The homeowners of Britain are being lied to, and unfairly smeared to try to get us to accept a hideous and irreparable destruction of green space in suburbs and the countryside. They are also being blamed personally for a problem they did not cause, in a nasty war on the middle-aged. They should resist this.

It is garbage to claim that liberating grabby developers to build thousands of nasty box homes will bring down the price of housing for the young in any important way.

House prices are madly high, but for quite different reasons. First, there is the mass immigration that nobody can mention without being defamed as a bigot.

Homeowners of Britain are being lied to, and unfairly smeared to try to get us to accept a hideous and irreparable destruction of green space

Next, there is the destruction of stable family life. The epidemic of divorce created a huge need for more houses, as formerly married parents both sought to offer homes to their children.

Then there’s the concentration of so much employment in London and the South East, and the destruction of jobs elsewhere in the country.

On top of these, there was the foolishly praised decision to sell off council houses. As well as breaking up hundreds of settled and civilised communities, this released billions of pounds into the housing market just as it was exploding anyway.

And, finally, and perhaps most crucial of all, house prices are the only true measure of the inflation of our currency. In a country where money is shrivelling in value daily, cash savings are eaten up by targeted inflation.

Targeted? Yes. The virtual abolition of interest on savings forces those with any money ether to shove it in risky investments, spend it, or put it into the only asset normal people can easily buy – land and property.

Assets are the only guard against the death of money. So people sensibly put as much of their cash as they can into them and so they go up in price.

Ten thousand hideous new ‘executive estates’ blighting villages will not suddenly make houses cheap in areas where people want to live.

The country will come to resemble the suburbs of Istanbul, an endless vista of brick, concrete, plastic and exhaust fumes

Nor will the bulldozing of old-fashioned spacious suburbs to make way for high-density flats. Nor will the concreting of what is left of the Green Belt.

All that will happen will be that the developers will make a lot of money, house prices will stay high and large parts of the country will come to resemble the suburbs of Istanbul, an endless vista of brick, concrete, plastic and exhaust fumes in which people may exist but not live.

I heard last week of a new ploy being used by powerful landowners anxious to cash in on the new boom. This Greed Lobby long ago invented the term ‘Nimby’ (Not In My Back Yard), to abuse those who wished to preserve their neighbourhoods. They lied that such people were selfish and obstinate, refusing to make sacrifices for the common good.

Now they are accusing them – me, if you like – of selfishly sitting on the gains of charmed lives, cruelly depriving the young of homes.

I have heard of immensely rich landowners seeking to build on the Green Belt, openly sneering at their opponents for being middle-aged. Though their motive was plainly to make lots of money out of developing farmland, they sought to make out that those who stood in their way were the selfish ones, keeping young families out of the housing market.

It’s not true. If our children are to inherit anything, we need to stand up against this pressure. If we cannot preserve the savings of years of work in our homes, then where can we preserve them?

I KNOW of people in my parents’ generation who died almost penniless, with no heritage to leave behind, because they had invested their modest savings on the stock market, instead of in housing.

Worse, the rape of the Green Belt and the overdevelopment of the countryside will mean our children inherit a blighted country, almost unrecognisable as the beautiful, civilised place my generation inherited from our forebears. Don’t be bullied into being ashamed of your thrift.

Don’t be abused by oily land- grabbers, whose only real interest is their own wealth, into thinking that by giving into their demands you are helping the young. You won’t be. Let us fight for our backyards, and not be ashamed that we own them.

Turning the spotlight on TV's sinister new face

Anyone who appears on British TV programmes is now being urged to complete an astonishing questionnaire about skin colour, sexual orientation and ‘gender’.

This is the work of something called the Diamond Creative Diversity Network, which declares: ‘Diamond represents a committed decision by leading UK broadcasters to make change.

We cannot expect to change cultures, attitudes or ways of working overnight, but Diamond is the tool that will enable us to say with confidence, “Change gonna come.” ’ Well, I believe this survey is a ridiculous and rather nasty idea. If I go on TV or radio, I do not represent all pinko-grey-skinned heterosexual males in their mid-60s. Many such people disagree with me.

Martin Luther King quite rightly said that we should be judged on the content of our characters, and on nothing else

If I represent anyone, I speak for the people who agree with me, whatever age, sex, orientation or skin colour they have. Thursday night’s BBC Question Time, whose audience were all under 30, showed that quite a few people who are neither my age or my skin colour (I neither know nor care about their private lives) were willing to applaud things I said.

But I have little doubt that such surveys will be used to exclude people like me from broadcasting.

This won’t be because I am not diverse enough. It will be because the surveys have provided a cover story for having even fewer moral and social conservatives on the airwaves.

It was certainly one of the tools the Tory Party used in the Cameron years to get rid of anyone who showed any signs of being a conservative.

Back in the 1960s, Martin Luther King quite rightly said that we should be judged on the content of our characters, and on nothing else. In those days, it was Apartheid South Africa which was always listing people according to their exact skin colour, and it was blackmailers who wanted to probe people’s private sexual tastes.

How did we get to this point, where self-congratulating liberals compile these sinister statistics?

Sir Ringo strikes all the wrong notes...

Oh, well, now it’s Sir Ringo Starr, joining all the other Tin Pan Alley knights. He’s waited years, and yet it still looks odd and daft to me.

These strange honours have made the orders of chivalry look ridiculous to those who once respected them, and made rock stars look ridiculous to those who once mistook them for rebel leaders. Why would any self-respecting rock star want a knighthood?

Richard Starkey, better known as Ringo Starr, and his wife Barbara Bach, pose as they arrive for an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace

I have pretty much nothing in common with the pop star will.i.am, interviewed last week in Event magazine. But we share a horror of the drugging of healthy children in the name of ‘ADHD’. I have argued against this ghastly, creepy misuse of medical authority for years. Will.i.am was very nearly a victim of this, saved (as many are) by a tough mother. He says: ‘It’s not the kids who are the problem, it’s the lazy parents and lazy teachers who want kids to take Ritalin… it makes me furious that you get a kid who has this creative energy, who is powering off the walls and people can’t be bothered to deal with the energy. They just want to medicate it away.’ And now they are trying to foist it on adults, too. Why aren’t more people angry?

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