Readers of my generation will remember the children’s programmes Trumpton and Camberwick Green, a sweet vision of life in an English village depicted with puppets. There is almost no traffic, power comes from a windmill, nobody ever leaves the village, and the storylines involve disasters such as a water shortage or a campaign against an unwanted electrical substation.
There, in a nutshell, is the view of the future held by too many of the people who rule us. Look around and you will see this world view everywhere.
Labour thinks we can run a modern economy entirely on wind and solar power, to judge from Keir Starmer’s conference speech.
Hilary McGrady, the director-general of the National Trust, is behaving like a throwback 1980s trade union leader, fighting the Government’s supposed “war on nature”, whether her 5.7 million members actually agree with her or not.
Or there’s Canterbury City Council, introducing Soviet-style closed roads to restrict travel around the city. Obviously they want to make it difficult to use a car at all, a goal that the anti-growth councillors who run Oxford or Bath seem quite open about, and indeed have largely achieved.
This whole tinpot picture of restricted aspirations inspires far too much of the British political class. They think it will produce a pleasant, unchallenging localism like Camberwick Green. It won’t. It will end up like East Germany.
Where it is really going is set out in this week’s House of Lords’ Environment Committee report on behavioural change and net zero. It is a bleak read, fortunately leavened by a certain unintentional humour.
To take just one example, the Committee heard from Kris De Meyer, head of the UCL Climate Action Unit, and one Per Grankvist – not, as you might think from his title, chief storyteller, a children’s TV presenter, but an advocate of storytelling as communication, on behalf of something called “Viable Cities”.
Dr De Meyer spoke with admiration of a “story of a pensioner finding out how to navigate green grants from the Government … which showed the pensioner overcoming challenges and retrofitting her home with double glazing and a heat pump”.
Such is the inspiring vision of the future set out before us. Free-born citizens spending their time finding out how to get money out of the Government in order to do things they wouldn’t choose to do themselves and living less well as a result.
This is the essence of the anti-growth coalition. About as in tune with normal human nature as the Anti-Sex League in 1984, and about as likely to achieve its results without hectoring, lecturing, and compulsion.
Because compulsion is where it will end up. The Committee speaks approvingly of the lessons of “the widespread behavioural change brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic”. That “behavioural change” was not ,of course, accomplished by encouraging us to act differently or by providing better public information. It was achieved by making it illegal to meet others and by fining people tens of thousands of pounds if they did.
The Truss Government has been trying to make us realise that there is another way, but it means that things have to change. If you restrict growth, people earn less, public services deteriorate, and everyone’s horizons shrink. When that happens, people get used to it, maybe even come to like it.
So making this mindset change was always going to be painful, especially when we and the rest of the Western world have been living in a fantasy of free money and unearned gains for two decades now. Sadly, the Government hasn’t got the message across particularly well so far, and too many people don’t want to hear it anyway.
Even some Tories. One ex-minister was quoted yesterday as saying: “Everything [the Government] are doing is everything that I don’t believe in.” One has to ask why this person ever joined the Conservative Party if they don’t believe in sound money, spending control, low taxes, and economic growth. There are too many like them, social democrats operating under Conservative cover.
Sadly, it looks as if the Government may be beaten already. The rather hamfisted start was unfortunate, and has allowed enemies to move in for the kill. Credibility has been shot as every mini-Budget U-turn makes another more likely. But the fight is not over yet. It is not impossible for Truss to recalibrate and keep the direction of travel while changing the pace. Let us hope so. If she fails, we will have lost the last chance to get onto a different path. We will then be living in the gloomy world of the anti-growthers, where we accommodate to steadily lower living standards.
The Tory vision of the country is, or should be, one where people are busy – working, thinking, travelling, prospering, bettering their lives. It involves building things and going places. It involves houses and factories, roads and cars, ports and airports, as well as parks, countryside and gardens.
Yes, that’s messy. We’d all secretly rather live in Camberwick Green. It looks a nice place. You could live a good life there.
The only thing is – there is no such place as Camberwick Green.
At least he didn’t say Venezuela.
Upvoting just to see boomers frantically grasping at straws as their world crumbles.
Hang on, we’re so deep I’m not sure if this is satire
Ironically the actual people who are preventing most of these changes are conservative voters
Note how in their vision “one where people are busy – working, thinking, travelling, prospering, bettering their lives” there’s no space for relaxation / family / enjoyment.
Miserable old Tory peer fails to recognise reality; News at Ten.
” There are too many like them, social democrats operating under Conservative cover.”
That’s right. Fight in the sack like the rats you are.
I love the irony of the man who negotiated loss of access to our main export market accusing others of being “anti-growth”.
So after removing the tax cut that was to magically make growth, does that mean Liz Truss is now part of her own anti-growth coalition???
It’s so pathetic how these Tory toadies have latched onto this “anti-growth coalition” nonsense like the survivors of a shipwreck clinging onto the last pieces of floating wood. The Tories have seriously fucked over millions of people and damaged the reputation of the UK by trying to implement their unwanted economic radicalism and they still have the gall to point the finger elsewhere.
The anti-growth coalition is something completely made up and exists only in the mind of a Tory speech writer.
Now it appears that policies against this made up concept appear to be the only thing the (current, at time of writing) prime minister can think about.
Perfectly normal behaviour by perfectly rational people
By turn into East Germany they mean highest standard of living in its military alliance?
