Peter Smith

This week there has been many reports on second homes. Our recent Budget speech was basically a charter to give public money to underwrite loans to buy homes. Most of these will be sold to speculaters,  landlords and people wanting a second home and not fo r the  purpose  the  deceitful  chancellor George Osborne stated; in helping people buy a house for  their  own oc cupation. Leading on from this press activity former poet laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, now head of the campaign to Protect Rural England, has made the headlines in all the UK media, calling for tax increases on second homes in the countryside to preserve communities. He is of course correct but if we dig deeper into what do we as a society want to see in the countryside we must look at the issues and values that will save rural communities. A number of papers have posed the question of how do we value rural Britain and protect its socia...

I listened to our Government's Chief Scientist,  John Bebbington, on Radio 4 this morning, he is retiring and has made a statement on three ‘underlying problem’ facing Humanity: Climate Change, population Growth, and Sustainable cities. What annoys me about such media debate is they seem to avoid all discussion on actual remedies to the three ‘underlying problems’ he raised. Instead of examining the solutions, the debate concentrated on anguish, wringing their hands with worry; saying it is really difficult and if only we tried a little harder, and it’s going to cost a fortune to protect the planet, and nobody wants to bear the cost of doing so etc... The real ‘underlying problem’ is our legal, political and economic system that enshrines the right of Government bodies & private individuals to own the ability to destroy and monopolise natural assets without compensation to the rest of society & ‘the planet’; yet it is the one issue that never seems to be chal...