This idea isn’t remotely good for parks

TIS a terrible thing, this getting old lark. For example, I keep turning on the news and not understanding a thing.

I don’t just mean news about scientists saying we’ve got it all wrong when it comes to fundamental particles. If those strange muons aren’t quite doing what is expected of them, that’s fine by me. Because I could not follow an atom of that particular news item even if I was to live for centuries. I would love to understand, but my brain aches trying to grasp a single sentence of what the professors are announcing.

And there’s plenty of other stuff that goes way beyond my comprehension – to the extent that this week I found myself re-checking the calendar to make sure April Fool’s Day really had been and gone.

I swear in my evening slumbers I heard someone on local BBC TV news report that the Government was thinking about having national parks like Dartmoor and Exmoor run from one central office.

Now, regional newsrooms are underfunded nowadays just like everything else – indeed I have recently seen several reports aired days late, presumably because dusting off some old package that hadn’t actually made the grade first time around must have eventually seemed a good use of licence-payers’ money. So maybe someone failed to realise this national park tale was just an April Fool’s joke that wasn’t funny enough to make the original cut.

Because, surely, no one would actually be mad enough to believe that the 10 most individualistic and unique landscapes in England could be run from one drab central office full of career-types more interested in wage packets than reality? In other words: a habitat that evolution would decree shouldn’t really exist – ie the centralised office.

If the story has any basis in truth, then the obvious question is: how long will it take for humans to realise that cost-cutting by creating some sort of one-size-fits-all answer is doomed to fail in the long run? It can look good on a balance-sheet, but in practice it’s almost always dysfunctional. Look what happened to the Soviet Union.

In so many walks of life centralisation has been a disaster – certainly from a rural perspective.

Here’s an example: a friend worked for an organisation which decided to analyse the way its operatives were working. Some time-andmotion bods were sent to follow a couple of the inner-city employees and it was discovered they could belt from one appointment to another and do a dozen jobs a day. Which made the rural-based guys look lazy, because those poor blighters could be driving 50 or even 100 miles between jobs and were therefore completing just three or four assignments per shift. The rural employees were made redundant, which was a disaster for them and not good for the countryfolk who relied on their services.

People in centralised offices do not understand that great big green space beyond the suburbs.

Just this week Sir Keir Starmer appeared on TV news talking about some countryside issue or other – and what made me splutter was that he was standing in the middle of Plymouth, the second-largest city in the South West, referring to it as though it were some rural village. Of course you can talk about the rural world from the middle of a big city, but do you really get the countryside? I’d say our two biggest political parties do not.

Call me a cynic when it comes to national park centralisation, but I know how this sort of thing works. There’ll be some high-ups working as consultants for Natural England or whoever, who will look at the socalled National Landscape Service and see a potential for rich-pickings.

They’ll pen some learned-sounding reports, which basically say: “Our expertise leads us to believe this is all a jolly good idea. The new body will require expert guidance – a service we are happy to provide at a reasonable rate of just five grand per day.”

Of course, such a body would need a highly experienced public relations person – and my email address is…

Only joking. Because in all seriousness, God help the last really protected and highly individual landscapes left in overly-concreted England if national parks are to be run by a bunch of overpaid know-italls from somewhere like Basingstoke.

I remember covering stories about the Exmoor Revolting Pheasants’ Party, which used to harangue national park officers for being out of touch. That was when the likes of the indomitable Molly Groves would march a couple of miles down the lane to the national park HQ in Dulverton. I’m not sure Exmoor’s high horse could make it to Basingstoke or wherever else they’d put this crazy central office.

But I do know there’d be trouble of the “all chiefs and no Indians” kind, with plenty of placards blaring: “Remote bosses do not understand needs of local people!”

Just like I don’t understand muons, I also fail to comprehend why anyone would go against a wise old adage. This one being: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…

In so many walks of life centralisation has been a disaster – certainly from a rural perspective