Want change? Well, it’s starting to feel like we’ve got it. Keir Starmer is taking on, not just right-wing thugs, not just criminal smuggling gangs, but a group that frightens MPs far more: Nimbys.

His conference message was bald. Some people will have to live near new prisons, some will have to put up with new pylons and most of us will have to accept some housebuilding locally: those are the trade-offs if the country – agreed by popular accord to have gone to the dogs – is to be mended.

Flip. It’s quite unusual for a Prime Minister to tell voters in such uncompromising terms they’re going to have to put up with things they don’t like.

You might even call it brave. The last election resulted in a big increase in marginal seats, vulnerable to being lost next time. A fifth of MPs have seats won by a margin of five per cent or less of votes cast. Nearly half of them are Labour.

Read more Rebecca

There are headaches in the making here for some of those Labour MPs. They’ll be the poor souls who have to do nervous, sweaty local radio interviews defending the building of a prison near a school (everything is near a school after all) or explain in restive public meetings why there has to be a large pylon on the edge of a view once immortalised by Wordsworth, Hardy or Grassic Gibbon. This prospect will not fill Labour backbenchers with a sense of wellbeing.

At least five current cabinet ministers, including Rachel Reeves, have in the past opposed housing developments in their own constituencies.

The UK Government is not responsible for setting planning........

© Herald Scotland