Young people – those vile young people, with their club nights and their enthusiasm, with their tight jeans and their wickedness – young people are significantly less likely to care about England’s green belt than the over-55s, a survey from the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) found this week.

You have to wonder, with no little pity, what Ipsos Mori surveyors do when faced with such a crashingly obvious question. “Do you, a young person, care about the countryside?” The answer is no. “Do you, an over-55, care about the countryside?” The answer is yes. Only a thousand more doors to knock on before the survey is done and you can drive home. Only a few hundred more days before death.

Anyway, the CPRE poll found that 53% of over-55s were very pro-retention of the green belt, whereas only 31% of 35- to 44-year-olds were certain it was worth keeping. Private renters were a third less likely than homeowners to feel strongly about saving the nice ring of fields around seven of the UK’s major cities.

All mushed together, this is seen as evidence that Generation Rent – with all their landlords and their written permission to put up shelves and their endless, infinite saving up of a deposit for a one-bed, saving up for so long that canyons rise and fall and mountains crumble into the sea – cares not for the 60-year-old ring of meadows designed to impair urban sprawl, and would rather see England concreted over entirely and flats built on top.

Many sensible arguments have been made for cutting the green belt into ‘green fingers’

Well, as a fully qualified member of Generation Rent who recently moved and, as a result, is this close to burning his outgoing property agency to the ground if it withholds his deposit a day longer, I say: yeah, concrete it.

Because the thing is, not even the CPRE – an organisation that is ostensibly about protecting England’s rural areas while tub-thumping about bramble – can come up with an especially convincing reason not to.

“The green belt is a very beneficial resource for everyone,” the CPRE’s planning campaign manager, Paul Miner, told the Times. “It’s a place where you can go walking and experience open, green views and can potentially get more of your food from.” Lads, call the JCBs off! We can go for a nice walk right here! Look, there, just beyond that ditch full of sticks: a single, potentially poisonous mushroom. The countryside is wicked!

Then you’ve got Prince Charles going on a press trip to Romania this week and saying wildflower meadows are “good for the soul”, and everyone should have access to them. Meadows are nice and all, but isn’t living in a house a little nicer?

To really cement its cause, the CPRE has roped in some of those celebrities young people like so much to sign a letter to the Times calling for protection of the green belt. You’ve got Philip Pullman, Julian Barnes, Penny Vicenzi, Michael Morpurgo, Joanna Lumley, Virginia McKenna. Truly, could they have done anything less appealing to young people? Beyond coaxing Vicky from Geordie Shore – our Diana – into a poppy field and slaying her? No. I can say this with some authority: as a young person doomed to a life of rental misery, nothing has rendered such nihilistic apathy in me as the fact that Julian Barnes signed a petition about a meadow.

The green belt was an idea conceived a hundred years ago and implemented four decades later

The fact is that London is straining at the belt – and other cities are too. Many sensible arguments have been made for cutting the green belt into “green fingers” to make room for … like … all the people. In January the Adam Smith Institute calculated that 1m homes could be built on the outskirts of London and within walking distance to a train station by sacrificing just 3.7% of the green belt – the equivalent of a half-mile strip all around.

The arguments against is: nah, plants are good, aren’t they? It’s: yeah but where we going to ride our horses, mate? It’s: but your children will grow up without meadows. Which, yes, meadows. But those children are going to have to grow up in totteringly grim tower blocks. They’ll have dropsy, the children, and other Victorian diseases, because it is so damp up that high; our children will never know the luxury of a lift free from urine. All so that they might one day have a picnic among some wildflowers.

The green belt was an idea conceived a hundred years ago and implemented four decades later. Grasping on to it is like insisting on still driving a Model T to work, or eating rations, or not letting women vote. To Generation Rent, the opportunity to actually live in a house one day without putting our privates in the vice-like grip of a terrible landlord outweighs the trace chance of occasionally eating a blackberry without being shot by a farmer.

Is the countryside really so good? Do we actually have to go to such great lengths to protect vast areas which, no matter what you do or where you go, smell fundamentally of manure?

Should we really listen to Prince Charles about anything? The answer to all those questions, and more, is: oh, oh no. God no. No, absolutely not.