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Nimbys. Naysayers. Traitors. Children take note, why learn oracy when insults will do?

Catherine Bennett, Guardian,  9th Feb 2025

Keir Starmer’s rhetoric against green campaigners appears to have taken a playground turn.

Before the last election, in what was billed as his “most personal interview yet”, Keir Starmer said: “I’m not in the habit of bandying insults around”. It was once part of his appeal, or meant to be, that his speech was polite, even to the point of colourless, in contrast to the ugly gibberish streaming out of Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss. When the Tories went low, Starmer went sorrowful headteacher. “I don’t think Boris Johnson is a bad man,” he said in one speech, “I think he is a trivial man.”

His favourite word, these days, is “nimbys”. Starmer uses it so freely he’s personally breathed new life into the original acronym (“not in my back yard”), revealing along the way its largely unexplored potential to create national disharmony. Why restrict such a genius jibe to arguments about ring roads and executive homes?

Last week’s headlines about his plan for nuclear power expansion – typically, “Starmer to ‘push past nimbyism’ in pledge to expand nuclear power sites” – are only the latest in which Starmer demonstrates how any opposition to any scheme with environmental consequences can be represented, by a skilled litigator like himself, as nimbyism: purely selfish, irrational and against the common good. Unlike the visionary tech overlords such as Google, Meta and Amazon, which Starmer invited, in the same speech, to profit, with their data centres, from the UK nimbys’ certain defeat. His government’s pro-nuclear press release featured praise from similarly patriotic, non-nimby-infested corporations, such as EDF and Microsoft.

It is thanks to Starmer we now understand that Greenpeace and other environmental campaigners – actually anyone with questions about, for instance, the disposal of nuclear waste – are essentially indistinguishable from other varieties of nimby he has been insulting for a while, so as to trivialise in advance any disquiet about Labour’s plans to tear up planning regulations.

Look beyond the acronym’s “back yard” element: now any non-local objection to 150 infrastructure projects, all evidently beyond criticism, also identifies a person as, in his eyes, the enemy of his “working people”.

…………………………..“There are countless more examples of Nimbys and zealots gumming up the legal system,” he wrote, “often for their own ideological blindspots to stop the Government building the infrastructure the country needs.” Anti-growth traitors, the lot of them. “They want to win for themselves,” Starmer raved, “not for the country.”………………………………………..

 For prominent Tory idealists, there must be validation in Starmer’s promise to fulfil their dreams, never properly realised, of humbling environmentalists and trashing planning restrictions (in places where they don’t live). Not forgetting the satisfaction of seeing Starmer recycle, for Labour, their exact same phrases, sometimes wearing the same accessories – hard hats and hi-vis jackets – for the benefit of vanity photographers recently declassified as a Tory outrage.

Since it can’t be plagiarism, only shared passion can explain why Starmer and David Cameron have phrased their ambitions in identical terms, in wanting, say, a “bonfire of red tape” (Starmer 2024; Cameron 2014). Starmer thinks regulations are “suffocating” (likewise Cameron); Starmer says “we are the builders” (ditto George Osborne); Starmer wants to end “dithering” (Cameron, “cut through the dither”); Starmer declares Britain “open for business” (Cameron, same, 2012); Starmer confronts those “talking our country down” (so did Cameron, 2011).

To judge by their interchangeable expressions of annoyance, hostility to environmental protections is also common ground for Reeves and Osborne. For him, they placed “ridiculous costs on British businesses”; for her, they make “delivering major infrastructure in our country far too expensive”. In 2012, the vice-president of the RSPB, Britain’s largest nature conservation charity, called Osborne “a bloody idiot”.

…………………………The teaching of “oracy” in schools was once a priority for Starmer. Confident speaking, he said, gives “an inner belief to make your case in any environment”. Whatever explains his recent change in style, the debacle is not without educational value. Kids, if you go in for name-calling, offensive misrepresentation and unconvincing assertions of your superior judgement, the finest voice coach may struggle to transform it into persuasive oracy. Even when, as with Starmer’s nimbys, your targets were, only months ago, your friends. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/09/nimbys-naysayers-traitors-children-take-note-why-learn-oracy-when-insults-will-do

February 12, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster, UK