London mayor race: Zac Goldsmith is being slippery about the green belt
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Version 0 of 1. One of the less publicised aspects of Zac Goldsmith and the Conservative Party’s poisonous campaign to win the London mayoralty has been their scaremongering about the capital’s green belt. The supposedly “principled” Goldsmith was at it again on Thursday at the Evening Standard hustings held at the Royal Geographical Society. In his closing remarks he said: If you want those 50,000 homes that we need to solve the housing crisis to be built beautifully, to enhance communities and without concreting over precious green spaces, then back me. Eleven days ago, he told an audience of Tory activists in Southfields: If you want our precious green spaces protected, Sadiq Khan has form on this. He will concrete them over. He will Khan-crete them over. Hee-haw. Before that, he told the Tory spring conference: If you want our green spaces protected, then back me, because Sadiq Khan will concrete over the lot of them. As with the attempts of the Goldsmith campaign, his media allies and even, shockingly, the prime minister to stop Khan winning by stirring a fear of him based on his faith background, this is an untruth to fire up an anxious and defensive form of English identity that excludes someone like Khan. The spectre of “our” green and pleasant land being “concreted over” has long been employed as a mobilising metaphor for keeping the dark and alien of the big city at bay. Goldsmith, a countryman at heart, understands the power supposed threats to the green belt can exert in those suburban parts of the metropolis that don’t think of themselves as being part of London at all. In such places and in the anxious minds of people living there lie his hopes of winning City Hall. The problem is that what he says about Khan and the greenbelt is fraudulent. The accusation that Khan “has form” stems from a decision he was party to when a government minister about green belt land outside London. That’s it. The rest of case is both thinner and deceitful. In a Telegraph article, Goldsmith has quoted Khan saying that “building on the greenbelt is something we could look into.” What Khan actually said, in an interview with the Economist, was this: “I am committed to protecting the green belt.” He also said: “There is plenty of scope to fix the housing crisis without building on the green belt.” He described green belt land areas as “crucial as the lungs of our city.” And he continued: If I was persuaded that all the possible pieces of land in London were being used sensibly and were built-upon, building on the green belt would be something we could look into. But we are nowhere, nowhere, nowhere near there. So the Khan quote from the Economist interview selected by Goldsmith was a deliberate and complete misrepresentation of what Khan said his green belt policy is. And here’s what Goldsmith himself said about the green belt at a hustings held at the Institute of Directors HQ during the Tories’ candidate selection contest on 2 September last year: I don’t think we need to even consider developing the green belt for now [but] it may be that the population explodes, and 15 or 20 years down the line we’ll have to have the discussion again. Hear it for yourselves here at around 23 minutes) In other words, there is no difference at all between what Khan told the Economist and what Goldsmith told his audience at that hustings. What has changed is that Goldsmith has become the Tory candidate and seen that he can profit by deceiving voters into thinking there is a difference and that it is profound. In truth, neither Goldsmith nor Khan would be likely to have much luck getting many homes built on green belt land even if they wanted to. In the first place, they’d have to persuade boroughs in which green belt land lies to permit it. Even that would be an uphill struggle. The other thing to bear in mind is that, according to a number of authoritative reports, neither Goldsmith or Khan is likely to achieve their common goal of presiding over a doubling of the rate of housebuilding in London to 50,000 a year unless at least a little green belt land is built on. Nonetheless, Goldsmith’s traducing of Khan on this issue raises an issue of trust. The most recent opinion poll, published on Thursday, gave Khan a big lead. But the Tory did better in some of the small print. Respondents were asked which of the two candidates most deserved to be called slippery or divisive. Goldsmith came out ahead in both cases. How on Earth did people get that idea? |