The UK government has had a fractious couple of weeks. First it was the Swiss EU deal rumours, then housing, then a panicked response to high immigration figures. The latest problem to crop up is a rebellion over onshore wind, which has effectively been banned in the UK since 2012. What each of these disparate issues have in common is that they fall within the scope of what is increasingly the most important political debate in the UK. This is the extent to which the government should prioritise economic growth, and, implicitly, who the country is run for.
Onshore wind and immigration are perhaps the clearest examples of this. The restrictions on wind turbine development, which currently make new developments effectively impossible, defy logic. If you’re in the middle of an energy crisis and you also have a formal commitment to net zero, not to mention a small-c conservative preference for not interfering in peoples’ lives, banning turbines because you think they look ugly makes little sense.
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