Housing development must not be an excuse for councils to destroy the UK countryside

Notes by Southport author, Pat Regan, on Councillor Peter Dowd’s, controversially proposed, land-flattening policies

Councillor Peter Dowd, and any faithful parties/individuals that stand with him on nauseating Greenbelt annihilation proposals, are clearly to be held fully accountable for an immense ‘Crime against nature’.

http://www.southportvisiter.co.uk/southport-news/southport-southport-news/2013/06/20/sefton-council-leader-defends-development-proposals-outlined-for-the-borough-101022-33498028/

Our fragile Southport countryside is dwindling away fast - thanks to Council-based, grey-suit, indifference and soon it may become a distant folk memory that we nostalgically tell our children about.

Council hypocrisy…

My own children for example cannot accept or understand the sheer insincerity of the situation after recently receiving a prestigious Sefton Eco award from the Mayor of Sefton, Maureen Fearn, who glibly advised schoolchildren present that we all need to do our bit to cut carbon emissions (i.e. go to work on your bike and all that decidedly uncertain, pseudo-green thinking), ‘Save the planet’ and similar global warmiac orientated platitudes…

Incidentally, when speaking about Kew’s countryside, Maureen Fearn stated in the Southport Visiter back in 2005 that:  “We have the land and we should be building on it!”    

Such amazing and hollow official double standards are pathetic and remain largely vacant to the future generation!

And it is worth remembering that land generally increases by 8-10 times in value with the granting of planning permission. (Source: Alvin Hall, Presenter of BBC’s ‘Investing for All’ and Wall Street’s most respected investment educator). Consequently, fat-cat development profiteering must surely play a big part in the ongoing ‘Greenbelt-threatening’ Council agenda that Southport is faced with today – or am I being overtly mistrustful?

These are a few more points of concern about Peter Dowd’s autocratic plan to flatten our Southport countryside…

Councillors should be thinking ‘outside of the box’ herein, as we are now undoubtedly fighting a real war to save the wonderful British countryside from authoritarian – approved obliteration and this is NOT a game.

Peter Dowd advises that the council cannot intervene to take up privately owned vacant houses etc. Therefore, I would propose that a new law urgently needs to be approved by Parliament to give councils the legal capacity to quickly reacquisition derelict and unoccupied properties that could be renovated to provide new inner-city homes.

Many such privately owned places exist that have fallen into ruin, such as the Ainsdale Brook pub eyesore on Sandbrook Way/Road intersection.

Old dilapidated properties not only look appalling and attract antisocial activity but they could help greatly with housing shortages if requisitioned.

Also, councils should stop approving new and surplus superstores (e.g. like Tesco’s mini stores that are breeding like mushrooms everywhere) in built up areas that ‘already’ have enough of the same. These areas would allow more housing too.

Furthermore, if house development is unavoidable then why not, like our American cousins, build ‘upwards’ with skyscrapers to save land capacity? It is much more eco-efficient to house 100 families vertically than build a huge swath of 100 separate houses across 80% more acreage of countryside.

Cllr Dowd also alleges that claims regarding new cheap properties being built to house immigrants are a “Myth”. This comment shows either precarious naivety or simply restrictive thinking.

Since the late 1990s immigration has added approximately four million new people to the British populace and they ‘all’ need houses.  This figure does not embrace all of the illegal immigrants, the exact number of which is indefinite but is almost certainly at least one million higher.

Is Cllr Dowd saying that our town has no immigrants who will require cheap housing? This type of disorderly thinking really is 100% ‘Cloud cuckoo’ land. England is one of the most thickly populated countries in the world beating China, India and Japan hands down in this respect.

The UK essentially cannot maintain the level of immigration that adds another one million people to the population every four to five years and this leads to additional housing crisis. We basically end up with an illogical situation relying on additional ‘cheap-labour’ immigrant to build houses that ‘they’ need for themselves.

Nowhere in Cllr Dowd’s remarks do I see any mention of legally protected species being given any due consideration. Species like water voles, natterjack toads; sand lizards etc need our help to survive and Peter Dowd’s frenzied proposals are exactly what will drive many creatures into final extinction. As such, his plans to roll in the bulldozers onto our greenbelt may be construed as eco-fascism gone wild and also highly illegal under current UK wildlife regulations.

So, this provably hypocritical council and its minions (along with other authorities across the UK) urgently need to oppose the dictatorial, anti-countryside, Government decree that is threatening our precious green places with extinction.

Enough is enough and I call for the public at large to protest against such unacceptable eco-vandalism now!

More here on the old SSGB site...

http://ssgb.150m.com/

Addendum: Protest against greenbelt destruction outside the Southport Town Hall on Thursday, 27 June 2013 at 5.45pm... 

Pat Regan © 2013