The issue of building on ‘green belt’ isn’t black and white but Starmer’s no spin approach is bold - David Behrens

Blair had only one yardstick for success and it was his personal popularity. He needed to be at the centre of everything and he longed to be liked. The way he came across was more important than what he did. This ‘look at me!’ mentality became the model for the next six prime ministers – even those like Gordon Brown who would rather have locked themselves in a cupboard.

So Starmer’s promise to get on with the job and shut up about it sounded like a breath of fresh air. And while the first details of his intentions remained vague they were at least free of the political spin an Alastair Campbell or a Dominic Cummings would have injected.

This left Conservative commentators with an open goal when the government confirmed that its house building targets would mean sacrificing some of the green belt land that separates our towns.

The unspoken narrative of the chattering classes was this: a socialist government will bulldoze the nice view from your suburban window and replace it with a brutalist office building or, worse, a council estate; and will denounce those who object as self-interested ‘nimbys’.

But the reality is more nuanced than the ‘serves you right for not voting Tory’ lobby will admit.

First of all, nimby is an unnecessarily pejorative acronym; there is nothing wrong with opposing developments in your backyard that would damage the character of the neighbourhood without greatly enhancing anyone else’s quality of life. Locals know better than politicians how planning proposals will play out in their area – and Starmer himself was called a nimby for opposing part of the HS2 rail line through his London constituency.

But more to the point is the use of the politically-charged phrase ‘green belt’ – an epithet that evokes the England of William Blake; of cricket matches on village greens and unspoilt vistas of rolling hills beyond. Only a philistine would contemplate contaminating a green and pleasant landscape such as that with blocks of council houses.

In truth, though, green has many hues. At the lush end of the spectrum is Blake’s Jerusalem which if paved over would ignite civil war. But that’s the countryside; it’s quite separate from the officially-designated belt of unbuilt land that separates one town from another.

It was put in place to prevent the ‘urban sprawl’ of communities merging into each other and Yorkshire is one of the regions where it can be said to have succeeded – although the north and east of the county do better than the populous south and west.

Within the green belt are swathes of parks and woodlands without which the patchwork of England would come unstitched – but also vast acres of scrub which Labour proposes to redesignate as ‘grey belt’ and open up to housebuilders.

But as with so much of its manifesto, the details are blowing in the wind. And it’s the fine print that will ultimately determine the fulfilment or otherwise of its ambitions.

Countryside campaigners argue that grey belt scrubland could be harnessed to create new wetland and woodland habitats – and if that’s the case landowners need to set about it quickly, before developers dig them up. But why would the owners even want to retain fallow fields that are suddenly sellable?

Brownfield plots on reclaimed urban sites are where most people seem to agree new houses should be built first. But housebuilders never liked them because they don’t attract premium buyers. And for those developers the opening-up of former green belt sites is a genie-out-of-the-bottle moment: suddenly they will have whole stocks of desirable homes to sell to aspirational buyers. It might actually be the most Conservative policy we’ve seen in years.

So the new landscape unfolding before us is physical as well as political. Tony Blair would have been spinning its virtues but Starmer’s policy-over-popularity ethos deems that unnecessary.

Is he correct? That may depend on how the view from your window looks five years from now.