Where’s the PM’s promise? (From The Northern Echo)

Where’s the PM’s promise?

3:21pm Wednesday 8th February 2012 in Harry Mead By Harry Mead, Columnist

ON the BBC’s Country File programme last month David Cameron delivered just about the strongest-possible commitment to protecting our countryside. He said he would no more risk damaging it “than I would put at risk my own family”.

Actually, the comparison he drew was with the countryside of his west Oxfordshire constituency.

But unless he selfishly discounts a similar value that people elsewhere place on their local countryside his assurance clearly encompassed the whole of our countryside.

It was designed to reassure people that the Government’s impending major overhaul of our planning laws would not be the developers’ charters that many fear.

Mr Cameron added: “Our reforms will make it easier for communities to say ‘We are not going to have a big plonking housing estate next to the village, but we would like 10, 20, 30 extra houses, and we would like them built this way...’”

Well, that’s not quite what’s already happening on the ground. Take one North-East example. Near Scarborough, the village of Scalby is to be expanded by a huge estate of 485 houses. Strong local objections, citing traffic problems, loss of agricultural land and impact on wildlife, have come to nothing.

Criticism of the house design has also been swept aside. So much for “we would like them built this way”.

Here’s a template for the future, except, perhaps, in west Oxfordshire, as long as David Cameron occupies Number 10.

STILL in the countryside, David Hockney disappointed many who gain pleasure from it by seeming to condone fly-tipping which, he said: “sometimes looks rather good”.

I commented here that it didn’t look good enough for him to paint it. Now, the omission of rubbish from his acclaimed paintings of a lane in the Yorkshire Wolds looks even more surprising, since it has been revealed that the lane suffers from fly-tipping on an industrial scale.

With visitors now turning up, there’s pressure to clear away all the rubbish. If that happens the lane could become an even bigger tourist attraction. Millions might turn up to marvel at Britain’s only stretch of public road not lined with litter.

THE Queen reached her Diamond Jubilee this week. Here’s a personal memory from what might have been the first Sunday of her reign. I was present at Holy Communion in my parish church when the elderly priest offered a prayer for “Our Sovereign Lord, King” (split-second pause) “Our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth.”

There’s since been just a little time for him and his successors to adjust to the change.

PAUL MCCARTNEY has brought out a CD entitled Kisses on the Bottom. The phrase is from the old song I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter, joyously recorded by Fats Waller, who, says Sir Paul, strongly influenced his own work. Well, as a lifelong Waller fan, once able to fumble my way through his piano masterpiece Alligator Crawl, I have to confess Sir Paul has had me fooled all these years.

Still, let’s be thankful for an overdue conversion.

Sir Paul’s CD also includes the Nat King Cole swinger It’s Only a Paper Moon, and Irving Berlin’s lovely waltz, Always. Rod Stewart, Robbie Williams and now Sir Paul, in the end the rockers all get round to the Great American Songbook, the 20th-century’s finest musical legacy.