Eco-town plans are socialist nightmare come true

That is a perfect description of the follies of socialist planners who repeatedly promise a new utopia but always end up building a concrete nightmare.

The depressing grey sprawls of the post-war new towns and the hellish slums of Sixties tower blocks are testimony to the arrogance and foolishness of modernising bureaucrats.   

Now Labour is putting forward another grandiose plan which is likely to result only in more urban wasteland scarring our once beautiful landscape. The Government is proposing 10 so called “eco-towns” in the countryside, each with 5,000 to 20,000 homes.

According to ministerial spin, these new communities will represent a radical departure because they will be environmentally friendly and full of bold green measures.

Cycling and public transport will be encouraged, we are told. Houses will be built from recyclable materials while new sources of energy, such as wind turbines, will be harnessed. 

In some of the eco-towns, it is claimed, instead of refuse collections residents will place their household rubbish in giant cylinders, connected by underground pipes to a neighbourhood recycling centre.

The Government wants us to be thrilled by its exciting vision of a green future but most of us can see through the overblown rhetoric. For there is nothing ecological about these new housing developments. They are just vast estates plonked in the middle of the countryside. 

That is why the plan is incurring such justified anger from the British public, particularly in the areas most affected by the scheme. Today, as the Government’s consultation on its plans draws to a close, there is a mass protest in central London against this needless destruction of our natural heritage.

Those taking part will be attacking not just the Government’s instincts for State-sanctioned vandalism of the countryside, dressed up as “meeting housing need”, but also the absurd green gloss painted on the proposals.

As leading architect and disillusioned Labour peer Lord Rogers has said: “Eco-towns are one of the biggest mistakes the Government could make. They are in no way sustainable. I fear we may be building the slums of tomorrow.”

There is something truly Orwellian about Labour’s pretence that building over large parts of rural England is a step towards protecting the environment. Across the country, ancient villages in rolling fields will be superseded by vast, soulless dormitory towns made up of dreary little boxes.

Fashionable talk about the supposed green “sustain­ability” of the eco-towns is yet more political deceit. Precisely because such developments are in the countryside, they will lack strong transport links and will therefore be heavily car dependent.

The eco-towns also represent another nail in the coffin of local democracy as the Govern­ment, in league with big

business, is determined to ride roughshod over the opinions of local authorities and neighbour­hoods. 

The scheme is being driven by an unedifying mix of Stalinist central control from the Whitehall planners and naked greed from the major developers and retailers. 

At least a third of the planned eco-towns are being backed by developers with strong links to the major supermarkets. 

The Government likes to trumpet its requirement that at least a third of homes in the eco-towns will comprise social housing.

But for most ordinary Britons, who have a greater understanding of the realities of life than socialist politicians, this is another cause for concern. The concept of “social housing” is little more than a euphemism for accommodation for welfare claimants.

It is not only manifestly unjust that benefits junkies should be rewarded for their idleness, fecklessness or lack

of ambition at the expense of hard-working taxpayers but it also threatens parts of eco-towns with being turned in social security ghettoes.

After all, that is exactly what happened with so many previous Labour experiments in housing developments such as Easterhouse in Glasgow, where new estates rapidly descended into concrete jungles of welfare dependency.

Apart from all the green nonsense, the other great absurdity of the eco-towns is that there is no demand for them. Ministers keep blathering about the “housing shortage” but the slump in the housing market shows that the current supply of homes actually exceeds real need. 

Many big developers have announced major slowdowns in house-building programmes. More than 800,000 homes are currently lying empty across the country, making a nonsense of the Government’s claim that three million new houses have to be built by 2020.

The only explanation for Labour’s attachment to eco-towns is political. The Govern­ment is pressing ahead partly because, in its urban socialist ideology, it despises the traditional countryside and partly because it wants to transform the demography of rural Britain through crude social engineering.

All but three of the short­listed sites are in Conservative MPs’ seats. Not one is in a Labour area. So when Gordon Brown, expressing his support for eco-towns, proclaims the importance of meeting “the rightful aspirations” of young people, we should remember what crude calculations lie behind his words.