Local activists are the strongest soldiers in the war over the character of England
“NIMBYs are the real revolutionaries”, I argued two years ago in a cover story for The Critic’s summer edition on housing policy. This week the people’s army came good.
Faced with the dispersal by the Home Office of large numbers of unwanted asylum seekers, one of them, Epping Forest District Council, pushed back. It ordered the closure of a hotel that had been converted for the exclusive use of 138 migrants, and that had become the focus of community protest that attracted nationwide coverage. But Epping could only make the order thanks to local planning regulations that Westminster policy wonks regard as reactionary and bureaucratic.
As The Times’ Steven Swinford explained:
In the end the Bell Hotel … wasn’t closed down because of protests, local fears or crime or disorder. It came down to planning laws – specifically the Town and Country Planning Order of 1987.
The 1987 statutory instrument allows a local authority to intervene when a property has a change of use. Under the orders of the Home Office, The Bell and hotels like it have agreed to change from being a public commercial leisure facility to a private state run human warehouse. Epping intervened, the Government appealed, and lost.
“Apologise to NIMBYism,” demanded the influential X account Max Tempers, citing Swinford. Others echoed the call, wondering: “Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?”
Local campaigners should savour the victory they have achieved
If both this reaction, and The Critic’s original headline, are in some part ironic, then the proposition underlying my piece was more serious. For two decades, politicians had promised to control migration, but governments changed, and numbers continued to increase. Voting didn’t work. Then, nine years ago Britons expressed a desire in the 2016 EU referendum to “take control” of the nation’s borders, only to see net migration rocket, in the largest demographic change to the island for a thousand years. So referenda didn’t work either. What tools did citizens then have left, except to grab what was nearest at hand? Local mechanisms like the TCPA could be used to express a stubborn refusal to consent to change imposed from outside. So, I wondered, perhaps Nimby-ism could be thought of as a grassroots political phenomenon? Were Nimbys the true heirs of Simon Bolivar and Mao Zhedong, but with a Waitrose membership?
This idea seemed outlandish in Westminster policy circles, which are now animated by intergenerational hostility. The use of coercion by central governments to impose change on local English communities is not new, but it now wins support from the conservative intellectual apparatus in SW1. Here, even nominally ‘Conservative-supporting’ think tanks like Robert Colvile’s Centre for Policy Studies, which runs a feature called “Nimby Watch” to deride localism, largely agree that local planning rules must be eviscerated to accelerate the creation of new housing and infrastructure. Opponents forlornly explain that without mass migration, there wouldn’t be much of a house crisis at all. This was always the Achilles heel of supply side arguments — demand was out of control. Now Epping has made clear how effective these local tools can be.
As well as institutions like think tanks, opponents of central control must also face down a new, self righteous and aggressive cadre of online activists. In my 2023 feature, I cited one called James Dickson, who uses the handle “RepealTCPA1947” — referring to the planning act — and the charming name “Yimby Martial Law Enforcer”.
Yimby, or “Yes In My Backyard” is a relatively recent development: a synthetic political influence operation that is almost entirely sustained by new tech money, and advanced by rationalist and utiilitarian activists. In 2023 I described how some arrived directly from the effective altruist (EA) movement, while others more indirectly, via “Progress Studies”, an EA-aligned initiative conceived by Stripe fintech billionaire Patrick Collison. It is inconceivable that Yimbys would exist at all in the UK without this funding. There is no sign of Yimbys abating, despite the hostility of communities to seeing their local environment degraded. The latest big money EA rebrand is the “abundance agenda”.
Somewhat awkwardly, voters will always choose security over growth, which brings us back to Epping, where protests have been sparked by safety concerns. A significant influx of imported young men, without families and raised with different social norms, poses a threat to the security of the community.
The EA-flavoured utilitarianism has been surprisingly influential in this Labour government, and in Angela Rayner, finds a housing minister almost as keen to dismantle localism as the angry Yimby enforcers. Now fortified by new EA vehicles like the “Centre for British Progress”, Rayner has promised to make greater use of compulsory purchase orders in her Planning and Infrastructure bill. Not surprisingly, the number of self-declared Nimbys has risen.
Local campaigners should savour the victory they have achieved, but the war over the character of England has only just begun.
