Labour activists used to hate Peter Mandelson. For years he would whisper in the ear of Tony Blair, urging him to defy the backbench ideologues, root out indiscipline and play the percentages.
The current incumbent of the backstage bogeyman position is Morgan McSweeney, a Mandelson protegé, who keeps his master on a similarly short lead. Mandelson, of course, is now a senior diplomat, his role as a political Svengali cemented by successive election victories after nearly two decades of Labour opposition.
Keir Starmer relies hugely on McSweeney, not least for confronting the big political challenge of the moment, possibly of the era: how to see off Reform UK.
And this week we hear Reform’s leader Nigel Farage is planning to outflank Labour by scrapping the two-child benefit cap and fully reinstating the winter fuel payment, both of which Starmer has been considering. Action Man Nigel knows how much Starmer fears his supporters drifting off to Reform, and he wants to show Starmer up as irresolute and plain wrong.
Staunching this impression seems to be McSweeney’s chief preoccupation, which is why, for example, hard-hatted Keir is out there in Bob the Builder mode, rolling up his sleeves and defying what are presented as pettifogging protesters to try and get his Planning Bill through.
Playing a key supporting role is Rachel Reeves, who says she wants to help developers to “focus on getting things built and stop worrying about the bats and the newts”. For someone who told voters she planned to be “Britain’s first green chancellor”, conjuring this entirely bogus dichotomy is pretty shaming.
The Government’s own review into why so little gets built found little reason to blame local green protesters. “We have only rarely had instances suggested to us where development was stopped by environmental regulation alone,” said the report’s author Dan Corry, a former Gordon Brown aide, who stood firm against the builders’ demands for a bonfire of regulation.
This was not the answer the Government wanted to hear. And there was further bad news last week for Reeves’s fraudulent alibi when it emerged that in fewer than three per cent of planning appeal decisions are bats or newts an issue.
So the bill’s supporters are selling a cartoon version of serious politics, presumably based on a belief that Reform voters, driven by dinner party and red-top prejudice, won’t be too worried about the facts. In any case, the chosen narrative is how the tyranny of bat tunnels is holding back Britannia’s surge to economic prosperity.
The sinister truth is that the creation of an Aunt Sally, the poor bats and newts, is a distraction from the creation of a more generalised licence to trash nature in other respects. Reeves’s bat-bashing provides cover for what even the Government’s own Office for Environmental Protection calls “environmental regression”. The meekest, most moderate nature-loving campaigners are aghast at Labour’s failure to “get” the contribution the natural world makes.
At a time when our impoverished natural world is under ever-greater threat from pollution and degradation, the planning bill promises yet more damage. It would weaken environmental controls, removing the “mitigation hierarchy”, another turn-off phrase but an important one, which codifies avoiding harm to nature as far as possible.
It allows developers a “pay cash to trash” clause, whereby in exchange for the damage they do they will pay into a fund to pay for a bit of greenery elsewhere. Yet less than a year ago Labour promised to “expand nature-rich habitats such as wetlands, peat bogs and forests so families can explore, and wildlife can thrive, including on public land”, and to ensure that “new towns and house building include nature at their heart, with access to parks and green spaces on people’s doorsteps and environmental standards protected.”
So what has changed? The Government’s message now seems to be: “We like nature, just not in our own backyard.” In thinking redolent of the 1970s, the assumption that builders have an obligation to the environment has gone out of the window, despite constructive offers from campaigners, as aware as anyone of the need to build houses, to meet legislators half way.
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The generous interpretation of this is that it is just bad PR and the Government needs to show it is listening. On the other hand, is it too cynical to suggest that it wants to advertise that it is not listening? Maybe being seen to play hardball against environmentalists is, for No 10 sophisticates, more important than the policy itself. It’s a dog-whistle appeal that says to potentially wobbling Labour voters: “You don’t need to vote Reform – you’ll get no Corbynite green crap with us.”
If that is the game, it’s a dangerous one. For one thing, in a tight election, frittering away the green votes that Labour won in marginal seats last year looks foolish. Recent polls have suggested that 44 per cent of Labour voters say slowing action against climate change would stop them voting for the party. Among young voters, Greens come second – to Labour. And no longer can the “low-salience” argument hold sway – that even when people tell pollsters they care about the environment, they still vote on the economy, cost of living and so on. These days, an improving natural world – on the doorstep – is more than a “nice to have”. People really care.
But even more pertinently, who says potential Reform voters are anti-nature? Research by Steve Akehurst suggests a big difference in attitudes between actual Reform supporters and “Reform-curious” Labour voters. His company Persuasion UK found that while 63 per cent of Reform voters at the last election opposed net zero, 60 per cent of Reform-curious Labour voters were in favour of it. In other words, among those Starmer wants to hold on to, there is no mileage in soft-pedalling the environment – and betraying the voters who got him elected. Akehurst says more generally that the smart money remains with sticking with the green agenda.
So going toe-to-toe with Farage on child benefit and winter fuel makes perfect sense. But maybe McSweeney should look at his polls again – and get Starmer to rethink the planning bill.
Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative by James Hanning and Francis Elliott was published in 2007
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