Green and Pleasant Landfill

Welcome, once more to the world of ‘The Expert', a title given to people whose gaping lack of insight into the bleeding obvious is only equalled by their enormous, public-purse salaries. Stephen Nickell of the Office for Budget Responsibility says the NHS couldn't function without immigrants and Britain has "masses of room" for more people. Good. We can build the extra houses around where he lives then? Ever wonder why Britain is described as ‘this green and pleasant land’ and not ‘this crowded concrete shithole’?

Anyway, we need the countryside to stop one rotting, swelling urban sprawl from abutting another and creating continuous conurbations of crap and teeming megalopoli of muck, mayhem and mediocrity. Not all population centres are ‘vibrant’, ‘thriving’ and ‘diverse’ in the way some parts of the capital are painted. In fact most urban population centres are moribund breeding grounds for poverty, malcontent and mischief; lawless battery farms for the underprivileged. If you built them a garden city, pretty soon they’d plonk a mouldy old sofa in that very garden.

Plenty of green acres are needed to separate those fetid dumping grounds that are the biggest centres of need for the NHS in the first place. It is a self-fulfilling Sisyphean nightmare whereby the vast bulk of our medical monolith is engaged in treating the ills borne of the general stupidity of the masses; childbirth, obesity, drink, drugs, geriatry and dementia - horrible lives need constant care – no wonder only desperately poor immigrants can be enticed to dress their metaphorical (and sometimes literal) suppurating sores. No sooner have you injected yet more cash into the monster, the monster then uses it to perpetuate its own death throes.

Space. Green space. We need miles and miles of it between the human landfills to provide aspiration for those who ultimately pay for it all; the higher taxpayers. ‘Miles from anywhere’ is really a polite euphemism for ‘far from squalor’. And the distance between the slag heaps has to be enough to dissuade most of the denizens from journeying between, fly-tipping as they go. (It's tradition, isn't it?)  The countryside is not for building on it’s for looking at… and it’s really not for just anybody to look at; like art and high culture, it is devalued when everybody does it.

Welcome to the greenbelt...

If the OBR really was responsible it would be agreeing that we genuinely are overcrowded – the direct experience of the vast majority of our heaving population  - and recognising that it is very irresponsible budgeting indeed to keep feeding a beast which can only bloat.  So, slash the NHS, put something in the water and put a halt to our population growth before idiots like this call to concrete over what’s still left of our countryside.