This is the first in a series of reports regarding one community’s fight to preserve its identity. It’s about how village people-power is trying to stop the ruination of one unremarkable village in England. The village in question will remain anonymous – in many ways it is a typically small English community, not chocolate box, not filled with luvvies or big-shot lawyers, just an ordinary little community of 5,000 souls which is faced with being transformed into yet another dormitory type satellite town via the building of thousands of new homes… And it’s happening all over England, right here, right now…
The softening-up process has been on-going for some time now. A council initiated workshop at our village hall in 2008 first saw the casual, almost by-the-way tossing of an idea into the locals’ consciousness.
One fifth columnist councillor – a guy who was supposed to represent our best interests, elected by us the people mooted that the very large collection of fields (making up a total of over 200 acres) adjacent to our village might benefit from a re-designation of usage. He suggested that ‘they’ might wish to build some ‘much needed new housing’ on it. I can still remember the excuse this nasty little Napoleon came up with as justification for the massive new development.
“After all” he said, “It’s not a very nice field…. is it?”
“But it’s Green Belt land”…
“Yeah, but it’s not very nice Green Belt land is it?… And it would be for local families!”
But it wasn’t. This guy was talking about 1,500 new houses – which would increase our community population by at least 100%. Either he was lying through his teeth or we had one hell of a homeless crisis on our hands. Which of course, we didn’t. Our housing list numbered in the tens rather than the thousands.
He left the meeting with a million fleas in his ear.
But that didn’t stop the momentum. It was obvious meetings had been held in smoke-filled rooms and little strategies decided upon to get us to comply – and nationally, the pressure to build on any bit of English land grew and grew as Gordon Brown, the newly non-elected Lord of everything English, declared he wanted to slap 3 million new houses onto ‘our country’ (and certainly not his). Conveniently, economist Kate Barker had already been asked to head up an enquiry in which the inevitable conclusion would be the sacrifice of the English Green Belt. She duly obliged.
But not content with the trashing of English Green Belt, Gordon came up with a wizard wheeze of an idea – Eco-Towns.
Eco-Towns were to be the Green-Porn of the Brown era. They would be sexy and fab, somehow greening up a previously virgin bit of already green English pastureland or wheat field. Amazingly and possibly quite by chance, all the sites chosen for these towns were in Tory held constituencies.
Dark murmurings were made at the time that maybe the only reason the Labour Government was thinking of such a strategy was to plant a load of Labour voters in each new Eco Town thereby wiping out the Tory constituency majority.
Perhaps the strongest bid of all during the selection process was that of Birkenhead. Their site was a God-awful mess of tainted industrial land and washed-out warehouses down by the docks. If ever a place needed some government investment then this was it. But it failed, possibly because it was in a staunchly labour constituency (so why bother?) and almost certainly because Frank Field, one of the few MPs at Westminster who tells it like it is, was the sitting member.
Gordon’s Eco-Town aim was to build “Grrreeen hooooses right acrrrrross the countrrrry” – code for building Labour green-gulags on English Tory countryside. So it was a two-pronged brick attack on England by the Westminster elite unsated until every last green acre of English land has been ‘Barrattised’ into oblivion.
And in the corridors of power at Westminster the numbers game was in full flow as 3 million house plans were divvied up. Instructions were sent out to every single borough council in England with one non-negotiable edict – ‘This is how many new houses we demand you build. Where you build them we just don’t care – just as long as they are built within your borough boundaries’… The result has been community against community, village against village and ward against ward in the battle to get someone else to take the new housing bullet.
So much for the much vaunted ‘local empowerment’ credo trumpeted by David Cameron and the Westminster elite. For in effect, it is the councils who are not now listening to the locals – that power has now been transferred from Westminster to the little Hitlers in council chambers.
Local democracy it ain’t – local NIMBYism it is as the sheer scale of new-build becomes clear. And when that awkward little question was asked – you know, the one about why we need such a massive rise in houses, the council flunkies would look at their feet and mumble something about population rise and rapidly change the subject.
In our borough, it was inevitable that our village, already doubled in size since the late 1980’s would be a prime candidate to take the hit. For our community isn’t stuffed with millionaire businessmen, Premiership footballers, gobby celebs or even Councillors. No one other than the ordinary people who live here and a few brave councillors was there to fight our corner.
We as a community had little or no faith in the consultation process – but nevertheless, we had no alternative but to go through the motions – and to do so better than any other community in the borough.
Over the last couple of years, the council has been asking everyone within the borough boundaries what we thought of the prospect of thousands of new houses being built within our largely rural confines. Not surprisingly, the idea was as popular as being stuck in a lift with a Tourette’s-afflicted Gordon Brown, especially when you consider that the farmland which surrounds us is some of the most fertile in the country. They put forward a few options with varying amounts of new houses being shoved next to assorted 500 year old communities. And one option in particular had the alarm bells ringing. Our ‘not very nice bit of Green Belt’ was under threat of being ploughed under – and it was there in black & white. Wall to wall Barratts and Redrow made concrete.
Realising our village was especially at risk, we got organised. We raised petitions, we wrote letters of complaint, we attended every single council organised ‘meet-n-greet’ session going. You know the sort of function I mean, the kind where they give the impression that your opinion actually matters, when all along, the decision was made years ago. For the record, we out-complained every other borough community, more haranguing of councillors, more names on our petition and more letters to the local press. And guess what? It made jack-all difference.
For after much soul searching, hand-wringing, blue-sky thinking and cerebral angsting at council HQ, it was thought best for everyone (especially for them) that our ordinary little community would benefit from a massive new housing estate + school – thus leaving the verdant greenery, bespoke communities and quiet backwaters in the rest of the borough largely untouched…… What a surprise.
Time to play dirty.
Next in Part 2 – A stormy meet’n'greet session morphs into Hurrican Katrina – and the fifth columnist councillor looks like he’s about to have a heart attack….. Kiss of life anyone?
