A third runway for Heathrow is a long-standing Labour policy. One was first proposed by Clement Attlee’s government back in 1949. A revived proposal was announced under Tony Blair in 2003 and approved by Gordon Brown in 2009. Between then and today, it was kiboshed by David Cameron, approved again by Theresa May, and kiboshed again by Boris Johnson.
If a runway was a good idea in 1949, it is a good idea today. If Schipol has six runways, and Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt, and John. F. Kennedy all have four, it seems incongruous that our national airport only has two. But what about Gatwick, Luton, or Boris Island? Yes, extend or build them too. Until populations decline or teleporters are invented, more space for more planes is a boon.
So the Chancellor’s speech today was welcome. As were her flurry of other announcements: an Oxford-Cambridge Arc Growth Corridor, with new rail-links, homes, and lab space for a Silicon Valley of the fens; relaxing planning constraints and a war on bats; lower but higher-skilled migration; welfare reforms; deregulation; trade deals; offshore wind; unlimited rice pudding…
With every new announcement, the nation’s YIMBYs clutched their printed and personalised copies of Foundations a little tighter. Centre-right think tanks have been swift and fulsome in their praise. The Adam Smith Institute, Britain Remade, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute for Economic Affairs – each, with varying degrees of caution, gave Rachel Reeves a thumbs up.
But as welcome as the Chancellor’s change of tone after six months of doom and gloom might be, her pro-growth rhetoric doesn’t get a single shovel in the ground. Had a third runway gone ahead unimpeded when May gave her approval in 2016, it might just be seeing flights this year. So even if Reeves gets her runway past her MPs, Sadiq Khan, and the courts, it’s a decade off, at least.
The same is true for Reeves’s various other building plans. The planning ogre has been challenged but not slain. Practical constraints on building capacity remain. A lot of these ideas have been kicked around for a very long time. None is a silver bullet, a catch-all answer to two decades of stagnation. Each is welcome; each would be a huge surprise it actually happened.
Apologies for my cynicism. But once the assumption that nothing ever happens has gotten a hold of you, it becomes difficult to shake. There’s also no way of escaping that today’s wishlist has been a hastily assembled distraction by a Chancellor whose Budget bombed, whom the markets, voters, and plenty of her MPs already despise, and who doesn’t want to lose her job.
All the decisions which Reeves has made to make her life miserable have not been reversed. The Budget imposed the largest tax hikes in thirty years. Her National Insurance and minimum wage hikes have discouraged employers from hiring. In tandem with the Employment Rights’ Bill, Daniel Hannan is right to warn that 2025 is the year our low unemployment miracle will end.
Ed Miliband might be peeved, but he and his one-man crusade to take us back to the Stone Age by 2030 remain in place. Just as the consensus settles on our need for cheap and abundant energy, the Government is ploughing ahead with ending new licences for North Sea oil and gas exploration. Fracking remains as politically unpalatable as it was under Liz Truss; new nuclear as distant.
In which case, unless Reeves decides she has had a Damascene conversion to fiscal irresponsibility, junks her fiscal rules, and breaks with half a century of orthodoxy, she is still going to have to come to the Commons in two months for a Spring Statement of downgraded forecasts, spending cuts, and tax hikes. Something something Gods something something Copybook Headings.
As both Matthew Lynn and I have suggested, Reeves’s fatal flaw – leaving aside the merits of her policies themselves – was one of sequencing. Like Truss, she put delivering her big Budget first, and the confidence-building tour d’horizon second. Also like Truss, barring a miracle, this is a mistake which will hobble her time in Downing Street for the rest of its conceivable future.
If Keir Starmer is as ruthless as his bigger groupies strain to suggest, Reeves will carry the can for any unpalatable decisions that have to be made in March, and moved on at a reshuffle at this government’s next reset. But as I have also previously written, whoever replaces her will confront the same set of Hobson’s choices. Chancellor hands on misery to Chancellor.
Yet at least for today, Reeves had something positive to say. If the bountiful timeline in which her various announcements today are realised, she will have left a far more substantial and beneficial legacy than plenty of her recent Tory predecessors. She has shown us up for our dithering over the last fourteen years, plucking the low-hanging fruit that we left. Cue the calls of ‘Liz Woz Rite’.
Reeves has also proved, if one is willing to look, that there are plenty of good ideas out there for the taking for a politician wishing to listen to think tanks, boot up the Substacks, and engage with the Wonkosphere. As per our Editor this morning, Alex Burghart is leading on this for our party. I wish him well in the pursuit of that most noble quest: writing Stepping Stones 2.
But as I have previously written, this is not 1975, Kemi Badenoch is not Margaret Thatcher, and if she does not have anything of interest to say as soon as possible, our party’s slump into irrelevance will continue. As Reeves has shown, having something to announce is a useful distraction as you desperately hope the polls improve. It changes the record, if nothing else.
In Badenoch’s case, that might mean getting around to reading the report on migration from the Centre for Policy Studies last year. If she persists in being the only person of interest on the Right who hasn’t read it, she will continue to be outflanked by Nigel Farage as her generalising about lower numbers and integration remains uninteresting to voters against his promises of action.
So best of luck to the Chancellor in getting Britain building, saving her own skin, and proving us gloomsters wrong. And best of luck to the Leader of the Opposition in finding some time in her busy schedule to do some reading.
