• Trump

Well, you kind of have to start with him, don’t you? But let’s keep this brief as well. As well as Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, his territorial ambitions now seem to stretch to Gaza. Considering that he said that “everyone loved” his proposal to take over this piece of real estate – in which terms he seemed to be describing it – the number of people who do not is quite large. These kinds of details don’t bother him, however.

The BBC suggests that the Gaza plan “won’t happen but will have consequences.” History is littered with the corpses of people who’ve told Trump he can’t do something, only to hear him say “just watch me.” It also must be admitted that everything that’s been tried there for about the last hundred years hasn’t worked that well. The big problem seems to be that many of the states are, or have been, clients of larger ones elsewhere. Trump’s plan doesn’t in that respect offer any change to that pattern.

• Heathrow

We had a look last week at Rachel Reeves’ growth-at-all-costs obsession and suggested at least four ways in which this was deeply worrying. Many Labour voters will also be marvelling at the speed with which several election promises have been diluted or set aside in the interest of this one aim.

Much of the focus has been on the promise of expanding Heathrow, traditionally a first point of call for governments which want to appease the business community. My conviction remains that it’s big enough already and that any extra transport capacity could better be apportioned elsewhere.

There’s also the question of whether it’s do-able. There are some formidable logistical challenges. The Week quoted The Sunday Times as pointing out that “the cost was put at £14bn in 2014, but Heathrow is said to have warned airlines that the bill could cost upwards of £42bn.” As we know from HS2, it’s always worth doubling the costs of large infrastructure estimates.

Heathrow’s every move is now conducted in a blaze of publicity. The way the airport came into being in the last months of the war was, however, positively furtive. Click here for an article I wrote elsewhere about twelve years ago. It could do with being updated: but couldn’t we all…?

• Homes

We cover this matter a good deal, mainly because planning (and flooding/sewage) are the two things that people find so boring that they don’t generally think about them. When they’re happening near to them, however, they can’t think about anything else. Both therefore need explaining.

An unwelcome housing development on your doorstep can certainly be irksome. During the lengthy construction period it can be like having builders or plumbers in your own place, ripping stuff up and creating mess but without any direct benefits for you. The character of your immediate area will be changed, perhaps for the worse (though this is always the suspicion). The value of your property may reduce: or, if more amenities are provided as a result of the new homes, it may increase.

Certainly your immediate environment will have changed. I remember our friend Nick telling us that, shortly after he and his family had moved into a new-build in Longcott, which stood between the existing houses and open countryside, he knocked on his neighbour’s door to introduce himself and said that he hoped they weren’t too disappointed with the intrusion. “Put it this way”, the tight-lipped neighbour replied, “our house is called Meadow View…”

I hope he remembered that every single one of us, unless we live in a cave, now inhabits a property that was once on a piece of virgin landscape. If you take the long view, we all live in new builds.

Planning applications and developments also produce another “can’t think of anything else” reaction in people. Some may find their view compromised: for others, the prospect of new homes is one which will, perhaps, open up the possibility of being able to get a home of their own.

It is this contradiction – attracting support from those who want more homes (but not where they can see them) and those who need somewhere to live at an affordable price – which governments are constantly trying to solve. Our new one has done this by reinforcing its predecessor’s 300,000pa target and also introducing some measures immediately to make this happen.

This article in The Guardian contains some excellent points about how this flagship plan might run into problems. These include a reliance on a few high-volume builders, the fact that the increased supply is not of itself leading to a reduction in cost, the failings of the tax and planning systems, environmental illiteracy and the problems of the proposed liberalisation of the mortgage market.

I could add a few more. Who’s going to do the actual work on these? There appears to be a shortage of skilled trades in the country to the extent required.

How will enough affordable ones get built? The current effective out-sourcing to the private sector doesn’t tend towards these.

Can planning policy be changed to ensure that the necessary infrastructure is provided at the right time? Too often, features such as community centres, schools and surgeries are left to the last stages of a build-out.

Can more funds be found for enforcement officers? At present, this is a non-statutory obligation for planning authorities and the frequent lack of them risks allowing those with long pockets and deep experience to pervert aspects of the system to their own ends.

Finally, we surely need to look at reforming our system of land valuation. As this article by WBC Councillor Tony Vickers explains, land ownership is – to quote Churchill – “the mother of all monopolies’ and confers a benefit for the proprietor quite out of proportion to the risks.

• German grannies on the march

There have been quite a few stories recently about political turmoil in Germany – fracturing political alliances, accusations of betrayal and various tentative alliances with the country’s right-wing AFD party, an organisation many politicians clearly don’t like but are finding increasingly impossible to ignore. Anything involving upheaval in Europe’s largest economy is probably worth keeping an eye on.

Not being well versed in German politics I was finding it hard to make much sense of it. Fortunately, an email to Penny Post’s Hamburg correspondent Owen Jones produced this enlightening and entertaining eye-witness report of one recent event organised by a group whose name translates as “grannies against the right.”

• Devolution: a communication suggestion

We’ve written about this quite a bit and will doubtless continue to do so. In a sentence, this covers the proposals by the new government to reform and re-organise the structure, responsibilities and (hopefully) the finances of local government.

