We choose to go to the Moon

Choice is a muscle. Exercise it and it grows stronger. Outsource it and you learn helplessness. For forty years our future has been governed by the illusion that there is no alternative.

When Kennedy said “we chose to go to the Moon,” he framed it as a national choice. We choose not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because the difficulty is what organises a nation’s best energies, and measures them. Choice is about self-determination. Nobody asked the bond market for permission to leave the planet.

We do not need an American president to tell us this.

An Englishman said it first, in April 1942 – weeks after the fall of Singapore, at the lowest point of the war. John Maynard Keynes wasn’t talking about funding the fighting. He was answering how Britain would pay to rebuild when it stopped.

“Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”

They tell us the country cannot afford it. I want to take that phrase apart in front of you, because it has done more damage to this country than any recession.

A country is not a household. It has no purse. A country can run out of bricks. A country can run out of steel, and cement, and people who know how to weld and teach and build. That is a real shortage.

But we are not short. We have the materials. We have the know-how. We have hundreds of thousands of citizens willing and capable of stepping up and playing their part whose horizons are shrinking before them because there is no wage to be found. Homes go unbuilt while sharp minds lose their edge earning scraps from gig-work. And we’re told they can’t build homes or wire the nation because there’s not enough yield in it.

“We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the sovereign vaults of a country that finds forty billion in a weekend for a bank that’s in trouble but cannot find a builder’s wage.”

I am not asking you to admire a plan. I am asking you to refuse a sentence. When someone tells you we cannot afford to house our own people, do not argue with the figure. Reject the frame. Ask them which brick is missing. Ask them which worker is unwilling. And when they cannot answer – and they cannot – you will know they have outsourced their ambition to a spreadsheet.

We can build. We can insulate. We can restore.

A hundred thousand homes a year will rise, and they will rise on foundations of British steel, fitted by British hands, warmed by power drawn from our famous British weather.

Many of the people who will finish this work are at school today.

You are not a hostage. You have never been a hostage. You have been someone who was told the door was locked, by people who never turned the handle.

Try it.

Footnotes