Before I sound off, Cassandra-like at the inchoate stirrings of dissent against our Supreme and Beloved new regime and outline my part in its possible downfall, I’d just like to say how utterly sick I am of all the cooing news footage of Baby Keir’s developmental milestones.
Oooh look, he’s addressing the Commons for the first time! Hanging with Grandpa Biden in the Oval Office for the first time! Finishing a five-piece animal jigsaw for the… you get the gist.
We don’t care. Brutal I know, but there’s limited appeal in fresher MPs being sworn in and newbie PMs taking their first tottering steps towards anything apart from stratospheric economic growth. I’m no economist but a 0.4 per cent rise in GDP for May does not strike me as a ticker tape announcement.
Yes, yes, we’ve all heard Keir is off to Berlin on Sunday but he’s coming home – and unless he brings football with him and duty-free Toblerones for the whole country – it ain’t worth the autocue it’s written on.
There’s a reason why nurseries give proud parents excruciatingly detailed daily round-ups of cutting, sticking and bowel movements while big schools save it all for a single damning slam-dunk report at the end of term (unless the little bleeder has set fire to something).
Which, to be fair, in some respects Keir has. In his first week he’s certainly lit the touchpaper on a bonfire of Tory vanities, inanities and insanities vowing to “reset water” (buy a great big sieve for the floaters), “reset relations” with NHS staff (start shaking Theresa May’s mythical money tree), and – what’s this? – “reset Britain”, which always approximates a return to the 1940s, ours being a nation bizarrely fixated on nostalgia.
In the Dad’s Army of political leaders, we are rid of Rishi channelling Private Pike, with his sweaters always pressed but not equipped for real world challenges. Wheeling out Bojo’s pompous-but-flappily-impotent Captain Mainwaring on the verge of polling day only served as a reminder of his bumbling uselessness.
Nigel Farage remains the “Psst! Over here!” spivvy Private Walker, offering to flog us black market Spam and Impermeable Borders. And although I’d like to believe Keir is John Le Mesurier’s level-headed Sergeant Wilson, I’m worried he could turn out to be Bill Pertwee’s officious joy-killing Chief Air Warden Hodges, yelling at everyone to put the lights out – although now Ed Miliband has banned all new drilling in the North Sea, he might not need to.
With a stonking great majority, some challenges will be more easily overcome than others, and hand on (professionally snarky) heart, I wish this Government well. I really do.
What’s that? Oh no, I didn’t vote for it. I didn’t vote for any of them. Wait for it – I did something I once thought inconceivable and spoiled my ballot, which is a story for another day. Today, however, I’m more than happy to let them have a go at cleaning up the god-awful mess left by the last shower, who are currently too busy engaged in internecine catfighting to oppose anything apart from each other.
But I am fully intending to oppose them. Citizen Woods reporting for duty. Dunlop wellies (only townies and Glastonbury popstrels wear Hunters) polished to a sheen. Why? Because I feel furious that people like me, who care about the countryside, have been so carelessly disparaged and dismissed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves as Nimbys.
She wants to wage war on us. All of us. The inference being that we are always wrong, always self-interested and always opposed to progress. How insulting. I don’t live among rolling fields or bosky hillsides, but that doesn’t mean I have no right to be invested in their existence and deserve to be shut down before I’ve even opened my mouth.
Policies, like prime ministers, come and go. But once you pave paradise, put up a parking lot and build on the green belt, it is lost to nature – to us – forever. The UK is already one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe and is in the bottom 10 per cent of all countries globally.
We need to be very careful about our custodianship of the land – and there’s a deal more to it than rebranding the green belt as “ugly”, grey-belting anything that can be built on and brown-belting our way to a scorched earth of monstrous carbuncles.
I get the need for a literal as well as metaphorical expansion of 21st-century industries. I have two daughters aged 22 and 15, whom I love dearly, but would like to see move out of the family home before I’m carried out in a coffin. So I have no quibble with Starmer and Reeves pledging to have 1.5 million homes built over the next five years in power. Happy to have two little ‘uns at the bottom of my garden if it helps, Sir K.
But you don’t have to be Kirstie or Phil to grasp the importance of location – and, a shocker I know, sometimes it’s the bona fide locals who actually know best. That would explain why newly elected West Bromwich MP, Labour’s Sarah Coombes, has already played hooky from Parliament to speak up for residents trying to stop 150 houses and a countryside park being created on Black Country farmland. Uh-oh.
She may be the first (give her a sticker) but I can safely predict she won’t be the last to paddle her own canoe when it comes to planning issues. I might join her. Did I once lie down in front of a digger? Try to tie myself to an ornamental cherry tree about to be felled for no good reason other than local authority elf and stupidity? I can neither confirm nor deny. It was pre-smartphones which makes deniable operations that bit more deniable.
What I can say is that if Labour starts laying waste to our green and pleasant land, our doughty defence of the Home Front could get very dirty indeed.
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