Britain may get some new National Parks, according to ‘energetic' environment secretary Michael Give. There are currently ten, along with thirty- four sites designated as areas of outstanding natural beauty.
The first national parks, the Peak District, Snowdonia and Dartmoor, were created in 1951, as the seventieth anniversary rolls around Give has ordered a review to be led by former Conservative Party aide Julian Glover.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph last week Mr Gove said it was ‘time to look afresh' at these iconic landscapes with a view to making ‘sure they are not only conserved but enhanced for the next generation’.
You would need to be a true cynic not to have your heart lifted by landscapes that have been inspiring artists and everyone else since the Enlightenment. The trouble is when it comes to Tory environment policy in general and pretty much everything involving Michael Gove; a little bit of me will always be profoundly cynical.
The Tories talk a good game on the environmental, not least because it plays into the ‘blood and soil' patriotism of members in the shire counties once described by David Cameron as the ‘turnip Taliban’. When it comes to delivering anything tangible they tend to be found wanting.
Their enthusiasm for fracking and the expensive white elephant that is HS2 knows no bounds, New Labour may have had form when it comes to selling off school playing fields to developers, but the Tories have hardly donned armour to protect them since 2010.
As for the perennially busy Mr Gove, he is the archetype of a politician in a hurry. Why waste time with half measures when you can charge at an issue head on? Particularly when doing so might help with the great (to him anyway) of seeing our hero standing on the doorstep of Downing Street.
What really worries me though is that the wrong problem is being addressed. It would be cause for air punching joy if any government were to create more national parks, they aren’t perfect, but they do protect landscapes that are a public good from being exploited.
The real issue is protecting those green spaces that aren’t as photogenic as Dartmoor or the Cairngorm’s, but matter hugely to the communities that use them. These are the places most threatened by drive the regeneration of areas facing economic challenges by building executive housing.
The thinking behind this is that all it takes is a ready supply of detached houses and investment will follow, except for when it doesn’t of course. Needless to say, the shortage of affordable housing is ignored by this ‘if you build it they will come' approach.
We need, desperately, to build the right sort of houses in the right places, with decent transport links and amenities. Gobbling up the wood at the end of the road or the scrubby bit of field where people have walked their dogs since forever to build a pocket estate of executive boxes will be of benefit to nobody.
In fact, it is hugely damaging to communities that have used these spaces for decades and risk along with being made more cramped and polluted as a result. It shouldn’t surprise anyone outside Whitehall that such spaces tend to get developed in areas that are already facing serious challenges.
The idea behind creating the national parks back in the fifties was that access to the countryside with all the benefits associated should be for everyone. In the spirit of which we should fight for every green space as a common good that should be held in trust for those to as much as those landscapes deemed iconic.
We may not always win; but it would send a powerful message about what we value and how we want to live.
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