Bernard Ingham: In this overcrowded island, we need a new curb on countryside development

First, the hypocrisy. In 1991, I was asked to help form Country Guardian, which has since been fighting the wind farm craze, assisting villages and rural communities to frustrate the industrialisation of their landscapes. Why?

Answer: because the founder, now sadly dead, realised that the plethora of official protectors of the countryside would not do their job. Nor did they. They had been greenwashed by our ridiculous environmentalists whose religious passion to suppress carbon sacrifices hills, moors and wild places on the altar of global warming.

Some environmentalists! They are aesthetically dead from the neck upwards.

If these official protectors of our heritage had done their duty – and if they were not so infernally politically correct – the Pennines and the Yorkshire Wolds would not now be increasingly under threat. Yet they now band together to resist the Government’s proposed new planning rules with a built-in presumption in favour of development.

They seem oblivious to the fact that such a presumption is far from new.

Successive governments have tinkered with the planning laws for years to frustrate opponents of wind farms and reward developers with planning permission.

Governments have then iced the cake with largesse through the billions required in consumer subsidy to erect “these bog brushes in the sky”, as the late Sir Donald Thompson, MP for Calderdale, described wind turbines.

Our supposed defenders of the countryside are now trying to close the stable door after encouraging the blessed horse to bolt.

This brings me to incompetence. Our politicians have known now for 20 years that every application for a wind farm will produce a protest from people who value their landscape, environment, property and their peace only to be vilified as nimbys and often ignored.

Conservative politicians know this better than most since they still represent the shires – at least until the next election.

Yet here we have a Conservative-led coalition trying to ram through laxer planning rules drafted with the help of developers on the pretext that we need a streamlined system to aid economic recovery.

Worse still, they do it without seemingly any effort to win over the people after their recent fiasco trying to sell off forests.

This is prima facie evidence that the Tories in this coalition are about as political as a brick wall still unmarked by a graffiti “artist”.

I am profoundly unimpressed with the argument that planning is holding up development. But if it is, where do we need that development?

Predominantly in towns and cities where most people live and work. That being so, then for heaven’s sake free up urban planning rules but don’t at the same time leave the green belt under threat of destruction.

It may not look it from the top of Blubberhouses or even from the watershed on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border above Widdop near my native Hebden Bridge, but England is already overcrowded.

The time has come to be far tougher on development, not easier, if we want a land fit to live in.

Which brings me to another reason offered for easing the planning system. We are incessantly told we need more houses. But it does not take a genius to recognise that we shall always need more houses if we do not get control over immigration.

To play the housing shortage card in the planning debate when you have done little or nothing to stem the tide of immigration and eject the hundreds of thousands of “illegals” still here is not just shallow; it is inept.

But then we have a very inept Government which, as I repeatedly say to myself, is curious since David Cameron is par excellence a PR chappy.

This ineptitude was recently underlined by the Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond.

He told a select committee that rail fares are “eyewateringly” expensive and trains are becoming “a rich man’s toy”.

So what is he going to do about it? Nothing, so far as I can see, except perhaps close about 650 ticket offices which, God save us, he persisted in calling “assisted channels” as distinct from ticket machines.

No wonder Hammond has problems getting the London-Yorkshire high speed rail link off the ground – to mention another planning problem.

I have reached the conclusion that this Government could not sell a sauna to Eskimos or plan its way out of a burst paper bag.