LAST DECEMBER, MICHAEL GOVE DELIVERED what might be the most puzzling speech of any senior politician in recent times. Entitled “Falling back in love with the Future”, it opened with an extended paean to the extraordinary legacy of Britain’s Victorian housebuilders:
They looked to the future with hope. It was in the nineteenth century that our great cities expanded to become the workshops of the world, the forcing houses of invention and the homes to swelling millions.
London spread east as the docklands became a window to the world, west to graceful suburbs such as Holland Park and Notting Hill, north to embrace villages such as Highgate within its ambit, and south from Clapham to Crystal Palace. It became the greatest city on the globe.
Stirring stuff. What the great sphinx failed to mention is that not only is he not dismantling the twentieth-century policies which have for decades stalled that great engine of progress (the Green Belt is entirely about stopping London
