Save our grey belt!

While working as a callow speechwriter for the Labour party in the mid-1980s, I suggested to a member of the then shadow cabinet that perhaps we should do something in support of the teachers, who were clamouring for more money. ‘Sod them, they’re all Tories,’ came the response. Well, how times change – and also how little.

This supposedly marginal land is in danger of disappearing, and with it the wildlife that abounds

These days there are just nine teachers in the country who vote Conservative and they keep their heads down in case a colleague dobs them in for the hate crime of existing. However, the principle of helping only those who voted for you seems to have been continued by Labour down the years.

Why else would our new government decide to grab money from our pensioners to give to the odious ‘young doctors’? Pensioners are the last tranche still to vote Tory, so the government is planning to thin them out a little this winter by letting them freeze to death so that it can splaff enormous amounts of money on its client groups in the public sector. Help for the elderly, investment in infrastructure, research and development? No money for that stuff. Just for pay rises in an already (comparatively) overpaid sector.

Labour’s other great allies in the construction industry are also to be rewarded with a laissez-faire approach to planning permission, which should see the extinction of every blade of grass south of the River Nene and the building of more homes which, in truth (as I wrote here a week or two back) are not really needed. But we should not be too surprised by that, either.

The Harold Wilson governments between 1964 and 1970 accomplished one or two good things, although I can’t quite remember what they were right now. But they also presided over the wholesale destruction of our market towns and city centres, the consequences of which are still with us today. Down came the Victorian warehouses and depots and mills and terraces, and in their place came concrete, ring roads, concrete, flyovers, concrete, car parks, concrete, hideous shopping and high-rise residential developments built from… concrete. Just take a look at Kingston upon Thames, Basingstoke, Sheffield, Leeds, Blackburn… all had their hearts ripped out. What the Luftwaffe couldn’t do, Wilson et al accomplished: the replacement of an agreeable assortment of historic old towns, each having its own individual character, with a billion gallons of cement. All of this in the name of Progress and to service, via the dependably inaccurate process of predict and provide, the car. The implementation of Beeching’s cuts to our railways hastened the programme of what most people recognise today was absurd modernist architectural overreach – in short, the implementation of mandatory hideousness, pretty much everywhere.

Labour seems determined to repeat the past. I will not bang on again about how our housing crisis is largely chimeric, except from the affordability point of view. I will simply say that what Labour proposes will disfigure our country for all time, much as did Wilson’s penchant for concrete 60 years ago. There will of course be a short-term boost to the Exchequer, but this is scant compensation for the damage that will be done.

Most damaging of all will be the re-designation of some ‘green belt’ areas into ‘grey belt’ – a piece of chicanery if ever there was one. It’s worth reminding ourselves that Eric Pickles tried much the same thing for the Tories but was mercifully largely thwarted. I fear there is no thwarting Angela Rayner and the crew.

There was some grey-belt land right opposite my house when I was growing up in Middlesbrough in the 1970s. It was not what you would call beautiful: former agricultural land where wheat still grew wild, old hedgerows and the occasional murky pond. I spent quite a lot of time birdwatching on this square mile or two, among the dog walkers and the kids playing ‘Base’ and the scrub and the teasels. It was a lot better for birdwatching than the nearby North York Moors, a national park. On a daily basis I would see corn buntings, skylarks, kestrels, linnets, yellowhammers, mistle thrush – all birds that have been in precipitous decline in our country and many of which are on the RSPB’s ‘red list’ of endangered species. The whole area was built over (and then some) by the end of the 1970s. The same process has been applied across the country and this supposedly marginal land is in danger of disappearing, and with it the wildlife that abounds.

The point is that vast swathes of the UK can be classed as ‘grey belt’. Not mountains with cascading waterfalls, or desolate moorland, or river estuaries, but just fields and hedges with a few trees here or there: nothing to write home about. That’s the predominant scenery we have in this country and it serves not only as a habitat for our wildlife but as a refuge for millions upon millions of people from the housing estates with their copiously clipped lawns and tarmacked drives. The psychological and social benefits of being able to wander in countryside near your home have been extensively catalogued, but with each year that passes fewer such refuges survive near our towns and cities. Labour seems determined to hasten that process.

Here’s a suggestion. If Labour was serious about tackling this supposed housing crisis it might consider one or two of the following ideas. Cut immigration by 80 per cent, for a start. Second, buy up empty homes and use them for social housing – which is needed, I would concede. Third, disperse as much governmental business away from the south-east of England to regions where housing is cheap. And fourth, make it easier rather than harder for landlords to let their properties: the more landlords, the lower the rents. Please, do some of that before you repeat the mistakes of your predecessors.