David Davis, at the Libertarian Alliance, wonders whether the ten-metre strip around the coastline to be seized by the government (ostensibly for the benefit of ramblers) is in fact intended to form a guarded perimeter, presumably for keeping us in (the standard communist model) rather than keeping enemies out.
Leaving out the knee-jerk mathematics, we might accept that the length of this coastal strip is about 7723 miles. This is 13 592 480 yards. It is sometimes said that a railway-line, to be adequately guarded against sabotage, etc. would require 1 guard per 100 yards. One might suppose that a coastline is little different. On this basis 135, 925 guards would be required to be on guard at any one time. If we allow that guards work three shifts, 407 775 guards would be needed. Since some guards will always be on leave, or whatever, perhaps half a million guards would suffice.
Of course one would suppose that a real perimeter would be stuffed with various automatic gadgets to detect, and make life difficult for, prospective escapers, all of which would be hugely expensive and would still have to be installed and maintained by someone, and also guarded themselves, given the ancient traditions of wrecking on parts of the notorious British lee-shore, and of camera-smashing more or less everywhere.
Then (if one is serious about it) one would have to organise an exclusion zone of some miles’ depth inland of the coastal fence, in which all kinds of restrictions and regulations would apply, together with a force of another million or so dedicated jobsworths to enforce them.
All of this would play comprehensively merry hell with what little is left of the tourist industry, particularly the bit to do with bird-watching (one can imagine. Can’t one?). The only clear beneficiaries, and only then in the short term, would perhaps be the gangster proprietors of seafront gambling-dens, whose market would become, de facto, a captive one.
What proportion of national income derives from tourism I’m not sure, but it cannot fail to increase as every other source of revenue is placed into casters-up mode by the deft control manipulations of the socialists. Will they really flood even this modest goldmine, and spend squillions on chain-link and cameras, to stop us from going down to the sea in Folboats and making off to France (or perhaps Norway) to tell them that whatever the BBC says we don’t actually like Gordon Brown?
No. I think they’re buying a vote from the Ramblers’ Association, that the plan will never be put fully into effect (partly because it is technically impossible due to nuclear power stations, Faslane, Morwenstow, etc. etc. and partly because some landowners will put up a fight), but that broadly-drafted and deliberately vague legal powers of ‘eminent domain’ will remain on the statute books for use whenever required. The leopard does not change his spots.
* In Australia, I believe, the plague of rabbits was to have been contained by the construction of an enormous fence called ‘No.1 Rabbit Proof’, which ran the whole way across the continent. By the time it had been built, the rabbits were on both sides.
