient load – such as phosphates and nitrates – generated from an increase in wastewater from new homes is mitigated.
But a recent joint report from the House Builders Federation and the Land Promoters and Developers Federation found that whilst DEFRA – the government department that provides Natural England’s funding – believed that the majority of nutrient pollution in Britain’s waterways were caused by agriculture and a lack of investment in waster water treatment infrastructure, Natural England had “acted exclusively against home building”.
Despite being based in Yorkshire – the heartland of non-nonsense rationalism – this institutionalised NIMBYism is about to get even worse. Council leaders are predicting the number of homes blocked by NE ‘is likely to increase by 20,000 every year.’
But this is very much a case of new liver, same eagles. Poppy Coburn has written in detail about the increasing examples of the state ‘directly sending its taxpayers’ money to fund a charitable organisation to campaign against the Government’s immigration laws — and against what most of the electorate professes to support.’
Meanwhile, in the arts sector, the Arts Council has been ‘captured and degraded by activists’. It now prioritises political over artistic goals. 80 per cent of the Arts Council’s £1.34 billion budget comes from central government. As I’ve written for CapX, the amount of money the Conservative government lavishes on the ‘woke agenda’ it apparently hates – and which certainly hates it – is staggering:
The Conservative Way Forward report Defunding Politically Motivated Campaigns worked out the total spend across government on politically motivated activities at a staggering £7 billion a year. For a Conservative government to be funding an entire sector weaponised against conservative values with nearly £20 million every day is not just bad tactics, it’s fragging.
As my mother occasionally reminds me, you can’t ride two horses with one arse. Neither can government. Yet the Government is spending billions of pounds to undermine its housing policy, fight itself in court, promote artwork criticising government ministers, and funding a whole industry that exists not just in opposition to it but in order to oppose it.
These billions are being spent in a Britain where the average working-age person is about to face the biggest fall in living standards on record; where the tax burden is set to be the highest since World War Two; and where a 27-year-old today is receiving about the same level of state support as someone did ten years before the welfare state was invented.
Conservatives have to recognise that much of this failure arises from our failure to tackle government by quango and New Labour’s political settlement, which Peter Burnham called ‘the politics of depoliticisation’. He described it as ‘the process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making’, in which ‘state managers retain arm’s-length control over crucial economic and social processes whilst simultaneously benefiting from the distancing effects of depoliticisation’.
But Conservatives no longer benefit from the distancing effects of depoliticization. In fact, given the public sphere is markedly more left-wing than it was when we entered government, it’s not clear we ever have. The institutions and bodies that the Government has outsourced too are now operating with increasing independence and with increasing hostility to government policies and aims.
The problem is not just bureaucratic incompetence. This is the foundation – and continued empowerment – of ‘The Blob’, which inexplicably continues to be staffed by the Conservative’s political opponents.
The only way to eliminate ridiculous clashes of government like this is, as Paul Goodman argues, to reduce both the demand and supply of government. We need a much smaller state, performing a much smaller role – but much more ably.
But this isn’t just about the size of the Government. Conservatives need to take a long, hard look at their record in government and ask why every policy was a struggle, every new idea was resisted, and why a Rolls-Royce Civil Service handled like a Lada. Unless we come up with a new political settlement it won’t matter if we are elected at the next election. We’ll only be able to offer two things: nothing and bugger all.