Green belt farce (From Bromsgrove Advertiser)

Green belt farce

11:30am Monday 9th November 2009

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I have just read Keith Birmingham’s excellent letter in The Advertiser.

He writes concerning BDHT’s intransigent, money motivated attempt to convince Stoke Prior residents that 49 dwellings dropped onto their green belt is a good idea. They have failed. This gentleman has a very good understanding of the un-elected pseudo governmental bodies who aid and abet dubious organisations such as BDHT who are continually mounting raids on our cherished countryside, in an avaricious quest for control of just about every square inch of Worcestershire’s green belt. The term affordable housing is used ad nauseum in their planning applications, though the term is more of an excuse than a reason and their juvenile attempts to justify their applications frequently contain masses of mis-leading and laughably inaccurate figures. What is the expression? Lies, damn lies and statistics.

The tone of Mr Birmingham’s letter makes it clear that he has little respect for Bromsgrove District Housing Trust and its evasive CEO, Mike (scrap the green belt ) Brown, and this was shared by the 300 or so very angry Stoke Prior residents who turned out in force at the SPRA meeting on October 2.

At this meeting, and to the audience’s delight, the BDHT balloon burst with a loud bang when panelist and sitting MP Julie Kirkbride came out very strongly on the side of SPRA and against the application.

The leaders of Bromsgrove District Council and the BDHT almost tripped over each other in their rush to re-assure Julie and the audience, in the nicest possible way, that she’d got it all wrong and that no this project wouldn’t open the planning control floodgates and sweep away our beloved green belt.

They convinced no one and were booed off the microphone for their trouble.

The strong theme, which runs right through this letter, is the role now played in our local administration by hoards of un-elected quangos whose purpose goes largely unrecognised in parish, district and county councils in Worcestershire by councillors who simply don’t know the score.

Quangos sprang from early EU directives and their purpose is to convert British elected local government into an EU dominated regime based on regions and we in the West Midlands are called region G by Brussels and Strasbourg.

Hence across the country we have un-elected, secretive regional assemblies, controlling unelected, unaccountable quangos and decisions are being made about our countryside under the assumed authority of some unreadable document produced by the unelected West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy, WMRSS.

This body has no legal authority and our representatives should refuse to conform with its utterings.

They, of course, are too gutless to do this and prefer to help “developers” foist one unpalatable scheme after another on outraged residents rather than acknowledge the reality of their own impotence. It is time we left the financially disastrous EU and all it entails and begin to breath again the fresh air of freedom which we won in 1945. Next May perhaps?

Peter McHugh, Alvechurch

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