ON Monday Basildon council in Britain is due to begin the grim process of evicting the remaining illegal pitches in Dale Farm, the final chapter of an eight-year battle fought by the Travellers. Dale Farm’s travails — and the sharply polarised opinions they have provoked — has been a vivid reminder of how doggedly people defend their sense of belonging and commitment to place.

It’s a driver in human behaviour as powerful as ethnic or religious identification, and yet attracts a fraction of the attention. In an age when we have become intoxicated by the technologies that shrink space — now we are able to communicate immediately with almost anyone anywhere in the world — it has become all too easy to belittle or overlook the geographical identities that motivate us. Where do you belong? Where are you from? As the residents of Dale Farm have found, such questions are deeply political.

Yet politicians can have a tin ear to the passions that place provokes. In the Dale Farm case, one councillor was quoted as saying that they could move to some free pitches in St Helens, several hundred miles away in the northwest. Try saying that to the outraged residents of Buckinghamshire running a vigorous campaign against the high speed rail link: you can always move.

Of course, that is never going to happen, because the politics of place exposes power more sharply than any other issue. While Dale Farm residents struggle to make their case, the middle classes are adept at protecting the places they value, mounting hugely effective campaigns. You would have thought this might have made the coalition government a little more careful about how it handled the politics of geography. Both parties have a long tradition of respecting localism, place and belonging; but in the last year there has been little evidence of any of that as they take on one shibboleth after another — at their peril.

The plan to sell off the Forestry Commission was one of the swiftest, most complete and abject U-turns in recent politics. Now the row over reforming the planning system is developing the same head of steam — the Telegraph’s current ‘Hands Off Our Land’ campaign is a prime example of how the middle classes like to go into battle, with a battery of argument on economic and environmental grounds.

George Osborne has weighed in, using economic growth as a rationale to bludgeon the reforms through. In so doing he has shown himself to be a true successor to the Thatcherite Conservatives, whose shocking disregard for the ties of place and belonging was made infamous by Norman Tebbit’s advice to the unemployed to “get on their bikes”. The chief executive of the National Trust, with its four million members and a rallying cry of ‘save our countryside’, presents a formidable opponent.Osborne’s position calls to mind Stalin’s question of the pope: how many divisions does he have?

Yet the sense of place is an important part of our politics. MPs develop a strong sense of commitment to a location — they are expected to do so — and it plays a major part in their effectiveness as constituency MPs and in maintaining the local party.— The Guardian, London