Our reporters have been especially busy this week covering protest meetings around the area, as opposition builds to a variety of schemes, from new industrial estates to plans for homes and solar farms.

The right to object to things, and to have your voice heard, is one of the best things there is about our being lucky enough to live in a democratic society.

However often we may wonder at the sometimes apparently peculiar decisions our elected representatives arrive at, the fact that they are just that – elected by you and me – is a freedom I’d never want to give up.

But I do wonder sometimes if the ‘right’ to protest and object to things which we hold so dear is not holding our country back.

Barely a couple of hundred years ago, decisions which led to massive projects like the Great Western Railway, and the Industrial Revolution which saw giant factories spring up, seem to have been made far faster than it takes us to finalise anything these days.

From the new HS2 rail route to the Westbury bypass, schemes which could have the same impact on our lives seem to be stalling, sometimes because of lack of cash but just as often because protesters put obstacles in the way.

Visting central France on holiday a couple of years ago, staying in a campsite in an idyllic wooded valley, we repeatedly came across giant building sites as we drove, carefully and on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, to explore the area.

Painstakingly translating the giant construction signboards, we gleaned that the work was part of a scheme to build a new high speed train line, which would carry the famous French TGV trains through the region. Perusing the local paper (when on holiday a journalist may resist the imported copies of the Daily Mail but simply has to try the Vallons Bugle), we failed to find any mention of protests against either the line itself, the works, which were despoiling great stretch of the Ardeche region, or even the mess the giant construction traffic was making on the local roads in a very wet summer.

Maybe the French have a different attitude to their ‘back yards’. In a country famous for the depth of opposition in rural areas to occupying forces, surely they do not believe that resistance is futile, but I bet it did not take them 20 years to decide to press on with the Rhin-Rhone line we witnessed being built.