Fell for it again

Of all the crimes by which the lonely and vulnerable are preyed upon, there is only one that does not attract a great deal of sympathy, at least in private. I am, of course, talking about the romance scam. Whether it is Reg, 60, falling in love with Pla, 26, on a beach in Phuket, or Jackie, 45, having a holiday romance with Abdul in The Gambia, there is always a slight sniggering, a Louis Theroux-style glance towards the fly on the wall, when it all blows up in their faces.

Much of this schadenfreude is post hoc rationalised, of course. The relationships themselves are exploitative, we say. Old and unattractive men and women imagining themselves desired by younger people from poorer countries, and so their humiliation can be dressed up as a kind of karmic retribution. Or perhaps it is the human fascination with watching people — sometimes successful, otherwise sensible people — suspend all disbelief in order to feel, for a moment, that love has returned to them as it was felt at seventeen.

I was reminded of this curious lack of sympathy when the latest housebuilding figures came out and the YIMBYs — the “Yes In My Back Yard” enthusiasts, those aggressively pro-development pressure groups and their fellow travellers — were confronted with the horrifying reality that fewer homes than ever had been built. Like Jackie on that beach in Banjul, the climate and the mood music must have been intoxicating: fourteen years of Tory incompetence, beginning in austerity and ending in Brexit, swept away by a stonking majority not seen since 1935. At the helm stood Morgan McSweeney. One of them: youngish, strapping, vaguely muscular in the political imagination, and associated above all with seriousness, discipline, and the reassuring possibility that somebody, somewhere, might at last be prepared to build the blimming houses.

The YIMBY is the sort of person is worth dwelling on, because he has become one of the more distinctive figures of the present political settlement. Managerial, metropolitan, socially moderate and inclined to think of politics less as a struggle between interests than as a problem of friction. Remove the blockers, streamline the process, get the grown-ups back in charge, and the country will begin to hum again. Planning reform, the green industrial revolution, proudly wonkish seriousness – this is the YIMBY in his purest form.

In one sense this is unobjectionable enough. GDP growth is good, and a country that cannot build is, plainly, a country in decline. There are, of course, irrational objections to development: there are elderly residents who object to any change in their sleepy market town, and those who complain about railway lines, pylons, substations, almost anything. But it is easy to see how such figures have been elevated into an all-purpose bogeyman for a certain kind of walkability-obsessed, urbanist, petit-bourgeois transplant. The NIMBY has become a pantomime villain onto whom every national frustration can be projected.

The problem is that YIMBYism generally refuses to talk about the main reasons ordinary people object to development. Chief among these are immigration, and the social consequences of large-scale housing expansion in a country where the social contract is already badly frayed. In Britain, people are not merely attached to views and hedgerows. They are often making a more hard-headed judgement about what happens when large estates or tower blocks are dropped into places where the public realm is already weak, policing is patchy and civic life has been hollowed out. In a country where crime often feels close to having been de facto decriminalised, and where the police do not reliably make people feel safe, it is hardly irrational for people to worry about large new developments imposed upon what had previously been peaceful, stable communities.

The most egregious example of this refusal to engage with democratic reality is Forest City, which, if it were not so laughable, would be genuinely sinister. Its authors write to local residents in the tone of a benevolent occupation authority — “You didn’t ask for this. We know that” — before going on to explain that if the locals will only suppress their instinctive resistance, they may in return enjoy affordable homes for their children, new schools, new hospitals, regular trains, buses every fifteen minutes, lump-sum compensation, rising property values, and even more nature than before. It is the language of people who believe that because they have sketched a future in sufficient detail, they have in some sense acquired the right to administer it.

It is the language of people who believe that because they have sketched a future in sufficient detail, they have in some sense acquired the right to administer it

The revealing thing is not just the absurdity of the proposal, but the cast of mind behind it. This is not politics as most people understand it — the laborious work of assembling consent, reconciling interests, winning arguments, securing legitimacy. It is politics as a form of imaginative possession. The land is not theirs; the mandate is not theirs, the institutional machinery is not theirs, but already they speak as though the villages had been softly annexed into a future over which only a few final administrative details remain to be settled.

Now that Labour has failed to deliver on housebuilding, some of these people have not so much reckoned with reality as retreated from it, into a world of make-believe. Denied results in the real world, they have taken refuge in the consolations of fantasy administration: sketching new cities, reallocating land, distributing powers they do not possess, like a defeated marshal still issuing orders to formations that exist only on paper.

Forest City is the reductio ad absurdum of the whole mentality. Forest City is what happens when the wonk escapes his natural habitat. Instead of making marginal improvements to an inherited order, he begins fantasising about founding a new one. The point is not that the thing is remotely close to happening; it plainly is not – the government today has said so. The point is that it reveals, in pure form, the anti-political temptation at the heart of modern YIMBYism: the belief that democratic consent, local attachment, landownership and political legitimacy are at best secondary questions, and at worst mere irrational blockages to be brushed aside by sufficiently clever people with a map, a deck, and an imported theory of growth.

That is why the failure of Labour housebuilding has hit this constituency so hard. It is not merely that a policy did not come off. It is that an entire moral and psychological picture of politics has broken down. They believed the main obstacles were procedural; in fact they were social. They believed resistance was irrational; in fact much of it was the ordinary expression of distrust in a country that no longer trusts its rulers to transform places without degrading them. They believed the state merely needed permission to act; in fact the state had forgotten how to act at all.

And so the YIMBY, like the victim of the romance scam, ends not just disappointed but humiliated. The embarrassment lies not simply in having been deceived, but in how badly one wanted to believe.