I’m not sure I like the sound of Gordon’s Britain. It is a hurried place, where any suggestion of indolence and relaxation and beauty — in other words, quality of life — abases itself before the twin gods of productivity and national status. Today’s Pre-Budget Report (PBR) has already told us more than the Chancellor perhaps recognises about what life under Prime Minister Brown would be like.

Look at the various reports commissioned by the Chancellor to inform the PBR. Transport, for a start: here is an Australian, Sir Rod Eddington, who lives not here but in Australia, telling the rural British that they must pay to avert what would otherwise be a £22 billion cost to business in the UK of slower roads. Never mind that, as Sir Rod points out, the road-pricing technology isn’t ready and it has never been tried on a national scale before; the Government has rushed to embrace the idea willy-nilly, saying we could have a national scheme within a decade.

Suddenly it is accepted wisdom among a political and media class that is either London-based and/or wealthy and/or will, I bet, have free travel (can you see MPs not being exempted?) that national charging is inevitable and necessary. Yet outside London, where people need to drive their children to the fewer and fewer primary schools and the hospitals are getting farther and farther away, useful local shops are closing and public transport shrinks by the year, everyone is worried.

If I were a motorist in the South East or on the busy Midlands routes I would be pretty annoyed, too; it’s not as if anyone would choose to drive in the particular hell which is the rush hour if they could avoid it. And petrol duty already taxes the amount, if not the time of day, a car travels, and more fairly than road charging because it hits harder the richer you are and the more hungry and faster your car.

Road charging prices the poor off the road while enabling business to speed along the unencumbered networks untroubled by oiks and grannies in old Austins. If overall travel must be curtailed, then why hasn’t there been any serious discussion of, for instance, petrol allowances — an annual allowance that each person would be free to use or sell on to someone else? Let the poor make some money from their enforced stillness. Let those who manage without cars gain some benefit from their abstinence.

Kate Barker’s report for Mr Brown into the planning system is also concerned almost exclusively with productivity. As with Sir Rod’s report, the Chancellor asked her to focus on economic growth, so the environment and sustainability come a very, very poor second in her considerations. Remember that, when you hear Mr Brown burnishing his environmental credentials. Ms Barker recommends wresting control of large planning applications such as road building projects away from local councils and giving it to a London-based commission to decide on the basis of the proposal’s national economic and employment impact, regardless of whether local people want it or not.

Their employment impact? We have full employment in the UK, or as good as. At what point did we decide we wanted a government that targets policy solely at maximising GDP — ever more jobs to be filled, because we have run out of British workers, by ever more immigrants who need ever more housing squeezed into an ever more crowded infrastructure?

Ms Barker also recommended yesterday that householders should be much freer to carry out “home improvements”, without going through the full planning rigmarole, paving the way for a hideous explosion of chalet-style kitchen extensions, monster conservatories and faux-Tudor loft conversions, all in the name of economic advance. Yes, local planning authorities can be too Nimbyish, but they also serve an important purpose in keeping England looking like England. Whisper it in Whitehall, but local planners actually do what local people want them to do: they block unsightly home improvements, mine as well as yours. Norwegian log porch, anyone?

At some point the country is going to start asking whether this unceasing pressure is worth it in the name of higher and higher economic progress. Productivity; skills; productivity — how much quality of life, how much “Britain-ness”, are the British prepared to surrender to keep our seat at the international “top tables”?

Even children are now routinely spoken of by ministers peddling the latest tests as units of economic productivity. But does anyone suggest that Scandinavians are less happy because they are not in the G8? These countries tend to come out significantly higher than the UK in the international “happiness” league tables. Indeed, most of the developed world is perfectly content being largely ignored on the international stage. Why is Britain so insistent on being with the big boys at all the big tables? People in the villages really don’t care if we are or not.

A similar willy-waggling approach to politics governs the decision to replace Trident (and don’t even get me started on the Olympics). It somehow maintains our influence; we remain “in the club”. What a club!

We are not an empire any more. Do the British people really want to move ever faster, to be the biggest and the best with the highest GDP, the most bombs, the speediest roads, with a government screwing as much “productivity” out of each of us as it can muster in order to spend it on grandiose macho projects? We have no time to stand and stare . . . and where would be the poetry in that?

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