History tells us the exact opposite. We live in one of the most fertile and well-watered countries on earth but we import food by the millions of tons. Why, I found one day last summer that a certain supermarket was selling courgettes from Holland when they were growing so bloody fast in my garden that I couldn't even give them away. This country was self-sufficient in food in your bad old days and people didn't die of diabetes, heart attacks or fat rot, and the countryside was replete with a diversity of habitat and wildlife that has all but disappeared thanks to your modern "efficiencies". And thank God for the Haber process, eh? Why, I wonder how those country bumpkins of old managed to get almost the same tonnage of grain per acre as modern farmers without all that damaging nitrogenous fertiliser?

The owners of those Duchies you refer to wouldn't know what an honest day's graft was if it reared up and bit them on their royal backsides. While the tenants are working their land for them and generating all those profits, they're off somewhere hot and colonial, waving at all those foreign chappies who are standing behind a rope waving cheap flags at them. And don't tell me that they're good landlords, etc. They have massively-overpaid "estate managers" to make sure that things are running smoothly at home and to make sure that the plebs can't get in to disturb the grouse or poach the salmon. That's what landlordism is all about.

"I moved and bought another house..." Well I had to find someone to buy the first one first. Then I had to borrow a ton of money that has taken me 35 years in all to pay off, all to buy my HOME, not "another house", a property or an investment. As for your market rate, well you know as well as I do about the blind workings of the market, supply and demand and all that. Thatcher and all her successors ensured that there was a shortage of public housing to rent by selling off over a million of the choicest houses at massive discounts in order to further her agenda of making the country a nation of little capitalists (as well as selling off our public utilities cut-price to allow anyone with spare dosh to make a killing on the shares. Look at them now: ripping people off with complicated, impossible-to-understand forests of tariffs and laughable customer service provided by call centres in the cheapest countries they can find). Housing shortage equals landlords' market. Remove rent controls (well done again, Maggie) and there's your recipe for out-of-control rent increases. Round here, the lowest-wage economy in England, a couple working full-time on the local average wage can scarcely afford to rent a two-bedroom house on a new-build estate, let alone get a mortgage, and I'm not talking posh here, I'm talking about houses with a lovely view of Morrisons' delivery yard or the back end of our new Lidl.