“Judging by the attention the Chancellor and David Cameron gave to tax cuts at the Conference, they think the economy is their vote-winning card. But they miss the point of why people, such as I, choose to live in rural areas. My home is in the countryside for aesthetic rather than economic reasons – for the “quality of life” that goes with the unspoilt countryside of AE Housman, which is now under daily siege from developers, whether it be solar farms, industrial pig farms, social housing or wind farms. Countryside voters – from the whole of England – are sick of being at war with their own communities.
The Tory-led Coalition’s claims for “localism” are a fiction from a Tom Sharpe novel. The reason I have taken up the invitation from Nigel Farage to be his heritage spokesperson is that I was always taught by my father’s example that if you believe in a cause enough – passionately, from the iron part of one’s soul – then you cannot remain playing wine-bar politics, but have to stand up and be counted.”
…”But there’s another argument. And it goes like this. Perhaps, as I suspect, the Tories have wholly underestimated the extent of rural anger. What if the disgust that people feel ends up driving a stake through the heart of English country life to the point that people there can no longer support the Tories? There are 12 million rural voters and a very great many I know have had enough. And they are not switching to Labour.”
East Devon Watch 
So “I’m all right Jack” is the mantra of those privileged, lucky or rich enough in the countryside?
If the villages had allowed a few houses a year to be built over the last decades then we wouldn’t need to build the larger housing estates that are being constructed today.
Planning departments, district councillors, parish councils and NIMBYs have only themselves to blame for the current situation.
Also, what is wrong with solar farms? You can hardly notice them.
As for pig farms – put them in the inner cities with the riff-raff I say!
Keep the countryside clean and tidy so we don’t get any mud on the Range Rover.
As for “social housing” … “we don’t want any of those unwashed poor people or immigrants in the countryside do we?”
As a rural dweller myself, with a small farm, I don’t see any real problem with a degree of house building and other rural regeneration. There is a LOT of land out there – we are nowhere near concreting over England!
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