The big issue

This week: the housing election looms at last. Also: some notes on Australia’s big things, and a map of British cities by popularity.

You can still, if you’re so minded, read my supervillain origin story. It was autumn 2013; I had bought my first flat a few years earlier but couldn’t for the life of me work out how to get to the next rung on the ladder. And looking around, it was clear that there were a lot of forces in British politics – local groups; the Campaign to Protect Rural England; actual public opinion – aligned against fixing the housing crisis. 

And so, fuelled by a combination of guilt, fear and a pure and simple need for a drum to bang, I decided to become the housing guy: the one who’d sit on the internet, calling the political classes out for their complicity in our housing shortage. By making the case for far more radical green belt reform than I actually wanted, I hoped, as I wrote in an early column for the New Statesman, in a very small way to balance the scales – and all from the comfort of my keyboard.

In terms of clicks and retweets, at least, this went surprisingly well. There was clearly a lot of enthusiasm for pro housing commentary, and I began to meet others who’d had roughly the same idea as me. In 2015, the National Housing Federation held a conference at which it brought together everyone in the British housing sector, and leaders from four major political parties, with the goal of getting them to commit to ending the housing crisis within a generation. It felt like the coming issue. 

And then the Tories won a majority, and Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership, and we had a referendum – and it became clear that maybe housing was not quite as likely to be the defining issue of the next few years as I had begun to think.

Even politically engaged people, I had allowed myself to forget, aren’t actually interested in policy.

But maybe I did have the right issue. Maybe I was just early to the fight. Because the parties are beginning to limber up for the next general election and it’s beginning to feel like, just maybe, housing is finally becoming a dividing line.

In the blue corner we have housing secretary Michael Gove, who told the Sun this morning that he’ll “never let NIMBYs crush [young Brits’] dreams to own a home”. His son, he claims, is an 18 year old Sun reader who will hold him to account. Of course he is. 

Gove himself is not completely terrible on this issue. He’s threatened to strip planning powers from councils that resist new housing, and – with a hint of panic about quite how many voter groups the Tories have left to rot – the renters’ reform bill is finally making its way through parliament. 

The problem facing pro-housing Tories, though, is that this is not what their voters actually want. Over the weekend, NIMBY in chief Theresa Villiers – the MP for Chipping Barnet; a woman who opposes greenfield development, yes, but is principled enough to oppose brownfield development, too – gave an interview to the Times in which she warned that building flats on tube station car parks would turn the suburbs into “East Berlin”. No one in her family has been affected by the housing crisis, she admitted; she could not recall a housing story that had actually touched her. 

This particular problem is likely to solve itself – her majority is tiny; she’s toast. But Gove’s refusal to criticise her is a reminder that his party’s support base consists largely of older, well-housed voters; and at this month’s local elections it faced NIMBY insurgencies across the Blue Wall, from LibDems and Greens alike. Gove has already abandoned mandatory housing targets for political reasons. His promises are politically impossible.

In the red corner, meanwhile, there’s Keir Starmer, who in a speech to the British Chamber of Commerce today attacked NIMBYs and vowed to “be on the side of builders not blockers”. He, too, has been speaking to the Times, who he told there should be discussions about whether or not to build on green belt. 

In the same interview, it’s true, he talks about his support for local decision making, which is frequently a block on development. And he, too, will face countervailing pressure from some MPs – John McDonnell has already tweeted his displeasure about all this; a few miles east, Rupa Huq has been opposing homes in Ealing. Labour’s voters, though, are substantially more YIMBY in outlook, giving the party more wriggle room. More importantly, the fact Starmer is willing to say he’s in favour of rethinking the green belt at all – that he isn’t running scared of accusations of any such intention – is a striking departure from recent political consensus.

There are plenty of hurdles between here and Labour actually changing anything, not least Starmer’s open relationship with his own promises. But for the first time I can recall, a candidate for Prime Minister has just said solving the housing crisis will mean building more on greenfield land. And now we get to have an election about that. Cool.

Some notes on Australia’s Big Things

The thing about Australia, right, is that it’s big. Really big: nearly 2,500 miles across. If Perth were London, then Sydney would be somewhere around the borders of Russia and Kazakhstan. If Sydney were London, Perth would be just off the coast of Newfoundland. It’s big.

Australia is also, to a large extent, empty, at least when it comes to humans: a population of less than half the UK, in the sixth largest country by area on the planet. Wikipedia has a list of 248 countries and territories by population density: Australia is 242th.

It’s hard not to see these facts – the sheer scale of the place; the distances between some of its settlements – as an influence on one of the great Aussie tourist traps: Australia’s big things, the huge novelty structures and artworks which generally depict things with which we are familiar (animals, fruits, bits of household equipment and so on), only, well, bigger. Some of them were adverts, a way for businesses to highlight their wares to passing drivers; others were straightforward tourist traps, roadside attractions built entirely to lure drivers to places they wouldn’t stop otherwise.