The Spectator’s Notes | 8 October 2011

Manchester
‘Beer-battered sustainable fish’, said the menu in the Palace Hotel: this great city tries to combine its incontestable northernness with its growing, but still insecure modernity. Everything has to be ‘sustainable’ now of course, which will prove difficult if the present European banking system cannot be sustained. The government’s new ideas about planning are based on ‘sustainable development’. Even though I find the phrase irritating and almost otiose (it is like saying one is in favour of ‘edible food’), I speak at the Daily Telegraph fringe meeting in favour of the new policy. Only in Britain — only, actually, in England — do people believe they are doing country life a good turn by refusing to build houses for the next generation to inhabit. It is a more powerful attack on rural culture and the rural poor than were the Highland Clearances. So it is puzzling to be opposed at the meeting by figures with a left-wing background — Shaun Spiers of the CPRE and Dame Fiona Reynolds of the National Trust.