For this week’s edition of ‘Nimby Watch’, we’re off to the Rutland/Lincolnshire border, where local Tory MPs are furious about a planned solar farm…
Alright, where to? Mallard Pass, on the Rutland/Lincolnshire border.
This sounds familiar. And Gate Burton, which is also in Lincolnshire. Plus some fields near Newmarket, where Suffolk blends into Cambridgeshire.
I’m getting a strange sense of deja vu, here. Yes, it’s a few years late, but Ed Miliband’s new golden age has finally arrived. It’s barely a week since the newly minted Energy Secretary began his reign, yet already he’s repealed the ban on new onshore wind farms, imposed by his predecessors back in 2015 in the doomed hope of placating the unplacatable. He’s unveiled plans to rejig the planning system to make it easier to stick solar panels on roofs, too.
Best of all, he’s overridden the dark forces of Nimbyism and approved a trio of big solar farms which between them could generate 1.4GW – enough, apparently, to power just over 400,000 homes. All this will mean cheaper energy, take us a step closer to net zero, and give us greater energy security to boot. ‘Some of these cases had been held up for months before I arrived in the department’, said Miliband. ‘They were put on my desk on Monday and I’ve made a decision in three days’. A new dawn has broken, has it not?
Sorry, did I miss a memo? Is this column now called ‘Yimby Watch’? Oooh, don’t tempt me. Alas – and sit down, this may come as a shock – there are those who don’t think this marks a glorious new day for Britain.
Take, for example, the Racing Post, which ran a story about the ‘controversial Newmarket solar farm’ Sunnica, under a headline which literally begins ‘It beggars belief’. The scheme will, apparently, be ‘close to some of Newmarket’s most important gallops’, and will ‘blight the landscape of the historic Limekilns training grounds to the north-east of the racing ground’. These are sentences which we are not, I gather from context, expected to find funny.
Well perhaps the horseys will get distracted by shiny things. They’re not the only ones. By a staggering coincidence, all three of these rural solar farms are in constituencies held by opposition MPs. Edward Leigh, the father of the house and MP for the Gainsborough seat which contains Gale Burton, complained that ‘Labour is waging a war against our countryside and against food production’.
Alicia Kearns, Conservative MP for Rutland and Melton, meanwhile, used a much-edited tweet to accuse Miliband of showing a ‘a complete disregard for community consent, contempt for human rights, and a complete failure to understand food security is a national security issue’.
Good to see someone sticking up for the human rights of Nimbys at last. That was actually, I think, a reference to claims many solar panels are manufactured by Uyghur slave labour in western China – an earlier, badly phrased and much mocked version of the tweet seemed to accuse the energy secretary of being ‘complicit in genocide‘. However ridiculous the phrasing, though, this seems to be an issue Kearns has a record of sincerely campaigning against, so good for her. (The Government has said its suppliers will need ‘to upload its modern slavery and human trafficking statement annually to the Home Office register to enable monitoring by the local planning authorities’. So, there you go.)
And then there’s Nick Timothy, a man previously most famous for losing Theresa May her majority in 2017, but who, as of 10 days ago, has become the MP for West Suffolk. He did his own Twitter thread ending with an ominous, ‘We will consider the options available to us’. Alas he, like his colleagues, may soon be disappointed to learn quite how limited those options are when you’re in opposition to a government with a mission and a big majority.
Yes, but food security… …is not significantly affected by these projects. The three schemes between them will cover 2,837 hectares – just under 11 square miles, or 0.02% of the land in England, not all of which is currently used to grow crops. I don’t think we’ll be going hungry quite yet.
In the name of completism, I should note that Charlotte Cane, the Liberal Democrat MP for Ely & East Cambs also opposes the Sunnica scheme. Just, not in a particularly interesting or quotable way.
But come on, if local people don’t want this stuff- Then there’ll probably be some annoying judicial reviews and a lot of whining, and I bet these solar farms will be plastered across election leaflets for the next few years. I also don’t believe for a second that a few flyers will be enough to stop the might of one of the world’s most centralised states. If the Government wants those solar farms to be built, they’re going to be built, and those opposition MPs better get used to the fact.
I bet those Tories will win reelection, though. Very possibly. The problem for the party is that it’s increasingly composed of seats in which their incentive will be to oppose any and all change. It’s thus harder than ever to imagine the party moving back to its roots as a mainstream, pro-business centre right party. Liz Truss was right all along: there is an anti-growth coalition. It’s the Tories.
And the Liberal Democrats. Oh, I’d forgotten about them.
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