Opinions differ on the extent to which this involves genuine devolution of some powers from Whitehall to the new mayoral authorities. A restructuring, though, it’s certainly going to be.

The municipal world is as a consequence slightly resembling an ant colony which has just been stirred with a stick. This is, as they say, an evolving story and one I’m sure we’ll be returning to.

Last week, I thought to myself that it might be a good idea if the Minister responsible for all this, Angela Rayner, would put aside the careful and formal Whitehall phrasing and write a direct, plain-language email to councils explaining what was really going on. Not having heard from her on this point, I thought I’d draft my own version. You can read this here.

• And finally…

• Grenfell Tower, which is in so many ways a monument not only to those who died but also to a series of serious commercial and municipal failures, is to be demolished. Not everyone agrees with this.

• Many of us are worried about the extent to which big tech is harvesting our information for purposes that we might not expect or understand. Mashing up our details and connecting us with the mashed-up details of billions of people across the world seems reasonable enough; after all, you don’t pay to use these services. If something’s free, you’re the product. A recent development seems to have been the modification of T&Cs to enable these silicon giants to teach their AIs to be more human. I don’t worry about this (but then I’m not on social media except as an observer). You could argue that, if this were true, you should be engaging on every platform like billy-oh in the hope that a small part of your brain-dumps informs future generations (i.e. next week’s) of AI to be a bit more in your image. Isn’t this all just another version of the obsession with propagating our genes? If you can’t beat it, mate with it.

• The proposed local-government devolution plans have been, for reasons I’ve written about several times and will continue to do so, proof for many councils of the Chinese curse of “may you live in interesting times.” There are certainly opportunities but also a lot of uncertainty: and it isn’t as if many of them don’t have enough as it is. This article on the BBC website takes a look at some possible aspects of the changes – which will affect us all, by the way.

• Some football news: congratulations to Newcastle United after having beaten Arsenal – a team I dislike with an intensity I’ve never been able to explain – to reach the League Cup Final. Newcastle has always called itself a big club and yet, despite several near misses, hasn’t won a major trophy since 1955. That’s a long wait. The current team seems worth some long overdue silverware. I wonder if they’ve suffered some kind of curse. In 1962, Bela Guttmann, having just led Portugal’s Benfica to back-to-back European Cup victories, asked for a pay rise, which was refused. In response, the charismatic coach slapped a furious curse on the club saying that it would never triumph in Europe for a hundred years. Various attempts to lift this have been tried. None have succeeded: since then, Benfica has appeared in nine European Cup/Champions League and UEFA Cup/UEFA League European finals and lost every single one…

Across the area

• WBC’s budget

WBC’s 2025-26 budget has now been finalised (though requires approval at Full Council later this month). It doesn’t make for particularly happy reading. Similar documents, with similar conclusions, are currently being published up and down the country.

Please click here to read our article covering this.

In it, we take a look at some of its main aspects, including a government loan, some proposed savings that have been re-thought, the probable need for further cuts and a number of capital projects that are planned or are already underway. The exercise also exposes two aspects of current accounting sleight of hands created by the government, which seem to risk seriously confusing the true problems faced by local councils.

There’s also a welcome and imaginative retreat by the administration from its previous position about garden-waste charges, along with a consideration of how town and parish councils may in some cases be able to take over some of the services that WBC can no longer afford to provide. We also get the reactions of the opposition parties on West Berkshire Council.

The budget will be considered by the executive on 13 February and then debated at the Full Council meeting on 27 February. Links to these events, and other sources of information, can be found in the article.

• An exchange of views

The letters section is a staple of local newspapers, even in these social-media driven times. These often produce responses which are picked up in subsequent weeks. The problem is that one needs a very good memory, or a pile of back numbers, to be able to recall how the previous correspondence read. The result can sometimes be like listening to one side of a telephone conversation.

One recent exchange of letters in our local newspaper between Conservative WBC leader Ross Mackinnon and Upper Bucklebury resident Tim Hall, were both also sent to us. We therefore set them down one after the other and then set to work looking at the various claims each person made.

There were quite a few of these. They ranged from Tilehurst to the Indian Ocean and from 2024 general election promises to our old friends Faraday Road and Monks Lane, with a brief diversion to South Lanarkshire. Several of the issues (though not the last) are ones we’ve looked at before.

You can read the letters and our commentary on what was said in this separate post.

• Old Town Newbury

A reminder that the latest proposals for the redevelopment of the Kennet Centre in Newbury have recently been published. These represent almost as different a vision of the place from the previous Eagle Quarter scheme as it’s possible to imagine. These will have to do for at least a month: I’ve recently been told that the application should be lodged within the next ten days, after which it will take a few weeks for EBC to validate it and put it on its website for public consideration. For reasons I suggest in the article mentioned below, there are good reasons why this might happen quite soon.

You can read more in this separate article which includes the background to the development, how matters got to this point, what might happen next and sources of further information on the project. Reaction to the new proposals from a number of people have been positive: mixed with an appropriate amount of caution until the formal application is available. Further comments can be expected thereafter. In the meantime, read the above article and visit the project’s website and see what you think of it thus far.