Sir.-I believe Basingstoke residents are facing the greatest-ever threat to their quality of life.

Aided by what I feel is the crass stupidity of the Liberal Democrat/Labour council's policies in Basingstoke, John Prescott is cynically using the unelected South East England Regional Assembly to propose an extra 6,000 high-density houses a year in the Basingstoke and Reading area.

Building 6,000 homes is like building three Hatch Warren estates every year. In 10 years, it doubles the number of homes in the borough. Think of all the green fields that will destroy!

Basingstoke must fight this attack with every sinew of its strength. I believe the starting point is to change the leader of our council for someone who will assemble a team to defend the borough. All over Hampshire, council leaders are pledging themselves to this fight - except here.

The stupidity of Lib-Dem/Lab policies in offering up our green fields without a fight has helped to bring this calamity on us.

I have been warning for years that it is the duty of our council to protect our environment and to adopt policies that will allow Basingstoke to grow at a natural rate. They ignored this advice. Now we see the disastrous consequences.

Mr Prescott's announcement is a recipe for tower blocks and gridlock. Many of the mistakes of the 1960s will be repeated.

Tower blocks are hated - they are a recipe for social misery and deprivation. High-density housing causes social problems.

Our roads will be locked solid. Our trains will be crowded out.

If any town should know the risks of going down this road, it is Basingstoke.

In the 1960s, it suffered with vast high-density housing estates being built without the leisure and travel infrastructure to support them. Forty years later, nanny-state planners once again have the arrogance to think that they know better than the people.

We see not only the threatened destruction of acres of green fields but also the demise of democracy in the planning process.

When unelected assemblies can be used to force on a region policies that are neither wanted nor needed, democracy is undermined. When nobody can be held accountable for decisions like this, democracy is dead. Democracy is about holding people accountable for their actions.

I call on Brian Gurden to resign as leader of the council. Without any mandate from the Basingstoke people, he voted for this to happen. He has set up Basingstoke for this calamity. He offered Basingstoke's green fields to accommodate this monstrous overload of other districts' housing.

Cllr Gurden must recognise the catastrophe that he has helped to bring on to our borough. He must go - and be replaced by a councillor prepared to fight to defend Basingstoke.

-Stephen Reid, Hatch Warren, Basingstoke.