It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good income, a high-powered wife and Boden-clad children must be in want of a country property. During the week, a village such as Cawsand in Cornwall is something like a ghost town. All the dinky ex-fishermen’s cottages with their gaily painted shutters and adorably crooked windows stand empty; the post office has been closed down for want of use; the only shop is the gallery that sells moody black-and-white pictures of weather-beaten fishermen mending their nets.

These pictures contain the only fishermen to be found in this erstwhile fishing village. The only nets are in the sports field way up the hill on the council estate. The only business concern in the old town is the boutique B&B run by two former social workers from London to give stressed-out city workers the chance to get away from it all.

At weekends and in (private) school holidays, however, the narrow streets fill with second-home owners struggling to unload their Waitrose groceries from their silver 4x4s. On Friday nights the sea air of Cawsand is fragrant with the scent of Diptyque tuberose candles lit to banish the damp smell of an empty house.

The oldest surviving resident of the old town bought her house just after the war for £150. Now her property is worth, even in today’s sluggish market, upwards of £400,000. When she decides to sell, there will be cash buyers hovering from here to the M25. The chances are that none of them will be local. Although prices are dropping, her house will fetch at least 14 times the average annual wage in Cornwall. Even the less chi-chi homes on what was once the council estate don’t go for less than quarter of a million. The average local first-time buyer doesn’t stand a chance of getting onto this particular retro-floral Cath Kidston property ladder.

In the last survey of such things, three-quarters of us declared that our dream was a place in the country. Thanks to the recent boom in the metropolitan property market, more and more of us have been able to afford a rural bolthole. In places such as Windermere, in the Lake District, and Polzeath and Rock, in Cornwall, 40% of the housing stock is second homes or short-term holiday lets.

It is this situation that has prompted Matthew Taylor, the Liberal Democrat MP for Truro and St Austell, to call for legislation that would force second-home owners either to live in their homes full-time or to make them available for long-term rental. Clearly this is a vote-winner for a Cornish MP, as most of those second-home owners will be registered to vote in Canonbury, Clerkenwell or Kensington.

What’s not to dislike about people who have made enough money to buy the thing they have always wanted: a place in the country?

Let’s forget that they pay council tax for services that they use rarely, or that they will pay £15 for an organic chicken at the local farm shop – or £3 a kilo for biodynamically grown broccoli – without even wincing, or the cheerful way they buy English wine. Taylor and his fellow second-home haters should also ignore the fact that all those pesky incomers are hardwired to replace their kitchens and bathrooms every five years, creating a tide of work for locals whose traditional jobs in fishing and agriculture have become the stuff of costume drama.

I have to declare an interest here. Every weekend, I pack my car with children, dog and Sancerre rosé to travel to my particular bit of (rented) second-home heaven. Yes, I (or my landlord) may be making it harder for a local family to find somewhere to live, but I know from the welcome I get at the farm shop and the store that sells floral wellington boots and hand-painted enamel bread bins that my contribution to the local economy does not go unnoticed.

Farmers are constantly being urged to diversify into premium products by Prince Charles and others, but without poncey townies like me, who’s going to support the new cottage industries that produce thyme-scented goat’s cheese, nettle soup and chilli-scented chocolate? Who else is going to patronise the burgeoning numbers of reiki healers, cranio-sacral therapists and rush-willow artists, who now outnumber dairy farmers in my particular patch of the West Country? Who will stuff their reusable hemp bags with produce at the farmers’ market while the locals go to Lidl? Who else can afford to employ a cleaner and a gardener? Get rid of me and you bring the organic-knickers industry of west Dorset to its knees.

Even Taylor admits that the real driver behind the boom in rural house prices is people who actually move to the country (at least 100,000 a year) rather than weekending scum like me. As these escapees to the country also have votes, however, there is no political capital in targeting them. Second-home owners are an easier bet; except that Mr Taylor might be surprised to find that second-home ownership is not the preserve of louche Londoners. In Cawsand, where even the ex-council houses are worth so much, some of the locals have second homes – except that they take no chances with the weather and have bought their castles in Spain.

Taylor would be much better advised to introduce legislation to regulate the scourge of the West Country: alternative therapists. Barbara Nash, who devised the “amazing hydration diet” that has allegedly blighted the life of Dawn Page so badly that she has been paid more than £800,000 in damages, gained her “qualification” from the College of Natural Nutrition, based in Tiverton, Devon.

Poor Mrs Page now suffers from epilepsy, poor speech and concentration problems – although you have to wonder about the intelligence of a woman who pays money to be told to drink lots of water and cut out salt to lose weight. Still, the £4.5 billion spent on alternative therapies with no scientifically proven results suggests that Page is not the only woman to suspend rational thought as she passes the therapist’s threshold.

The detox magic bullet, with its connotations of spiritual as well as corporeal cleansing, is seductive to woolly-minded middle-aged women who love the idea of spring-cleaning their lives, never mind the complete lack of evidence that detoxing is anything more than a way of parting a fool from her money.

If Taylor really wants to do the West Country a service, he should bring in a law that means alternative therapists are paid by results only, thereby creating a wave of bankruptcies and putting a load of adorable West Country homes on the market. And, with the current housing downturn, perhaps those properties might be worth so little that a local first-time buyer could take out a 70-year mortgage and buy one.

Rachel Johnson is away

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