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Oxford is a beautiful place, famous for its university and fine medieval buildings. But it also stands as symbol of Britain’s housing crisis, branded the country’s least affordable city with average property prices 11.5 times the area’s average annual wage. This is partly a story of success, with families, firms and students drawn towards the dreaming spires. Yet a significant slice is overspill from London, reflecting the intensity of property shortages in southern England.
There are many complex reasons for the housing failures that blight so many lives, as UnHerd examined in its Home Truths series last week. And it will take many years to tackle a legacy of Westminster ineptitude and local authority weakness. Yet there is one simple dragon to slay that would speed up resolution of this crisis. Green belt.
This has been recognised by Susan Brown, the new leader of Oxford City Council. In one of her first acts, she declared her desire to slacken the green belt that is stifling development. “There is no ability to build enough dwellings to meet our housing needs within the city’s boundaries,” she said last week.
She was attacked instantly by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which has long seen its main mission to be safeguarding such sacred spaces. This was predictable: the bosses and bores of this body increasingly appear like druids from an ancient sect, determined to resist change however antiquated and risible their arguments. “The very purpose of the green belt is to prevent urban sprawl,” said one local trustee.
And herein lies the problem. Green belt is an outmoded concept that is strangling cities, destroying countryside and forcing people to commute hefty distances. It was launched after the Second World War, when 15 million fewer people lived on these islands. Since then, it has grown like knotweed, now covering more than one-eighth of the country.
In the London region it is three times bigger than the capital, creating a giant doughnut that forces people to live further and further from workplaces in distant commuter towns. The same is seen in cities such as Oxford and York, with Green Belt bigger than the place it is supposedly protecting.
Almost half the land in England is protected. This includes glorious national parks and many rightly protected nature areas – yet the bulk of this is green belt. Duncan Sandys, the Tory minister behind its expansion in the 1950s, said such areas did not need to be green nor attractive since the purpose was to prevent development. So what a shame this concept was not given a less bucolic moniker; instead, it sounds leafy and lush, so few politicians dare attack something that ossified into a sanctified slab of British heritage hardly less worshipped than the health service.
Some of this land is worthy of the name. Yet more than half is used for intensive farming, which could not be further removed from arcadian ideals with often limited public access, barren fields drenched in chemicals and grim lack of wild creatures. Great chunks are grey or sludge brown, given over to airports, gravel pits, railway embankments and water treatment works. There is often greater biodiversity in all our carefully-nurtured city gardens. Meanwhile school playing fields are sold off, transport systems overflow and essential urban development gets squashed into poorer parts of cities rather than richer zones spared by proximity to green belt.
Certainly there is room for new homes within existing urban areas – as highlighted by a recent Centre for Cities report showing our cities to be less built up than many European counterparts. ‘The densest square kilometre in the country, with a population of 20,000, is in the London neighbourhood of Maida Vale — an affluent area which doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of an urban jungle,’ said researcher Hugo Bessis. Compare this with Barcelona, one of the world’s great cities, which has density of up to 53,000 people per square kilometre. But driving up urban density is not a short-term fix for one of the nation’s most pressing problems.
The green belt is a powerful weapon in hands of those nimbies who are such a strong force in our planning system as they protect bricks and mortar that represent key assets. I have often heard well-heeled Labour voters in my area of north London bemoan nearby new developments even as they berate Tory policies ‘attacking’ less prosperous people. And note how MPs call for solutions to the housing crisis – then without slightest embarrassment find reasons to oppose schemes that upset their constituents. Theresa May opposed dozens of new homes in a green field site in Cookham, then demanded urgent reforms to boost new-build numbers.
We must review that green belt map – not scrap it, but modernise an idea designed for distant times that does not suit modern needs. The main aim of the original policy was to stymie the spread of London into surrounding fields and woods, yet more than one-fifth of land mass in a city facing chronic shortage of housing supply is now green belt. ‘This leaves us with the strange yet taken-for-granted situation that green belt prevents development inside London,’ reflected Alan Mace, an urban planning expert at the London School of Economics.
Carving off a few chunks of this often-misnamed land in areas of urgent housing need would be a major boon for families and firms across England. In London, one million more homes could be built in return for giving up less than 4% of green belt, revealed the Adam Smith Institute three years ago. The same is true of many other besieged towns and cities. For the sake of the British economy, the environment, the creaking transport system and, above all, the well-being of many citizens, we need to urgently loosen the green belt.
Ian Birrell is an award-winning foreign reporter and columnist. He is also the founder, with Damon Albarn, of Africa Express.
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SubscribePerhaps the bottom line of this complex (really circuitous) essay is valuable as it emerges from the morass of the prose. Ultimately, cancel culture is an unacceptable practice for any classical liberal no matter what or to whom. However, not every firing or de-friending is cancel culture. For example, if a Secret Service agent tweeted some joke about an attempted assassination, they should be fired for dereliction of duty. Similarly, if the Catholic Pope declared fealty to Satan on X, he should be deposed. Lastly, if the Marketing Director of PepsiCo posted that Pepsi is swill on their Facebook timeline, out. And if you no longer want to maintain a personal friendship with someone who showed up to softball practice in a Klan robe, you are displaying freedom of association and good judgment. Those are not examples of cancel culture… True cancel culture, as practiced by either the Left or Right, must end…
What’s good for the Goose is good for the Gander ….