12 comments
Readers of my generation will remember the children’s programmes Trumpton and Camberwick Green, a sweet vision of life in an English village depicted with puppets. There is almost no traffic, power comes from a windmill, nobody ever leaves the village, and the storylines involve disasters such as a water shortage or a campaign against an unwanted electrical substation.
There, in a nutshell, is the view of the future held by too many of the people who rule us. Look around and you will see this world view everywhere.
Labour thinks we can run a modern economy entirely on wind and solar power, to judge from Keir Starmer’s conference speech.
Hilary McGrady, the director-general of the National Trust, is behaving like a throwback 1980s trade union leader, fighting the Government’s supposed “war on nature”, whether her 5.7 million members actually agree with her or not.
Or there’s Canterbury City Council, introducing Soviet-style closed roads to restrict travel around the city. Obviously they want to make it difficult to use a car at all, a goal that the anti-growth councillors who run Oxford or Bath seem quite open about, and indeed have largely achieved.
This whole tinpot picture of restricted aspirations inspires far too much of the British political class. They think it will produce a pleasant, unchallenging localism like Camberwick Green. It won’t. It will end up like East Germany.
Where it is really going is set out in this week’s House of Lords’ Environment Committee report on behavioural change and net zero. It is a bleak read, fortunately leavened by a certain unintentional humour.
To take just one example, the Committee heard from Kris De Meyer, head of the UCL Climate Action Unit, and one Per Grankvist – not, as you might think from his title, chief storyteller, a children’s TV presenter, but an advocate of storytelling as communication, on behalf of something called “Viable Cities”.
Dr De Meyer spoke with admiration of a “story of a pensioner finding out how to navigate green grants from the Government … which showed the pensioner overcoming challenges and retrofitting her home with double glazing and a heat pump”.
Such is the inspiring vision of the future set out before us. Free-born citizens spending their time finding out how to get money out of the Government in order to do things they wouldn’t choose to do themselves and living less well as a result.
This is the essence of the anti-growth coalition. About as in tune with normal human nature as the Anti-Sex League in 1984, and about as likely to achieve its results without hectoring, lecturing, and compulsion.
Because compulsion is where it will end up. The Committee speaks approvingly of the lessons of “the widespread behavioural change brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic”. That “behavioural change” was not ,of course, accomplished by encouraging us to act differently or by providing better public information. It was achieved by making it illegal to meet others and by fining people tens of thousands of pounds if they did.
The Truss Government has been trying to make us realise that there is another way, but it means that things have to change. If you restrict growth, people earn less, public services deteriorate, and everyone’s horizons shrink. When that happens, people get used to it, maybe even come to like it.
So making this mindset change was always going to be painful, especially when we and the rest of the Western world have been living in a fantasy of free money and unearned gains for two decades now. Sadly, the Government hasn’t got the message across particularly well so far, and too many people don’t want to hear it anyway.
Even some Tories. One ex-minister was quoted yesterday as saying: “Everything [the Government] are doing is everything that I don’t believe in.” One has to ask why this person ever joined the Conservative Party if they don’t believe in sound money, spending control, low taxes, and economic growth. There are too many like them, social democrats operating under Conservative cover.
Sadly, it looks as if the Government may be beaten already. The rather hamfisted start was unfortunate, and has allowed enemies to move in for the kill. Credibility has been shot as every mini-Budget U-turn makes another more likely. But the fight is not over yet. It is not impossible for Truss to recalibrate and keep the direction of travel while changing the pace. Let us hope so. If she fails, we will have lost the last chance to get onto a different path. We will then be living in the gloomy world of the anti-growthers, where we accommodate to steadily lower living standards.
The Tory vision of the country is, or should be, one where people are busy – working, thinking, travelling, prospering, bettering their lives. It involves building things and going places. It involves houses and factories, roads and cars, ports and airports, as well as parks, countryside and gardens.
Yes, that’s messy. We’d all secretly rather live in Camberwick Green. It looks a nice place. You could live a good life there.
The only thing is – there is no such place as Camberwick Green.
At least he didn’t say Venezuela.
Upvoting just to see boomers frantically grasping at straws as their world crumbles.
Hang on, we’re so deep I’m not sure if this is satire
Ironically the actual people who are preventing most of these changes are conservative voters
Note how in their vision “one where people are busy – working, thinking, travelling, prospering, bettering their lives” there’s no space for relaxation / family / enjoyment.
Miserable old Tory peer fails to recognise reality; News at Ten.
” There are too many like them, social democrats operating under Conservative cover.”
That’s right. Fight in the sack like the rats you are.
I love the irony of the man who negotiated loss of access to our main export market accusing others of being “anti-growth”.
So after removing the tax cut that was to magically make growth, does that mean Liz Truss is now part of her own anti-growth coalition???
It’s so pathetic how these Tory toadies have latched onto this “anti-growth coalition” nonsense like the survivors of a shipwreck clinging onto the last pieces of floating wood. The Tories have seriously fucked over millions of people and damaged the reputation of the UK by trying to implement their unwanted economic radicalism and they still have the gall to point the finger elsewhere.
The anti-growth coalition is something completely made up and exists only in the mind of a Tory speech writer.
Now it appears that policies against this made up concept appear to be the only thing the (current, at time of writing) prime minister can think about.
Perfectly normal behaviour by perfectly rational people
By turn into East Germany they mean highest standard of living in its military alliance?