Quango - They're Building Britain a Brand New City

Look out onto a field of potatoes. Looks pretty placid, doesn't it? The delicious edible tubers lined up one after another, their green leaves ducking in the gentle breeze. Well, it isn't placid. It isn't nice. It doesn't conform to your naïve ideas about Ruritania. Fact is, farming in Britain is the most brutal, cut-throat coalface of capitalism there is. When you look out onto a field of potatoes, you are looking out onto an industrial Somme, where farmer after farmer slashes his prices to penury to keep the next guy out of Tesco's supply chain, selling up below cost just to have the money to plant next year. In reality, once you loose yourself from your mind-prison, those tatties might as well be fried in blood and sautéed in butter, crushed garlic cloves and a little rosemary. The nightmare fact of the matter is that the average farmer in the UK nets less than the average night porter in the UK. The median financial yield per hectare of land? Somewhere around £200, for an area larger than a football pitch. Instead, our farmers can only keep up their existence as landowning dole-moles, handouts from the Common Agricultural Policy keeping them in shotguns and tweed. This is why the cost per acre of agricultural land in Britain is some £15,000 a hectare. No one wants it. In the long-run, it'd be cheaper to import all of our spuds from Idaho – an area the size of England, but with a basic population shape of 100 people for every 100 million potatoes – and return the fields to nature. Except that's politically unpalatable, because farmers have votes, and besides, people like to believe that there are farmers out there, and they like to look at ploughed fields and potatoes. They find it placid, nice, conforming to their naïve ideas about Ruritania. But imagine if that land could, at the stroke of a pen, have its value raised not ten times, not fifty times, but one hundred times. That is exactly what we stand on the precipice of today, because the price per acre of residential land is around £1.5 million per hectare. And we're about to go to planageddon, the largest change in the zoning law since the 1773 Inclosure Of The Commons Act. The irony is that that Act of 1773 effectively created the wealthy landowners of the 18th and 19th centuries. And this one is going to make their descendants moneybags-rich on an oil baron level. Draped in gold, filled with financial languor. Get ready for a Dubai-style nouveau architecture boom in Evesham. A visit to Lincolnshire will be a drift into a dim twilight where the ATMs are all Coutts. Farmers will sell, why wouldn't they? And we will build. Because, when you look at it: why shouldn't we? England is not a tiny country, as it is often held to be. It is simply a country in which 92 percent of all its land is hoarded away as shrubberies, corn, wheat and other rural tat. You think it's a small country, sure, because you only travel through the habitable bits, and don't often see the massive wodges of fields that are entombed behind arcane planning legislation that doesn't allow for someone to build a Westfield and a Barrat Landscaped Village on them. For the Coalition, the planning law revisions are all about economic growth. In a way, it's profoundly anti-Conservative: why piss off the shires when that's where your core vote is? And why fail to conserve when that's the USP of your party? But for Osborne and co, these revisions are all about getting themselves out of the growth hole in which we're presently trapped. Growth fundamentally requires people committing to long-term investment: which is exactly what a load of easy-money new homes will translate to. Naturally, this windfall is a one-off, exactly like how the Big Bang of the 80s explodified growth by transforming our financial markets. It can't be replicated again. But once it's gone, George and pals will also be long gone. Moreover, it offers them a chance to forge the only legacy that lasts: bricks and mortar. Long after their successors have overturned all their policies, and the name David Cameron is about as redolent as Bonar Law, there will be a brand new town outside Birmingham. Tentative plans are to use this planageddon to plonk down a hundred thousand human beings somewhere east of Coventry, in what the marketing board will doubtless sloganise as "A 21st century planned community". This will be no less than a British Brasilia, a West Midlands Washington. To get a sense of its scope and scale, realise that by far the largest planned community Britain has ever seen, Milton Keynes, started out with a population of 40,000. It has taken Milton Keynes 40 years to shake off the failures of the ugly list of 60s planned towns it sits at the centre of: Stevenage, Redditch, Peterborough, Crawley. Those concrete coffins bred future-phobia. We stopped believing in a better tomorrow and concentrated on building a minimally fucked-up today. Finally, we're ready to come out of our shells, have another shot at it and herald in a bold new age where we'll be the tarmacked envy of the world. The implications go as deep as national character. All the old stereotypes about a nation committed to its obsequious politeness by virtue of being cheek-by-jowl with one another will gradually melt away. Britons driving down eight-lane highways unrolled across former strawberry polytunnels, to their massive faux-villas in their gleaming new towns, will feel empowered, assertive, bold, very New World. "This," they will begin to say, "Is fucken Britain, right? Fucken love it or fucken leave it." The rate of school shootings will rise in inverse proportion to the fall in people saying "mustn't grumble", which seems like a trade entirely worth making.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

Illustration by Joss Frank

Previously: Quango - Is Ken Livingstone a Dead Whale?

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