Land use
If anything of England's green and pleasant land is to be saved from the on- ward march of the developers, we need, the most fervent libertarian would probably agree, to have restrictions on what can be built and where. Unfortunately the Depart- ment of the Environment gives very little impression of being a body competent to decide what these restrictions should be. In the last year the Secretary of State has first
granted and then withdrawn a relaxation of the restrictions on house-building in Green Belts. There are parts of the Green Belt so heavily settled that farming is no longer possible within them, and in these areas the Secretary of State intended development to be concentrated. His trouble was that he did not have a map of existing land-use to show him where these places were. The developers headed for 'unspoilt coun- tryside', which has a rather higher promo- tional value, and announced plans to despoil it with new villages, which like new towns would destroy farmland both direct- ly, by building over it, and indirectly, because it is very difficult to go on farming next to a new community which would prefer to use the land for recreational pur- poses. The DoE had once again failed in its essential task of distinguishing land where new building would be tolerable from land where it would be disastrous. This is not surprising. Its last attempt at a so-called 'National Land Use Survey' left 90 per cent of the country blank — known in planners' jargon as 'white land' — and catastrophi- cally misrepresented the other ten per cent, by, for example, showing no piece of land smaller than 12.5 acres and labelling each piece according to its predominant use. So wasteland in cities, of which there is an abundance, and which is often highly suitable for redevelopment, tends to be classified as residential. The DoE now in- tends a new survey, hailed absurdly in the press as a new Domesday. Mr Peter Walls, for the Department, has said he would be satisfied if the new survey turned out to be 70 per cent accurate. This is disgraceful. Are the planners to decide where new houses go on the basis of information one- third wrong? To get the information he needs the Secretary of State should commis- sion an accurate and independent survey from one of the two organisations compe- tent to carry one out: the Ordnance Survey, or the Land Use Research Unit at King's College, London. This survey would give him statistical proof that there is plenty of' room for building good new houses in Bri- tain without concreting over a single green field.
In their attack on 'peace studies' (Peace Studies: A Critical Survey, Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, £2.50), Caroline Cox and Roger Scruton advance two arguments: that the subject does not merit respect as an intellectual discipline, and that it provides nothing but a cover for unilateralist propaganda. Both arguments have great force, and they are, of course, in the view of the authors, con- nected — sloppy thinking leads to errone- ous conclusions — but it would be wise, if opposition to peace studies is to enjoy any success, to concentrate on the first. It is from those worried that children are being educated not to think that the best opposi- tion to peace studies will come, not from those who think they are being taught to hold the wrong opinions.
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