THE ‘NEW’ REVOLUTION
Officers at Torridge District Council are to be congratulated on having identified areas in Northam Appledore and Westward Ho! for the potential construction of 2,142 new homes. Any ‘Nimby’ opposing these plans should pause and consider the vast amount of spare capacity at the Cornborough Sewage Treatment Plant, the huge number of job vacancies, the thousands of unused parking spaces, the hundred of unfilled school places, and the under-used Doctors’ surgeries and hospital etc etc.
Ever optimistic, at least TDC can see the coming massive upturn in the UK’s economic fortunes which, as we all know, is just around the corner, as Euroland with its cheap labour and technological prowess exports it’s way out of debt by sending billions of tv’s, computers and cars etc to the desperately needy Chinese, Indians etc. I saw 3 pigs flying over Appledore last week!
The reality is of course, that there are umpteen hundred second homes in the area that lie empty for most of the year (nationally, there are approx 850,000 empty properties), in addition to which developers in England are already sitting on planning permissions for 300,000 new houses. However, they have failed to build them, because in the economic downturn there is not enough profit in doing so. Naturally, governments of all colours are reluctant to hugely increase Council Tax on second homes to force the owners to rent them out because most MP’s already own 2 or 3, many of which were bought at taxpayers’ expense!
Tragically as with TDC, so at the national level we have had to endure successive administrations made up of often very clever and crafty people who have absolutely no vision beyond that of ever increasing production and consumption. Having strangled many small manufacturing businesses, and sold us all into economic slavery to the wide-boy bankers and international corporate capitalists, who have no patriotic loyalty whatever, the only hymn politicians seem to know (as exemplified by the recent party conferences’ speeches) is ‘Money Can Buy us Love, Security, Ecological Harmony and Everlasting Happiness – so long as we remember the Dunkirk Spirit and all slave away harder for tomorrow’s smear of jam over the mouldering bread and margarine.
However, do not despair. Underneath the rule-numbing, monolithic and increasingly lignified structures that is Government, there are some green shoots emerging from stock that have always prospered in the rich and fertile soil of Britain – plants that have always grown uneasily in the shadow of the alien mono-culture that has come to dominate and decimate the land.
To translate the analogy – substitute plant stock for people.
Huge numbers are now working allotments, and there are over 110,000 people on the waiting lists. Such is the size of this grass roots movement that the National Trust and farmers, particularly those in Cornwall, are opening up land for people to grow produce. The number of people keeping bees and chickens is rapidly increasing. More and more people are cycling or walking or home-schooling. I could go on. However, it is the growing number of people, whether born in this country or who have recently settled here, who are realising that there are limits to growth, and that having a huge flat screen telly in every room and changing your kitchen every 3 years, not only doesn’t make you any happier, but actually inhibits your real quality of life ie quality time to spend with each other, your children, your friends and interest groups. They seek a simpler more harmonious life-style; because they have come to understand that the rat-race is for stressed out rodents scrapping for rations dispensed by impersonal corporations, whose only interest is to demand more and more of their time and squeezing the last atom of energy out of them.
So politicians, beware when you talk of the need for ‘The Big Society’. Increasing numbers of people are turning away from the State religion – the worship of The Golden Calf. They are responding to a deep call within them to become ‘free range’, and rejecting your calls from the State Battery House to increase production and consumption at the expense of their own health and that of their land and communities.
Tell the truth. Not only have we mortgaged our children’s future, but nature herself can no longer sustain such a rapacious ‘civilisation’. If we want to survive in any meaningful way we must learn to put people before profit, and reconnect with the only real birthright we have – the Land of Britain, the health of which subtends all cultural and economic life.