Can Things Only Get Better?

This week: what I learned at Labour conference; some railway towns; and another lost transport plan to make you mad.

Forgive me if there’s a slightly incoherent quality to this week’s newsletter. I’ve just returned from Labour conference so, firstly, there have been days when I’ve felt less like I am about to die from a mixture of alcohol poisoning and freshers flu. (Reports of me dancing like a twat and screaming along to Things Can Only Get Better are yet another example of fake news from this exhausted Conservative government, and the voters simply will not fall for it.)¹

Starmer speaks. Image: Labour Women's Conference/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

More than that though: this was a particularly surreal Labour conference for me personally. On Sunday I attended a housing rally, at which someone announced that they’d had badges made featuring an excellent slogan which, they apologetically admitted, they’d stolen from the Liberal Democrats. Then they said the slogan out loud, only it wasn’t from the Liberal Democrats, it was the one the Liberal Democrats nicked from me: “Build More Bloody Houses”.

So, that was weird. Then on Tuesday, the night after that Labour List disco which I absolutely did not attend, I woke up to this report in the Times that outlined Keir Starmer’s big housing announcement, including a generation of new towns and some stuff about “Georgian townhouses” (not the type you get in Tbilisi, one assumes). The bit that really grabbed my interest, however, was the part that appeared in the final speech as this:

…This doesn’t mean we’re tearing up the green-belt. Labour is the party that protects our green spaces. No party fights harder for our environment. We created the national parks. Created the green-belt in the first place. I grew up in Surrey. 

But where there are clearly ridiculous uses of it, disused car parks, dreary wasteland. Not a green belt. A grey belt. Sometimes within a city’s boundary. Then this cannot be justified as a reason to hold our future back.

We will take this fight on.

The poor quality nature of much of the greenbelt, too, is a thing I have been banging on about for absolutely ages (an example in the Guardian, from September 2017). I’ve never particularly expected someone who had a pretty good shot at becoming Prime Minister to agree, because, well, voters love the green belt, because green belt sounds nice in a way “disused car parks” does not. And now there it was, spoken out loud by Keir Starmer in what may well be the last conference speech before the election.

And then, at almost literally the exact same moment, the BBC announced it was putting all of Doctor Who on iPlayer. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m in some kind of simulation, or possibly a coma.

But! I’ve talked about housing quite enough recently, and it’s going to take some time to digest this week’s announcements, so I’m going to park the matter for the moment. What to say of the conference more broadly?

My professional opinion as a journalist was that it was incredibly, mind-blowingly, boring. Quite possibly the single least interesting Labour conference I have been to in my 15+ years of attending. The party is united behind the leadership, to an almost unheard of degree. Outside the secure zone there were a dizzying range of protestors (pro-trans rights, anti-trans rights, pro-life, pro-choice, pro-Palestine, pro-electoral reform, plus an all-singing, all-dancing, all east Asian campaign for domestic workers rights, each member of which was wearing a brightly coloured sweatshirt with their name on the back). 

Inside, though, all was harmony, and everyone was on message, and where’s the fun in that? Meanwhile, the fringe meetings which normally provide an alternative source of both information and stories were often so over subscribed that they were impossible to get into unless you showed up absurdly early. From the point of view of generating copy, the whole thing was a bust.

There’s a reason for much of this, though. Those fringes were oversubscribed because of the sheer number of people at the conference: 18,000 was the figure doing the rounds, a record, and a number said to be four times larger than the Tories’ offering last week. 

These weren’t just delegates, either, but commercial visitors, public affairs types and the media, all sniffing around to see what the next government is planning. Seemingly every event had a corporate sponsor, and a half decent buffet to match. The Spectator – the Spectator! – threw a party. Put it this way: “Rachel Reeves’ speech was standing room only” is not a sentence I ever expected to hear. And yet. 

It was, in other words, not a million miles away from how I imagine the conferences of 1995-6 felt: there was a very clear sense that real power was already crossing the floor. But there was something else, too: an inescapable feeling of caution, even paranoia. Last year, there was a sort of giddiness and excitement that Liz Truss meant that what had previously looked like a 10-year journey might just be completed in two. Now that feels all but certain – and nobody on the inside wants to be the one to mess it up. 

Nobody wants to be the one who drops the vase.

So yes, my professional opinion as a journalist is that this was an incredibly tedious conference. But my personal opinion, as someone who has to live in a country which the Tories have spent the last 13 years tearing to bits, is that this is a very good thing. 

A selection of railway towns

Like anyone else who travels regularly by train in Great Britain, I have on occasion found myself stuck – drinking coffees, checking noticeboards, tutting – at Crewe. Simultaneously and paradoxically, though, I have never actually been to Crewe. It exists in my mind not as a town, but as just a station and a railway junction. It took me a surprisingly long time and a conscious effort to even attach the name of a county to the place. (It’s in Cheshire, but only just.)

This is in some ways terribly unfair to a settlement of over 70,000 people. In other ways, though, it’s entirely fine, because Crewe really is just a station and a railway junction, albeit with a town attached.² The modern settlement grew around the “Crewe Works”, which made trains: the Grand Junction Railway chose the site, besides a village of just a few dozen people, after being rejected by NIMBYs in both Winsford and Nantwich. So Crewe really wouldn’t exist without the railway: the town was even named after the station, which was named after Crewe Hall. (UPDATE TO ADD: That in turn was named for the de Crewe family, who took their name from the nearby village of, well, Crewe. That, though, was around a mile and a half from the modern town and has since given up all hope of keeping the rights to the name, and is today known as Crewe Green.)

This feels like a good excuse to note some other railway towns: places that exist in their modern form, or possibly at all, only because of the arrival of the railway. Other noteworthy examples include: