Bowel Motion

From The Daily Mail:

Andrew Motion accused the Coalition of putting at risk Britain’s ‘great collaborative masterpiece’ – its countryside.

"The environment is foremost in people’s minds, not just because disasters like the recent flooding and ash dieback disease increase our consciousness of what is at risk, but because we’re hearing government pronouncements that betray a wider pattern of neglect for the landscape," he wrote in an article published in The Lady.
"By a thousand cuts, we will be left with a countryside so fragmented that it will be impossible to find a view unimpeded by pylons or warehouses."

... Sir Andrew said the planning system had historically prevented ‘needless urban sprawl while regenerating our cities’ and pointed to the Olympic Park as a good example of using brownfield sites.

He said: "Nick Boles seems determined to abandon this proven strategy, calling for developers to build on an area of open countryside two-and-a-half times the size of Greater London... Even that great icon of England, the village green, is under threat from the growth-at-all-costs culture."

Interestingly, the article is accompanied by a picture of him in a house; a picture of a power station with neat rows of electricity pylons leading away from it (pylons which might well be taking electricity to the very house he is pictured in); and another picture of him in what appears to be Venice, one of the most artificial and densely built up places in the world.

I'd also like to point out that 80% or 90% of us live in urban or suburban housing estates, and very few of us can see electricity pylons or warehouses from our back windows. So if you don't like looking at them, it is easy finding somewhere from where you can't see any.