Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

That old chestnut..

I was watching "The Daily Politics" on BBC2 today. One of the items was about various plans to attempt to make it easier for local people in rural areas, particularly areas with lots of holiday homes and second homes such as the Lake District, to be able to afford to buy houses in a climate where prices are ridiculously inflated owing to the second-home effect. This is a real problem - lots of people are being forced out of areas in which they grew up because they simply can't afford housing as it's being bought up by stockbrokers from Chelsea and Buckinghamshire. I was fairly depressed when I visited a village in rural Warwickshire a while ago to find that all the local services had been converted into expensive houses with names like "The Old Schoolhouse" and "The Old Post Office", and the place was like a ghost town until the BMWs started arriving back home in the evenings (shortly after the people carriers brought the children back from their private schools in Warwick, I presume). No facilities (other than a couple of pubs), no life, just the effect of people who want to have it all - they want to live in rural peace but work at highly paid jobs in the cities, and never mind the effect they have on local communities in the process. But I digress.

In the discussion that followed, Kirstie wossname who hosts "Relocation, Relocation" on Channel 4 - one of those irritating programmes in which yuppie types from London sell their one-bedroom flat in Knightsbridge and buy a house in the Lake District, a house in France and a small Pacific island with the proceeds - opined that locals really shouldn't be complaining about this as "We live in a capitalist country, and if you don't like it there are other places you can live." She then went on to say that she'd recently visited the Lakes for the first time, and as so many of the staff in the hotels were Polish and Russian anyway it was obvious that (I paraphrase) local people didn't really want to live there and were just lazy because they didn't want to do menial jobs in hotels.

You really have to wonder how someone can be quite so callous and unsympathetic. I'm constantly amazed at this kind of selfishness - who cares if we're contributing to the decline of rural communities? We've got our darling little artisan's cottage in Cumbria, darling! I've often thought myself that rural life would have its benefits, but I'd have to be able to find a way to work there as well and actually, like, live in the area rather than just treating it as a glorified dormitory with convenient railway connections to London. Given attitudes like Kirstie's, no wonder a lot of rural communities are suspicious of incomers. Still, I'm sure they'll all take heart from knowing that we live in a capitalist country and they're free to live elsewhere. In fact, the Kirsties of this world would probably love it if they did - no more of those troublesome locals blocking the lane with their sheep and demanding plebby things like local schooling and decent bus services that would only bring Undesirable Elements to the village. After all, darling, the country shouldn't be a place where people do work. Work's what we do in London, right?