The government’s knuckling down for bare-knuckle fights with an awful lot of people as it sets about keeping its promises on housing and clean energy. And is making as big a noise as it can about it.
After so many months tripping over their own tails, as tales kept getting told about how they’d messed up, there’s clear evidence emerging that they’re learning to talk the talk.
In the process, they hope, getting the twin message out that they are walking the walk – but it’s a long road ahead.
Very soon after Sir Kier Starmer got the keys to Number Ten, on the promise to change everything, this question arose in voters’ minds: ‘Er, when, exactly?’
With no clear answers forthcoming, his and his party’s poll rating plummeted, and the honeymoon turned out to be, as someone once said, nasty, brutish and short.
But, after a root and branch revamp of the Downing Street operation, the new look is beginning to show. Whether or not it’ll produce the goods is another matter. But it’s a start.
Take this week’s big fanfare over housing. The government swore blind at the election it’d get one-and-a half million new homes built.
Doubtful they’ll manage quite that many, but they have now set out a modus operandi and have signalled they’ll take on all comers in the process.
Put crudely, they plan to redesignate loads of land that was previously declared sacrosanct and trample on local councils – and nimby factions – that try and stand in the way.
What they’ll be up against is the default position best summed up in the following headline from the Daily Telegraph: ‘Labour Bid To Bulldoze The Home Counties.’
To which Starmer’s rejoinder is: ‘Our Plan for Change will put builders not blockers first, overhaul the broken planning system and put roofs over the heads of working families.’
Of course it’s not just comfortably off Conservative voters from the leafy suburbs who’ll be up in arms, there are also plenty on his own side who’re going to make a fuss.
But, hey presto, the government’s expected this week to set out plans to abolish loads of district councils, many of which just happen to be Labour controlled and anti too much housebuilding.
Funny that.
But it dovetails neatly with the government’s other bit of razzamatazz of the last few days, concerning the switchover to clean energy.
This will mean lots of new wind farms popping up all over the place, often very likely in defiance of local objectors who’d really rather they got built somewhere else.
Tough, says Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. ‘Obviously, we will take into account the views of local people, but … we want to avoid the kind of cost of living crisis we have seen over the past few years.’
His point being that if we’re too dependent on fossil fuels we risk a rerun of huge spikes in energy bills, such as the one that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And talk of the Kremlin’s cabal of fascist thugs brings us on to something that on one level puts all this talk of controversial but potentially nice new things into the shade.
‘It is time to shift to a wartime mindset, and turbocharge our defence production and defence spending.’ Because the current security situation is: ‘The worst in my lifetime.’
That didn’t come from some crusty old colonel who loves sounding off, but from the head of NATO, Mark Rutte.
Neither he nor his organisation is into hyperbole, and his language was starker than anything we’ve heard from that quarter in decades.
In practical terms, what Mr Rutte’s saying is that the so-called peace dividend that followed the end of the Cold War must now go into reverse. Meaning we need to spend more on defence. All of us.
And the message is given added urgency by threats from Donald Trump that if those who lag behind don’t get a move on he might pull the rug out from under the entire Western Alliance.
In fact we in Britain are very much not on the laggers-behind list, but the challenge for Starmer is should he divert some of the billions earmarked for peacetime projects to something more muscular.
A question he could well do without this week just as the economy surprised and disappointed everyone, including the Chancellor, by sticking stubbornly in reverse gear.
Naturally, the Tories are saying this only goes to prove how rubbish Labour is. To which Rachel Reeves’ riposte is a catch-all for just about everything the government’s trying to do now:
‘It’s not possible to turn around more than a decade of poor economic growth and stagnant living standards in just a few months.’
In truth though, the Tories haven’t really got much to say to anyone yet, and won’t until their leader, Kemi Badenoch, has defined what their mission is.
Hence perhaps the noises off about how Nigel Farage’s Reform party could supplant them come the next election as the official opposition, maybe even the government.
Former Labour Deputy Leader Harriet Harman is sounding the alarm about the insurgents, who were after all election runners-up in nearly a hundred seats, the vast majority held by her lot.
‘I actually think that Reform are going to replace the Conservatives at the next election because they seem to have an argument and they seem to know what that argument is,’ she said. Rather glumly.
They may well also have loadsermoney coming their way, thanks to the buddy-buddy thing going on between their new billionaire treasurer and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
In theory you don’t just buy your way into power in this country, but every little helps, as the slogan goes.
That’s one more troubling thought for Badenoch, who’ll be aware of the words of one of her predecessors, William Hague: ‘The Conservative Party is an absolute monarchy moderated by regicide.’
Still, something she said last week did manage to gain traction. Just a shame it was about nothing more consequential than, er, sarnies.
She stated, in her anything-but-understated way, that: ‘Lunch is for wimps.’ And, what’s more: ‘I’m not a sandwich person.’
To which the Prime Minister’s official spokesperson huffed that he’s: ‘Quite happy with a sandwich lunch.’ Indeed they are: ‘A great British institution.’
And, in an unprecedented display of cross-party solidarity, Farage agreed that a midday meal, that might well include a sandwich: ‘Is pretty cool.’
I’m not making this stuff up, honest.
But at least food’s more palatable than World War Three, though the American satirist Tom Lehrer managed to blend the two during the Stalin-era nuclear arms race, in a song spoofing Armageddon.
‘There will be no more misery when the world is our rotisserie,’ his jolly little ditty went. ‘Yes we’ll all fry together when we fry. We will all bake together when we bake, there’ll be nobody present at the wake.’
He sung all this with a jolly little smile on his face. Check it out on YouTube.
As to whether it calls for laughter or tears, that you have decide for yourself.
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