Rocky Recovery

Conservative MPs in Yorkshire are squealing because the region's heritage is being dismantled by non-corporate entrepreneurs. Buildings of all kinds, including those that could potentially profit Party donors, are suffering the depredations of stone thieves. It is suspected that the thieves are selling the stone to rogue builders, whose concerns may not be sufficiently oligarch-oriented to qualify them as bona-fide engines of the Osbornomic miracle. Were the risk of a public panic not so great, there might even be whispers of a danger to house prices. Stone is, of course, a profoundly Conservative resource, being not only a useful ingredient for mansions and vertical prole deterrents, but also a traditional weapon in witch-hunts and lynch mobs.