Even irrational food taboos are hard to drop

That’s the last time I let someone else order food for me. Chomping on a ravioli dish this week, I inquired of my dining companion what meat we were eating. “Squirrel,” he said. I laughed. “No, really,” I said. “What is this?” He repeated it: “Squirrel.”

Realising he was serious, I put down my fork. “Is there a famine on?” I asked. “Are we under siege?”

I admit there was nothing rational about my reaction. As far as I know, squirrels are perfectly clean. They eat nuts, like some gourmet pig breeds. But nor was the squirrel so delicious that I felt the need to keep eating it.

The next day, in the park, I saw a tourist luring a fluffy squirrel up her leg using a banana, posing while her smiling relatives took photos. I couldn’t help but wonder whether that particular squirrel would be tasty.

There is one good reason we didn’t traditionally tend to eat them: they are too small. In Israel once, I asked an archaeologist how his team had identified the mud boundaries of one of the first built human dwellings ever discovered, some 14,000 years old.

It was simple. Outside where the walls had been, they found the skeletons of many small creatures. Inside, there was nothing smaller than a rat – because smaller animals simply weren’t worth hunting.

Their findings did somewhat back me up, however. The Natufians, the people who lived there, are only thought to have moved onto eating rats because they had already eaten everything else in the area. In other words, there was a famine on.

There’s no such thing as a magic money tree. But thanks to our planning system, there is something close to one. This is how it works. In many parts of south-east England, you can increase the value of any parcel of land by 1,000 (yes, one thousand) per cent at the stroke of a pen. The trick that achieves this wondrous effect is simple. It’s called granting planning permission.

If this phoney act of “value creation” is so easy, why don’t we do more of it? We all know the answer. There are two major beneficiaries from this process – landowners and developers – but there’s a third party that simply doesn’t see enough of the benefits. That third party is the local community.

Currently, councils are obliged to draw up local plans earmarking sites for development to fulfil demand, but can only charge levies on developers at a later point. The problem, according to an essay by Bim Afolami MP, is that local councils hate local plans. They are expensive and unpopular because so many homeowners oppose new houses in their area. As a result, many councils fail to produce local plans.

The Government uses a big stick to make them. If councils don’t draw up a plan, then all bets are off. Developers benefit from a “presumption in favour of sustainable development”. This provision has helped to lift the number of planning permissions granted from about 80,000 to 90,000 in the past four years, during which housing starts have risen from around 30,000 to 40,000 a quarter.

But it has also set up an entirely oppositional relationship between housebuilders and locals. Development becomes a punishment exacted upon councils for failing to plan properly. Unsurprisingly, this generates a spiral of unpopularity: badly planned development inspired angry opposition, which in turn further discourages councils from drawing up sensible building plans.

Mr Afolami’s suggestion is to start harvesting the magic money tree earlier. If councils get paid a levy by developers and landowners as soon as they publish a plan, they’d have an incentive to do their job properly. The system would reward them with a carrot for working out local plans, and not just a stick for failing to do so.

There would still be all sorts of issues. It’s not clear that the total amount raised by these levies would be enough, given the scale of the planning value uplift. And too often, developments are ugly and fail to take into account locals’ views. But it’s the sort of approach that might work, because it involves enlisting locals as allies, rather than finding new ways to make them angry. The Eurosceptic Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe hosted a posh dinner at Tate Britain in order to give out a prize to a Belgian politician, Bart De Wever. Taking to the stage to introduce the prize, Dan Hannan MEP noted that the gallery was the secret meeting place chosen by Leave campaigners during the referendum. That’s because, by meeting in a place of great culture and history, they knew they would not be interrupted by a journalist.

Mr Hannan pointed out some of the great culture on the walls around us, which were all Pre-raphaelite paintings. The Pre-raphaelites were often sentimental and romantic in their subject matter. But despite the disdain felt towards them by art connoisseurs, they were annoyingly popular. The Lady of Shalott gazing mournfully into the air as she sets off down the river, the drowned Ophelia surrounded by lush foliage: these were not subjects that art critics ought to like. But other people did like them, rather a lot.

There was, therefore, something doubly suitable about ACRE’S chosen meeting place. Like the Pre-raphaelite paintings, Brexit is not the choice favoured by our intelligentsia. But, also like them, it has popular appeal. Voters aren’t blind believers in the views of their “betters”. They’re also romantics.