Green & Pleasant Belt

Around the London, and any of the major cities in the United Kingdom their lies a small but unfathomably valuable tract of land known as the Green Belt. For local Councillors it is the Holy Land over which all battles in the chamber are fought, and as absurd as it may seem - such conflicts muster the people of middle England into a terrible anger. Many people in the City may be totally unaware of the existence of the Green Belt, or indeed of anything even slightly green, but there it ease, rousing the passions of the Middle classes everywhere.

In 1888, writer Octavia Hill coined the phrase, 'green belt' saying

"The need for quiet, the need for air, the need of exercise, and, I believe, the sight of sky and of things growing, seem human needs common to all men, and not to be dispensed with without grave loss."

Since then, the murmur and furor of protecting it has only frown, as London and other cities grow outward instead of upward, swallowing up the commuter towns and villages as they do so, the threat of even greater consumption comes with it, 'what if those houses are built in the park? What wickedness next does come?'. Indeed, the British Planning system as grown up around it, electoral campaigns fought on it, the desire to protect the natural character and heritage of a place, rising with each passing year.

This week in Parliament, the debate on the Green Belt has left the Council Chambers of Sussex, and taken Westminster in its grip, as politicians with Housing high on the agenda, all scrabble to see who can be the first to commit electoral suicide. Members in the National Unionist Party and some on the Conservative Party benches (when they are not focusing on which Leadership candidate to force out of the race) must be reeling to see the LPUK abandoning home owners, and the middle class, in their furious need to build more and more homes.

Ultimately, for a party with the great majority of its support in the South East, it seems an add decision to antagonize ones base by threatening to shave off a huge percentage of their property value, yet - common sense ne'er could be said to prevail in Parliament at the best of times.

With the vote on the Bill assured soon, one can be sure that property prices across the commuter belt will tumble, as the Housing Market hits back at the possible destruction of its beloved value buffer, the glorious Green Belt.