It's partly to break that spell, and partly because there comes a point in any spiral of decline when a line has to be drawn, that 25 of the country's leading wildlife and conservation groups have decided to pool the misery and publish a single, shocking stock-take of the British Countryside.
Certainly the 100, 000 well-paid autoworkers employed by overseas manufacturers in the U.S. need only look to Detroit and what the UAW has wrought there to realize that unionization could well spella loss of jobs and competitiveness.