All demographic assessments of the political spectrum agree that the left contains a greater proportion of more highly educated people. The same is true for academia itself, for media (journalism and entertainment–to the degree those remain separate things), for art, and for fashion. Generally the Left enjoys the advantage of creativity. It logically follows that the Left would be more adept at pioneering creative political weaponization such as cancel culture. But they do so often without consideration as to the inevitability of the Right eventually also mimetically adopting those weapons. Since the Left considers themselves morally superior to the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers on the Right (their stereotype, not mine), is that not inherently dangerous to empower an enemy who–they have said–cannot be trusted? The Left is, therefore, analogous to the tragic phenomenon often seen in the U.S. of parents purchasing an automatic weapon to have around the home where they also have a very troubled grown child. They cannot imagine that this child will use the gun in a school shooting or assassination attempt. The Left should be more wary of the weapons they create.
Interestingly, when you read Milo’s comment in the light of his new faith (Catholicism), it is not surprising. Catholics in many ways have abdicated their role in the public square for far too long.
Maybe that’s why we have the likes of James Martin, Rupnik, McCarrick, Bugnini, and Bergolio to name but a few.
Exsurge Domine (arise Lord) and may we have the courage and wisdom to do His Will in all realms of society.
Like all rights, free speech comes with responsibilities. When you exercise your right to cheer for someone’s murder or to lament that a would-be assassin failed, you have every right to that belief. By the same token, your employer has every right to distance from that belief because wanting one’s opponents killed is a bad look.
The psychology of cancellation leads to political violence because, for the impressionable young mind, why debate or even influence when you can eliminate (Evil)?
In that the Right should not copy the Democrats and their liberal grad hive-mind. The Left always see politics as a battle to eliminate Evil- education of the ignorant first, then elimination of the perceived extremes.
Competitive advantage is the lifeblood of business, so why not politics? It is naive and complacent to imagine that your competitors will not 1. Match you or 2. Exceed you. All else is for the birds.
The idiot who wrote this article evidently didn’t bother to verify whether the ten people had *actually* been sacked, or whether the – anonymous, partisan and intemperate – Tiktoker was lying.
I’ll never understand why some people disqualify themselves so easily by senselessly using insults. Just writing “the author” instead would have elevated your comment immeasurably.
I don’t think, personally, that cancel culture ever sought to accomplish a coherent set of goals: instead, it appears to be more about scapegoating and the pleasures associated with that (now very online) activity. Pretty much as described by René Girard in “Violence and the Sacred”, really. When considered in that context, its internal inconsistencies become less relevant, i.e. the need for explicit, consistent aims loses its relevance.
Social media has created global outlets for mob behaviour.
Pretty simple really.
Mob behaviour and tribalism are historic human constants, but usually restricted by local norms and restraints, and tribal aversion to conflict escalation.
Internet tech removes local constraints and unleashes these elements of human nature on a global decontextualized scale.
The dissolution of shared norms into competing normative and digital spheres will proceed apace alongside the continued erosion of localised institutional procedures in the face of viral media. Whatever such a society might look like, it won’t be well-ordered or pious.
This statement is an open issue. Things are equally likely to get worse or better; unlike the author, I would not make such bold predictions.
Although, it seems to me, the probability of the collapse of society is quite high. It seems to me that this is due to people’s loss of religiosity. Even on this site, most people pride themselves on believing in the “kingdom of reason,” although history and what is unfolding before our eyes inexorably proves that there is nothing crazier than believing in the rationality of the crowd.
In the recent past there lived Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. They all were building a “reasonable” societies.
Just today, a correspondent is interviewing residents of California and they are all convinced that the attempt on Trump’s life was staged. These same “reasonable” people are sure that a man can become a woman, and a woman a man, since sex, which they call gender, is a product of education and the fact that even the brains of a man and a woman are physically structured differently does not matter.
The mind is prone to narcissism, and the collective mind is prone to total delusions; religion, no matter what you think about it, not only formulates moral maxims, but also unites people and requires them to be modest in assessing themselves.
The assumption that lack of religiosity is due to a reliance on the “kingdom of reason” is, as i’ve previously pointed out, false. It makes naive assumptions about human spirituality, failing to understand the well-springs of why some need an external “meaning” imposed upon them whilst others don’t.
How many times are you going to use the phrase “Human Spirituality” before you define it?
“In the recent past there lived Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. They all were building a “reasonable” societies.” –
They most certainly were not. Not even as a pretext … This collection of sociopaths were simply building their own power/ cult of personality (nothing more)…
Yes, they were sociopaths, but in order for sociopaths to gain power, faith must be destroyed.