I first ran this week's poll on this 'blog and then linked to it over at HousePriceCrash. The final results, split into people responding from here or there are as follows:
So well done two-thirds of you - the correct figure is indeed 'about ninety per cent'. Page 44 of this gives estimates for developed/urban areas of between 8.9% and 13.%. And those are figures for England, which is just over half the surface area of the UK, but five-sixths of the population and an even greater fraction of the economy.
In other words, my suspicions are confirmed. A third of the better-educated people who read this 'blog or HPC have either never looked at a map, taken a long car or train journey, looked out of an aeroplane window or bothered to google the topic.
Even worse than that, The Barker Review commissioned a poll among less-well-educated folk, i.e. the general public, which asked "What proportion of land in England do you think is developed?", and the responses were as follows:
Between half and three-quarters - 21%
Around half -23%
Between a quarter and a half - 19%
A quarter or less - 13%
Don't know - 15%.
Which is pretty terrifying. Who is pumping out the propaganda to make people believe this and why? There's no way I can fight it, is there? I've argued with NIMBYs who insist that half our country was already built on; when I point out that it's a tenth they just reply "Well, that's still too much," instead of the rational response, which would be "Only a tenth? Oh, that's brilliant! That means there's plenty of scope to build a few more houses and factories etc."
-------------------------------------------
Anyhoo.
Prompted by a post over at Steven_L's Place, this week's Fun Online Poll asks "Who poses the biggest threat to 'our way of life'? The BNP, the Islamists, both or neither?" I'm not including 'The Nanny Statists' as an option, because they are exactly the people who created the conditions in which both the BNP and the Islamists can thrive and then assumed more powers to meet the alleged threat(s).
Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.
I Don't Know Why They Call Them 'Thinktanks'...
2 hours ago
3 comments:
It's partly that the overwhelming percentage of the population live in "urban" spaces (by which I might mean anything larger than a market town) so what they see is urbanity all around them all the time.
Once you get 20 miles out from London, Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham and Newcastle, you're basically into countryside with a few towns dotted in there.
What would be interesting is how much farmland do we have as a % of land, and what size population can that self support.
OC, that's the striking thing about train journeys from town centres, for five or ten minutes you're travelling through a densely built urban area, then there's a fence, and then you're in open countryside.
Anon, about 85% is viable farmland = 25 million acres. About 5% is mountains, lakes, rivers, marshland, hills-with-forests, all of which make ideal AONB's and/or nature reserves.
The UK is largely self-sufficient in food anyway and could easily be completely self-sufficient in food, but it would be just a lot more labour intensive - go down the local allotments and look at what they grow on less than one tenth of an acre and think that we've got the equivalent of ten allotments each.
But if we did want to be able to use all our ag land that intensively, we'd need loads more housing in the countryside (it would be daft for farm workers to commute for hours to get to their patch), so if you're worried about 'food security' then you ought to be in favour of much more rural housing.
Post a Comment