If you visit Aldeburgh these days you will come away with the impression that Ukraine is not the only victim of hostile invasion. According to a campaign that has festooned the streets with posters, legions of monstrous electricity pylons will descend upon this blameless coastal town in a “march of destruction” unleashed by a malign force from the north, appropriately named Scottish Power. This evil empire plans to desecrate the area by laying cables from offshore wind turbines to transport electricity to a substation which will be built “close to the 6th- century Anglo-Saxon cemetery and home of Benjamin Britten’s Snape Maltings Concert Hall”, according to a letter to The Times signed by 17 outraged celebrities.
The campaign includes images of warbling nightingales (“When I’m gone will you miss my song?”), mournful looking red deer (“Displaced: cut off by cable trenches”) and tragic turtle doves (“Save me because I’m worth it”), suggesting its main concern is protecting the environment. Sceptics might wonder why, if so, all this effort is going into opposing a project whose purpose is to mitigate climate change by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.
The comfort and convenience of modern life has costs. Some of them — plastic waste and polluting industries — we offload on to poorer countries. Environmental damage is fine by most of us so long as it’s happening somewhere else. Other costs — housing, transport infrastructure and power generation and storage — can’t be exported. We have to build those facilities on these islands, so some people have to take a hit for the greater good.
That’s what planning disputes are about. Such arguments always seem petty, but they are small instances of something big: the clash between individual and collective interests. They arise when society needs to build something which locals fear will spoil their view and bring down the tone of the area. The protesters usually dress their concerns up as environmental, but they’re mostly about property prices. Nimbys who doubt that should ask themselves whether they would prefer to see a decline in the value of their house or in the population of nightingales, red deer and turtle doves.
Britons are exceedingly resistant to development, for they’re peculiarly attached to the countryside. Maybe that’s because we live on a small island; maybe it’s something to do with a class system at the apex of which was the landed aristocracy. Either way, while Europeans aspire to high-ceilinged apartments in elegant cities, Britons long for their own front door and a view over a patch of green. Our system of government panders to this, for it offers unusual scope for individuals to block development, which therefore tends to be slower and more expensive than elsewhere.
In the past couple of decades, our selfishness, which is what our failure to subsume our interests in favour of the common good amounts to, has shown up most visibly in the housing market. People who live in nice places will fight to the death to stop others from having the chance to do so too. Society’s consequent failure to build enough houses contributes to social injustice and intergenerational tension. Older Britons, in other words, are behaving selfishly towards the young.
As the row in Aldeburgh shows, energy is the other big area of tension between individual and collective interests. Mitigating the danger posed by climate change means reducing dependence on oil and coal, which requires the construction of new power-generation infrastructure. This, too, is meeting resistance. Most people support the transition to net zero, so long as the necessary wind turbines, solar farms and nuclear power stations are not built in their backyards. Fracking to produce the gas that we still rely on, and which is less damaging than coal or oil, has been stopped before it started. This resistance raises the costs of the transition — protests have driven the wind industry offshore, which doubles the cost of power — and slows it down.
Now Britain faces a new and even more urgent collective imperative: energy security. We have suddenly discovered that the world is more dangerous than we thought, and we can’t rely on being able to import whatever we want whenever we want it. The risk is not just of high and volatile gas prices, but also of interrupted supplies.
That means developing all our available energy resources as fast as we can. We need wind power, solar power, nuclear power — all the forms of electricity generation that can help secure our supplies. We need to start fracking, too. The argument that it won’t bring down the global gas price is beside the point: the danger is not just that gas will get more expensive, but that we won’t be able to get hold of the stuff. If it’s coming out of our land, we can.
In this new world, we must put collective interests above individual ones. Maybe we need to do that through legislation, as we did during Covid, when the government ordered us to stay at home and stop socialising to limit the spread of disease. Most of us obeyed. In the case of nimbyism, legislating for a more European planning system would tip the balance towards society’s needs. We can do that voluntarily, too, by paying less attention to what we want for ourselves and more to the greater good. For role models of how we should behave when the going gets tough, we need only look to the Ukrainians who are risking their lives for each other and for their country. Compared to what they’re doing, the price that we need to pay to make Britain safer is very small.
