I WAS a cub reporter on a country weekly when I covered my first national park committee meeting almost 50 years ago. And one of the complaints I reported was from local residents saying that their interests were not being represented because there were too many outsiders on the board.

That was a meeting of the Peak District National Park which, along with the Lake District, was one of the first two parks created by the post-war Labour Government.

Ten years ago, in the Daily Telegraph Weekend section, I wrote a long article about complaints from Lake District residents who were very angry indeed because, they said, not a single member of their planning committee lived within the boundaries of the park.

This week, the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority (YDNPA) issued a press statement saying that the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs wished to appoint 26 members to the NPA - and was particularly anxious to find volunteers from towns outside the park and, best of all, young people from those towns.

Half a century of water under the bridge - and the Government is still ignoring the wishes of people who live and make their living in the national parks, often at great inconvenience caused by too much traffic on poor roads, over-strict planning regulations and a veritable jungle of red tape.

Now my townie critics, of which there are many, will once again excoriate me for this, saying that I am totally biased against urbanites and whose countryside is it anyway?

But I am not anti-townie in general. I am, however, anti-townie in the countryside when they fall into one of two classes.

The first are the well-educated, politically correct Left wingers who would nationalise the whole of the countryside or, at the other end of the scale, the yobbos who visit us instead of going to Blackpool and leave us virtually every summer weekend facing mountains of litter, broken down stone walls or, worst of all, livestock injured by broken bottles or worried by untrained dogs.

These two groups, who have made many of my own weekends almost insufferable this long, hot summer, do so because they believe that the words "national" and "park" mean what they say.

The PC brigade think that "national" means the parks are owned by the nation when, in fact, they mainly consist of private land from which their owners make a difficult living. The yobbos think that the word "park" means that this a vast, free playground in which they can do their diabolical worst, instead of a working environment.

Between them, they have in the past come very close to destroying the very thing that these parks were created to provide: the conservation of wonderful scenery and its wildlife so that visitors can enjoy some quality peace and quiet - without making life any harder for already struggling locals.

So 26 new appointees - even the word smacks of political intervention - is just what we need if, of course, they are genuine country lovers who understand how rural society and its economy work.

Pigs might fly, of course, but that might be an incomprehensible analogy to some of our new rulers. They probably think that a pig is something that comes in joints, all neatly wrapped in polythene at the supermarket. Unless, of course, they are vegetarians, which is not unlikely but also means that they disapprove of using the countryside to raise livestock in any event. What they would do with it then, God only knows.