For this week’s edition of ‘Nimby Watch’, we’re taking a look at the work of Simon Jenkins, perhaps the most high-profile Nimby in Britain…
Where are we going this week? The pages of The Guardian.
That’s a newspaper. It is, yes.
You can’t build stuff on the pages of a newspaper. No, you can’t, but you absolutely can make it harder to build in the actual physical world. Consider the work of Simon Jenkins, a symbol of everything that’s gone wrong with the British planning system in one convenient columnist-sized package.
Oh god, what’s he done now? Written a particularly infuriating piece under the heading, ‘Pylons rule and rural beauty is up for sale. Why do those in power so hate the countryside?’
I, for one, welcome our new pylon overlords. But you of all people should know that columnists rarely write the headlines. They don’t, but they do write the text, and that’s shocking too.
Hit me. It begins with a rant about all the horrendous things Ed Miliband is doing to the country by allowing – you might want to sit down for this – solar farms.
My god. One of them was apparently described by a Suffolk councillor as ‘the poorest infrastructure application that I have ever dealt with’. Jenkins does not find room to mention that said councillor was a Tory, and thus might not be entirely plain dealing here.
Well, word counts and so forth. ‘Now,’ he continues, like an outraged Daily Mail headline about teenagers and their watermelon vapes, ‘Miliband is demanding a procession of pylons filling the glorious Amber Valley in the Derbyshire uplands’.
Do they have valleys in uplands these days then? And so he goes on, playing the hits. Overriding local objections. Contempt for local democracy. ‘A contributor to the BBC’s Farming Today,’ he writes, ‘argued that the value of the countryside was an asset that locals should be entitled to sell. There was no mention of the pleasure others might derive from it’.
Wait, he’s arguing that people who don’t own an asset should be able to overrule those who do? Yes.
Just because they like it? Yes, I thought that might trigger a reader of CapX. We’re also concreting the countryside while leaving cities untouched, apparently. Which might come as a surprise to anyone who’s lived in this country recently, but as Jenkins himself admits in his column, he lives in a conservation area.
Anyway, the reason I’m going in so hard on this one specific column is really just because of one incredible paragraph:
The way modern government spends money on infrastructure projects is chaotic. Rachel Reeves’ Treasury is apparently preparing to spend upwards of £1bn on the absurd HS2 extension to Euston. For the cost of bringing HS2 into London, the government could build the Lincolnshire pylons entirely undersea. It only needs the Treasury to make the switch.
…run that past me again? Yep. Ignore the fact he’s comparing fantasy budgeting for underwater pylons to the real cost of an actually existing budget. He’s arguing that, instead of completing a nationally significant piece of infrastructure, we could have slightly fewer pylons in a country that already has quite a lot of pylons. For the mere cost of (these the words of a review commissioned by the Government) ‘leav[ing] the West Coast Mainline, and… the M6, to collapse,’ we could protect Simon’s view when he drives through the countryside.
For the mere price of cancelling HS2, the Government could buy me one hundred billion penny sweets. It could!
It only needs the Treasury to make the switch. Jenkins, of course, has form for this sort of kneejerk ‘I’ve got mine, Jack’ selfishness. ‘Housing policy in Britain is a chaotic shambles,’ read one headline last December, ‘Thank God for Nimbys, I say’.
They do know how to make people click, don’t they. That would explain the 2022 column headlined, ‘Michael Gove is right about one thing: building more homes won’t solve anything’ – a column so bad as to get Jenkins a fisking from CapX supremo Robert Colvile himself (‘It’s rare to read a piece that has more factual errors than sentences’).
Two years before that, Jenkins accused Boris Johnson of trying to ‘in effect end planning permission’ (he was doing no such thing). He claimed in 2012 that Nimbyism is the default mode of politics (yes, and how’s they worked out, eh?). And a year earlier, he’d managed to be such a Nimby that he got himself a write up in the New York Times.
This man really hates the more houses. The all time greatest Jenkins/housing policy interface moment, though, surely came during a ‘heated debate’ on Newsnight in 2013, when Jenkins was chair of the National Trust. ‘Simon, how many houses do you own?’ demanded then planning minister Nick Boles. ‘I know [he] has at least two homes because I’ve been to two of them.’
I’m sure his own extensive consumption of housing has nothing to do with his desire to build no new things. Surely not.
Hang on, don’t you write for the Guardian? I do sometimes, yes.
Be interested to see if you still do after this. Me too.
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