I RECENTLY wrote to the Journal complaining about plans to build on the Britford Lane meadows near the city centre.

Although Salisbury faces less new house building than a lot of places, Britford Lane could be the thin end of a very large wedge.

Britain’s current housing crisis means that hundreds of thousands of new homes will be built, many on greenfield sites which used to be (but are not now) protected by tough planning regulations.

The government is allowing developers to nibble away pieces of green belt around London and other cities and even areas of outstanding natural beauty.

The root cause of the housing crisis must surely be the unlimited immigration which we are allowing from the European Union, which is creating a population explosion in this country. The 64 million people in the UK now are set to rise to 74 million in 2039.

I am 100 per cent in favour of good relations with Europe and don’t hate foreigners or immigrants. Before I moved to Salisbury I spent 25 years living in London and had pals from Spain, Jamaica, Pakistan, India, Japan and South America. I still like them a lot and I don’t wish to send them back to their countries of origin. I wish them long and happy lives in the UK.

However, giving a vastly increased number of people the right to live in this country means that our beautiful and precious English countryside will quickly become a massive building site.

What is even more worrying is that a lot more countries are lining up to join the European countries and take advantage of the free movement of peoples.

They include Ukraine (44 million), Turkey (74 million), Serbia (seven million), Croatia (four million), Macedonia (two million), Belarus (nine million), Moldova (three million), Armenia (three million) and Georgia (four million).

One day Russia will come out of its present nationalistic phase, elect a Liberal Democrat as president and join the EU. That’s another 142 million people with the right to live in the UK.

And that’s an awful lot of people to fit into Britford Meadows.

The moral of this story, in my humble opinion, is for Britain to get out of either the free movement of peoples or the EU as quickly as possible.

MARK LONG