Let me tell you a story. The man aspiring to be the next Prime Minister has been forthright in his plan to boost the ailing UK economy following six months of economic tumult. For a man accused of being bland and technocratic, he wants to deliver surprisingly bold planning reforms to create jobs, growth, and ease the UK’s housing shortage.

This man has promised to “make it easier to build better homes in the places people want to live.” And to achieve this goal, he tells Parliament he will deliver “comprehensive reforms of England’s planning system to better support the economy and release more land for housing in areas that need it most.”

No, this isn’t Sir Keir Starmer’s 2023 “Mission for Growth”, although it could be. It was in fact Rishi Sunak presenting his “Plan for Jobs” to Parliament as Chancellor in July 2020.

At the time Sir Keir slammed the Conservatives for their sweeping planning reform proposals – arguing that they would be nothing more than a “developer’s charter”, warning the public that the plan Sunak promoted would mean developers “building on your green spaces without your say”.

Oh, how times change. Where as recently as 2021 the Tory government professed to want to free Britain from its regulatory straightjacket, and Labour helped lead the anti-growth coalition against those reforms, it appears that today the party leaders are engaging in an act of political cross dressing. Happy Pride month.

Weak, visionless, and profoundly anti-market

On Wednesday from the government despatch box in the House of Commons Rishi Sunak bellowed “I make absolutely no apology for respecting, respecting what local communities want in their local areas. Whilst the party opposite may want to ride roughshod over the views of local communities and impose top down hor… errr… housing targets, and carpet over the green belt, that is not something that this government will do.”

It’s hard to get one’s head around just how pathetic this little speech was. Weak, visionless, and profoundly anti-market.

It’s tempting to think that Rishi Sunak is simply so insulated from the concerns of people having to downgrade their accommodation year on year thanks to rent increases, or those who have ever had to worry about mortgage payments, or pulling together that first deposit.

It’s tempting to believe that very wealthy people cannot possibly imagine what the housing market is like right now for the vast majority of the country. That they are so happy with their own property they do not give a second’s thought to pulling up the ladder of opportunity to others. Of making it harder and harder for the next generation to own property of their own.

But it’s worse than that.

Let’s dispel the fiction that Rishi Sunak doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he is doing. As Chancellor Sunak told us again and again that supply side planning reform is the key to jobs and growth. He championed releasing more land for housing. He knows how important planning reform is for not only growth but also social cohesion, for conservatism, for a sense of a property owning democracy. He knows all of that. He is simply too weak to enact it.

Sunak didn’t want to abolish housing targets. And he invented his “freeze the green belt in aspic” policy well in the knowledge that 11 per cent of all our brownfield land falls within his top down anti-growth diktat. He came to commit to both of these awful policies not because he thinks they are good, but as weak sops to Nimby interests within his crumbling party.

On planning policy our Prime Minister is showing himself to be nothing more than what one former Mayor of London might have described as a great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jelly.

And now supine Sunak has backed himself into a corner. Perhaps worried about appearing weak, he has taken the boneheaded decision to not only begrudgingly accept the housing target abolition rebellion, but to lean into it too. He is now attempting to cast himself as a leading commander of the all party anti-growth coalition, alongside Lieutenant Generals Ed Davey and Caroline Lucas.

Now his words about becoming a tech superpower or levelling up in the north ring hollow. He has been pushed to champion the very policies that are keeping us poor. Manchester and Liverpool are each constrained to fractions of the size of London. Cambridge has zero available lab space. And while planning restricts our own innovative university cities to medieval sizes, Boston in the States continues to boom and generate wealthy companies as a result.

It makes Sunak’s cringeworthy snipes at Sir Softie Flip Flop ring hollow. They have both abandoned as many pledges as each other. They both stand for weathervane politics.

And that is perhaps what is worst of all. I would love Sir Keir Starmer to deliver a version of the Jenrick Planning For The Future white paper he so fervently opposed as recently as 2021. But how can I be sure that five minutes after the election his policy will be any more alive than any of his ten leadership pledges — dumped the second he got the job.

Britain faces a choice between the man who flip flopped from Nimby to Yimby and the man who flip flopped from Yimby to Nimby. With no guarantee they won’t spin back all over again. I love this country, but emigration never looked so tempting.