Fun Online Polls: Sarah Ferguson & The Hallowed Greenbelt

I'm pleased to see that the readership of this 'blog is a mercenary bunch. Over ninety per cent of those who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll said that they would have kept the $40,000 if they were Fergie.
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Any lingering hopes which people may have had that the Lib-Cons would be a bit less Home-Owner-Ist than the previous Labour government were cruelly but not unexpectedly dashed yesterday, when that disgustingly fat bloke announced that:

... Housebuilding targets set by central government are be scrapped to protect the green belt around towns in England... councils would now be given the freedom to make their own decisions, not be "bossed around" by central government.

He said: "We've promised to use legislation to scrap top-down building targets that are eating up the Green Belt, but I'm not going to make communities wait any longer to start making decisions for themselves... The previous government gave a green light for the destruction of the Green Belt across the country and we are determined to stop it."

So obviously, woe betide any members of 'communities' who would love to be able to afford a house, they can all piss off abroad or something, presumably.

Particularly galling is the snapshot of some random fields with the caption "The last government had wanted an extra 3m homes built". At typical densities, three million new homes would use up about 0.5% of the UK by surface area - you wouldn't even notice the difference if you looked out of an aeroplane window. As to 'destruction', here's a bright idea, every year let's reverse the trend and demolish every house or building that is within a hundred yards of the existing greenbelt, within ten or twenty years, the whole country will be farmland again. What's not to like about that?

As we have previously established, only slightly over one-tenth of England by surface area is developed. There is presumably some popular myth that all non-developed land is green belt; or possibly even that the green belt consists of narrow strips of land which prevent towns and cities merging into each other.

Far from it, actually, which is the topic of this week's Fun Online Poll: "How much land in England is 'green belt', compared to the developed areas (just over a tenth)?". Feel free to guess the answer or look it up on Wikipedia.

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