Does Labour believe in beauty? The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, celebrated his arrival in office this summer by permitting three of the largest solar panel arrays in Britain. One, a Suffolk array covering nearly 2,800 acres, was described by a county councillor as “the poorest infrastructure application that I have ever dealt with”.
Now Miliband is demanding a procession of pylons filling the glorious Amber Valley in the Derbyshire uplands. Another parade of 420 pylons, each nearly as tall as Nelson’s column, will run down the east of England from Grimsby to Walpole, near King’s Lynn in Norfolk. The government also wants to allow the return of onshore wind turbines, overriding local objections.
There is no sign in any of these decisions that the new government puts any value in the beauty of the British landscape. Miliband derides its defenders as “blockers”, “delayers” and “obstructionists”. He even adopts the authoritarian’s favourite gimmick, defence. Pylons and turbines are “the economic justice, energy security and national security fight of our time”. As with the location of new housing estates, he and Keir Starmer also revel in their contempt for local democracy.
Miliband is now reportedly toying with the idea that local people who object to pylons and turbines should be bought out, either by grants or by cheaper energy bills. Rural beauty is up for sale. A contributor to the BBC’s Farming Today this week argued that the value of the countryside was an asset that locals should be entitled to sell. There was no mention of the pleasure others might derive from it. Indeed, never in these debates is value attached to the benefit the nation as a whole might get from its natural environment. It seems utterly disposable.
The contrast between the way we treat country and town is glaring. We do not despise cities in this way. We value townscape. We “list” and conserve the most visually rewarding areas. I cannot alter my house in a conservation area for fear of giving offence to those who live round me. Starmer and his colleagues may have signed up to an arbitrary housebuilding target, and a developer may duly want to build a block of flats next door. But I can stop him, not as a nimby but as one of many who derives pleasure from my urban surroundings.
In other words, the housing market must be regulated even if, in extremis, it is the homeless who suffer. We have learned, belatedly, to respect the beauty of architecture. I imagine Miliband and his colleagues would agree. He would not ease the plight of the homeless by building flats in Hyde Park. Nor for that matter would he save the planet by erecting wind turbines on Hampstead Heath.
Millions enjoy the British countryside, both by living in it and by visiting it in ever greater numbers. Yet outside national parks, this countryside is effectively defenceless. The Amber Valley has been enjoyed by millions of visitors over the years, as have been the rolling woods and fields of Lincolnshire and East Anglia. Yet Miliband dismisses those fighting to protect them as obstructionists and blockers – and is prepared to pay them off with bribes.
The reality is that these decisions are not about global warming or planetary survival. Plainly renewable energy makes a contribution to relieving climate change and plainly we must play our part. But the contribution that Britons can hope to make in that cause – compared with China and India – is so infinitesimal as to be mere gesture.
That is why some sense of proportion should be applied to the price the country is asked to pay. There are plenty of areas where renewable infrastructure could be allowed to intrude on the scenery. Britain is not short of brownfield land crying out for investment of any sort. But it would be a good idea if some concept of zoning were introduced to suggest where those areas are and where they are not.
That way we might know in advance where countryside is sufficiently precious – in terms of its scenic beauty – not to suffer intrusion. The East Anglian coast must be one such area, as should be Snowdonia and the Amber Valley. If National Grid can pay its international shareholders nearly £9bn over five years it can bury its cables or sink them in the sea where they would otherwise go through beautiful countryside – or if not it can be helped to do so.
The way modern government spends money on infrastructure projects is chaotic. Rachel Reeves’ Treasury is apparently preparing to spend upwards of £1bn on the absurd HS2 extension to Euston. For the cost of bringing HS2 into London, the government could build the Lincolnshire pylons entirely undersea. It only needs the Treasury to make the switch.
These are not matters of planetary survival, let alone of national security. They are aesthetic choices of how to spend public money on values that we should surely hold dear.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
