Rochester cannot expand to the north. It would place that wonderful area under even greater threat. I had always thought that the bedrock of support for the Conservative Party was in the rural areas of England. The fact seems to be that over the past 20 years, the party has done everything in its power to urbanise and suburbanise the countryside. There are a diminishing number of places where the rural voice has any chance of being heard or understood.
Local government is almost entirely town-controlled.
It is now to the shire counties to which we must look for sane and sensible management of the countryside, and this order will achieve the opposite.