Daniel Carey Dawes of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (https://www.cpre.org.uk/) just had this anti-housing letter published in The Times.
I'm sorry but this is an outright hideous and typical response from CPRE. What they call economic overheating is jobs; and economic redistribution, the way they describe it, means fewer jobs in the places where they currently are and more where they currently are not.
While the latter makes sense, the former is insane. But the problem is that infrastructure alone is a very slow means for changing the economic balance of a country in geographical terms.
The second problem is that London isn't competing with Leeds economically. It's competing with Paris, Frankfurt, New York, Singapore and Hong Kong. A economically illiterate degradation of the London economy is the equivalent of drowning a goose that's laying golden eggs.
They're right that Britain is too dependent on London, but that doesn't mean London is a bad thing and we should have less of it. It means we need more Londons. More places resourced and marketed to compete in the global economy.
And a frikkin' train line can't achieve that alone.
Achieving this would depend on leveraging those local economies that are already in global markets or have the capacity to make that leap. The Edinburgh / Glasgow corridor has this potential, as does the northern powerhouse if it were planned right (which it is not).
But the absolute, prime opportunity for a new world-class economy in the UK is by linking Oxford and Cambridge. I would build a maglev between them and effectively merge Northampton and Milton Keynes (and the countryside between) to make a tech hub city for at least 2 million people.
If any of these plans were effective, even the northern powerhouse, it would mean building a shit-ton of housing in the countryside. But it would relieve the pressures everywhere else - including in the countryside.
But how can you pay for the investment that would be needed to create new, great world cities? Certainly not by destroying the London economy. If you want long-term, sustainable decentralisation of the economy, you have to support London in the short term and that means providing housing, which can be built far faster than globally competitive cities.
Give me the golf courses on which to build housing.
Give me high rises which, done right, can be delightful places to live and which are campaigned against by slightly less idiotic campaigners at Create Streets (http://dev.createstreets.com/).
Give me the abolition of the ridiculous planning rule that bars any construction that obscures the view of St Paul's Cathedral.
The alternative is the ongoing serfdom of a population of renters who have no market power and few rights in the hand of a venal and rapacious landlord community.
Or the collapse of the British economy, which seems to be the aim of the government, as far as I can make out from the state of the Brexit negotiations.
Just accept that a tiny, fractional percentage of Britain's countryside needs to be built on. And get over it.