 Like, I suspect, many readers of this column, I probably value the beauty of the English countryside more than any other visual aesthetic experience. I grew up on a small Sussex farm, and about 15 years ago, we returned to the area, buying our own house. We live on the edge of a village, and from our bedroom window I can see green fields, what estate agents call "river frontage" (a tiny stream), and hornbeam woods. No houses are visible. I love it.  So when various bodies such as the National Trust, and this great newspaper, announce their wish to defend the loved land, I hear the "bugles calling from sad shires", and want to rally to them.  But over the years, as the rows about building new homes have recurred, I have come to think that the argument is not what it seems. Now the Government wants to simplify, devolve and liberalise the planning system. With the exception of specially designated areas - green belt, national parks etc - it will create a presumption in favour of development and let localities decide what that development should be. In my view, this is right - not only on the grounds of overall national need, but for the good of rural life itself.  People often speak of landscape as "natural", but it very rarely is, certainly not in England (bits of wild Wales and Scotland are different). Its appearance is the result of human engagement with the land - mainly agricultural, but also, for many centuries now, industrial. Near what could be grown or bred, mined or quarried, harvested or milked, watered or drained, habitations arose. With the habitations came shops, churches, bridges, roads, mills and potteries, forges and barns.  The result, on the whole, was beautiful. The building made good use of what was available. Round us, reddish tiles often cover the walls as well as the roofs. I don't suppose anyone worked this out solely for aesthetic effect - it arose simply because there wasn't as much local stone as in, say, the Cotswolds - but the result is attractive and characteristic.  The people who did the building had practical sense. Their main motive and support was the economic growth which, the National Trust now perplexingly tells us, is antithetical to "the needs of people and places". More often than not, they would, literally, have to live with what they had constructed, so they built carefully and pleasingly. In 1733, someone built Flatford Mill in Suffolk. about 80 years later, John Constable, whose father owned it, used it as the inspiration for the great paintings which, more than any other, encapsulate our view of rural England. I bet the mill would not have got past the planners if such things had existed in 1733. I bet the National Trust would have accused this "industrial unit" of being "out of keeping" with the rural scene. Someone would have slapped a noise abatement order on the hay wain as it creaked and splashed through the ford.  The landscape we love, then, developed out of the normal human need to make a living. I cannot believe that its interest is best served by making future livelihoods almost impossible. The men who put up those rustic dwellings did so in the hope that their children would be able to live and work there. If they had been told, as they are today, that it was an anti-social act to build more houses to accommodate them, they would scarcely have understood what was being said. In southern England today, you have to have access to an amount more than 10 times the average wage to buy a country cottage which was once inhabited by some of the poorest people in the land. This means that such villages can offer no place for the next generation, which is another way of saying that we are killing the thing we say we love.  "Planning", that socialist concept which so many intensely conservative people in Britain oddly love, did almost nothing to create this beauty. I do not believe that it preserves much of it, either. It is not a coincidence that in the era of planning, the ugly developments with which we are all familiar have become so common. It is because planning, being essentially a bureaucratic process, decrees what you cannot do, rather than letting you do what you do best.  People rightly complain about mean, uniformly ugly new housing being crammed into villages and on the edge of towns. But this happens because planning restricts space, making the land where development is permitted vastly expensive. People correctly observe that a small number of large building firms sit on land banks which provide most of the new (usually dreary) building in this country. This is because planning rules (1,300 pages of them, which the Government is replacing with 52 pages) have become so petty, slow, restrictive, and complicated that few ordinary mortals can fight their way through them and actually get a house put up. Only the giants have the resources to work the system. They need to hold capacity back for the years it takes to get permissions.  In this paper yesterday, a lady writing from Tunbridge Wells, the constituency of Greg Clark, the planning minister, complained that the place is too crowded already and would get worse if Mr Clark got his way. She did not ask why it is so crowded. It is partly because the "plan-led system", shaped by Chris Patten and taken to heights of lunacy by John Prescott's "regional spatial strategies", encouraged density. Obsessed with the virtues of brownfield sites,  