WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Trump has successfully secured 18 months of free Geek Squad service as a condition of negotiating the end of hostilities between India and Pakistan.

We’ve spent most of the last century with the people of this country stating they’d like to live in houses with a nice front and back garden - and the planners, the authorities, insisting that they’re going to build flats, apartments, for everyone. This is a common refrain in David Kynaston’s books based upon the Mass Observation archives. The people say houses, the people planning for the people say flats. This all predates the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 that is, indeed is one of the reasons for that Act. The invention of the Green Belt is purely an insistence that the proles must be forced into stack-a-worker chicken coops so that the haute bourgeoisie can enjoy the green rolling acres without having to pay for their own land.

At which point:

Sadiq Khan plots tower blocks on London’s green belt

Campaigners and Conservatives hit out at mayor’s plan to build housing developments on capital’s protected outskirts

Well yes, build on the Green Belt. It’s an entirely artificial creation existing only to oppress the people. But why tower blocks?

The countryside on London’s outskirts could soon be concreted over to make way for tower blocks as Sir Sadiq Khan throws his support behind building on the green belt.

The Mayor of London will on Friday announce plans to release more of the capital’s green spaces for housing as he launches a consultation on the city’s development strategy for the next two decades.

Sir Sadiq is expected to argue that parts of the green belt “can often be low-quality land, poorly maintained and rarely enjoyed by Londoners” and would be better used as housing.

If we’re going to build housing - which we should - why not build actual houses? The form of housing the British have been shouting they desire for the past century and more?

To remind, it’s currently illegal to build what an actual century ago, the last time Homes for Heroes came around, was regarded as the minimum acceptable house for a working man. The 3 bed 2 recep on a quarter acre garden. This currently vastly richer society refuses, point blank, to even allow what was thought righteous as a council house then for a World War One squaddie. And it really is refuses to allow - you’ll not get planning permission for something with that low a density. It’s not even that such would be expensive, it’s that it’s verboten. Because, of course, the haute bourgoisie can still buy those older houses with those nice gardens.

As we keep reminding, housing is a technology and technologies only work when all the moving parts are present. The Europeans do not live in flats - they live in a flat in town and a cottage to shack in the country as well. 90% of Czechs have access to a chalupa. 30% of Italians a second home, 25% of Iberians and absolutely every plot point of a Scandi Noir novel takes place at the lakeside cottage. So, as with that idea of mansion flats in Cambridge, where are those second homes, those cottages, going to go? Or, why not build what has always been the English (and it is rather more English than British) solution, the house with a nice front and back garden?

Bulldoze the Green Belt, sure, grand idea. But build those suburban des res houses that are the British housing preference. We are not, after all, French so why do people keep trying to insist we should live as if we are?

Tim Worstall