Concrete Proposals for a Concrete Future

What with students who fail to realise that higher tuition fees mean they pay less; consumers who fail to spend despite rising inflation and a flexible labour market; taxpayers who fail to comprehend the sensitivities of people like Lord Ashcroft; and charities that come over all unbigsocietal just because their funding is being cut, it was no doubt sadly inevitable that the greenest government ever would run into problems when trying to sell the virtues of the new National Planning Policy Framework to the chlorophyll-oriented community. As one would expect given the name of the National Planning Policy Framework, the idea is to do away with the framework of national planning policy and leave everything up to "local communities"; which is to say, anyone who feels like building anything on the two-thirds of England which is not formally protected, at least until the protection for the remaining third can be removed. Various countryside and environment groups have registered their objections, and the Government's anti-planning spokesbeing has responded in the standard New Labour manner, by saying they are too stupid to understand the proposals. Given that some of the troublemakers are Conservative councils, this time it may even be true.