No, my actual (rather small) point is that when the aspirational poor were previously shunted to distant dumping grounds, the biggest error was in not sending us far enough away from people like Polly Toynbee and her metrocentric ilk; those for whom if it doesn’t happen in London, then it doesn’t really happen at all.
it is a fair point…..the spread of the London suburbs and Metroland has sucked the life out of any number of places
Those would be places like Harlow, and Metroland, that have no conceivable reason for existing apart from being dormitories for London, you mean?
After all, when the subsidies stopped, the industry fled. When the subsidies stopped, Harlow couldn’t afford all those ‘excellent’ schools. When the subsidies stopped, that was the end of the ski slopes and the water features.
No, the new towns were intended to entrench a Labour government forever, hundreds of thousands of voters in the Tory shires dependent on Labour handouts for their existence.