Brush with Democracy - another shade

After losing at two appeals and on the fifth application a local site nearby has finally won approval to form a new vehicular access, and, incidentally create yet a further habitation. Which side of the coin do you see? Persistence rewarded or sheer bloody mindedness, contrary to all local wishes, eventually winning out?

The background. The main road out of the village is narrow, only a car and half width, no verges, with hedges or low walls on either side. This section has a blind corner at either end of a some two hundred yard length of road. Towards the further end the road crosses a stream with stone parapets to either side. All typically Somerset. The local residents find this road difficult to drive and even more dangerous to walk or cycle. No forward visibility and nowhere to go to, or make room to pass. The initial application for two houses to one side of this narrow section of lane had many objectors, eventually it was approved on the basis that no vehicular access should be allowed off this narrow section of lane.

So after a further five applications and two appeals the Planners Officer recommends Approval to the forming of a new access off this same narrow section of lane, just before the bridge. Apparently car speed monitoring demonstrated low risk and visibility splay requirement were achievable. I have a smidgen of sympathy for the Planning Officer. If it was refused again and went to Appeal and if at the Appeal the Applicant could now show compliance with those same reasons used to refuse it last time, the Council could incur considerable costs for being unreasonable. All in all a bad decision and the thugs in our society, prepared to defy all to take what they particularly want, win. The initial decision, no road access of this stretch, was the right one.

Local democracy is a fragile thing. It is hard enough to marshal and focus opinion when freshly engaged to resist a bad application. But to have to return to the same subject time and time and time and time again when you thought you had won first time is beyond the possible. People do have lives and cannot keep going back over the same issues with fervent militancy. The trouble is that Planning decisions are not based on the degree of support or objection to any one proposal by the local residents but rely on the wording of obscure Planning Polices and detached objectives. More on that shortly.

If Planning was only just about what the local residents or even surrounding community thought, there would be no development. It would always be in someone's back garden, therefore to be objected to. You just cannot keep placing all developments, objected to by the vocal organised, near to the weak and ineffectual who are not able to organise a protest. Who would welcome a school, factory, fish and chip shop at the end of their garden? Sure there are bound to be lots of ideas where else they might be located so long as not there at the end of my garden. In the simple early days of Planning there were clear well understood objective principles that guided the application process. Certain areas were decreed suitable for certain type of development so long as specific criteria were met. Residents could object but would have to show that these criteria were breached in some way. A lumpen handed fairness to the community in general but not to the individual.

With time the process has become hugely complicated and complex. The vagaries that follow from this complexity allow a high degree of parochialism, with objective rationale being the loser. What we have now are a series of interrelated Policy Statements. Each Policy Statement being a huge cumbersome document, the result of a prolong and intense period of inspection, challenge, appeal, review and approval. Finally some years down the line, the plan is published and for those few weeks when everyone can remember what it was supposed to enshrine, it remains relevant and the working tool.

The District Council publish their Local Plans for each settlement based on the Structural Plans published by the County Council setting the framework for each of its areas and which in turn it to is based on the government's own published planning strategic objectives for the nation and the regions. From bottom up each is fully referential and compliant with the Policies of the next layer up. So well honed words severally checked for compliance with all relating Policies and stripped of vagueness and ambiguity to the point of course that they become meaningless generalities. Reading any Policy statement from one tier or another, there is no way you can see what is meant and intended when it comes to the specifics of planning in your own patch. Their sweep is too broad and general, stepping well aside from the specifics that might give a clue to the usual conflict of interest arising out of any patch of ground. What is worse we get sweeping aspirational design generalisations that apply totally inappropriately or to some nowhere place. Designs in our patch are to be based on guidelines set up for the Exmoor National Park! Chalk and cheese indeed. Now I like some of the chalk I have seen within the National Park but it is an irrelevance when sorting cheese from cheese in our patch.

Reflecting a view from a contrary stance to that expressed in my Brush with Democracy, we end up in the similar position. An over-blown, bloated planning system no longer responding or recognised by the communities on the ground on one hand. On the other intransigent individuals that are belligerently resist the common good when it compromises their own selfish aspirations find the chinks amongst those generalised words to drive in their wedge. As decisions have to founded on those same words, the Planner is left wrong footed and commonsense flies out of the window. A through spring clean is overdue. Get back to simple objectives with Planners working alongside with the community to help the community understand its planning problems and to achieve it's aspirations. Explaining any National or regional strategic requirments for their local patch and winning support. Not perfect, rough and ready, we may even have to wait before another airport, barrage, power station, motorway can be built. In the end only words can win and keep communities united.

Baffling silence

Just had our three major political parties annual conferences where they address the prevailing issues of the day. Not a mention of social inequality and the desperate need to reduce the gap. I confess I did not pay close attention, certainly did not read cover to cover all the various speeches. Yes I did pick up on one or two minor concessions that could be interpreted as paying a token lip-service to giving the underprivileged just a tad more. However the extremes between those that have and are getting more and those who do not have and are getting less, are so wide with the gap increasing at such a worrying rate.Nothing but a seismic shift in policy from any of three parties is going to even begin to change the present courses. That would have hit the headlines. Even I would have notice that. No, our political leaders attuned to the cares and worries of our Nation, are indifferent to the loss of self-respect, lack of hope and disassociation for the growing army that are having to give up more so that the few can enjoy. Those that have seek to isolate themselves from those that have not, ring fencing their privileged access to the key essentials of life, education, health and homes. A polarised society with a ghettoed rich isolated from the morass is a dangerous society, everyone is degraded by it, rich and poor alike.

The only word I hear is we must stay on course to ensure this slow recovery continues. All parties seem well content and satisfied in continuing to follow this Alice-In-Wonderland economic policy. A pyramid selling type of policy that is founded on creating money so we can spend more. That spending pays off the interest on past loans, so we must take out new loans to create the more money we need to spend to keep the wheels turning. If only we can increase our spending we can, we might, keep ahead of the spiralling debt interests that have to be paid. Just another pyramid selling scam but this one brokered by government.

Spending disproportionately of course, those with get even more while those with a little have to give up that little and those without have to do with even less. Never mind the rich spendings will trickle down as swill to feed the masses. Except that is not how it works. The rich are in a catch up race with the unseemly rich. The unseemly rich are grabbing ever more to show a gap and distance to those on their heels. Their spending is in the realm of the stratosphere, buying up banks that create money or controlling lead industries to set the prices that others must pay. You get the drift, the poor that have to give up are giving up even more to the outlets that the rich control and directly benefit from. Trickle down just does not trickle, another aspect of this crazed Alice-in-Wonderland economics. Economics based on principles where the real life consequences that fail to conform to theory are then assumed not to apply to the theory and can therefore be safely excluded. Told you Alice-in-Wonderland rules.

Institutional lunacy

I just dont get it, a massive loan is taken out to buy a company at some extortionate eye-watering price and then the costs of paying the interest of that massive loan is dumped on the company who struggle to pay it, or more often fail and go bankrupt. In the meantime all the fatcats along the way are creaming off their bonuses for putting together all the different components of all these massive deals. This is supposed to enrich us and make us a wealthier nation? This is not a one-off, this has now become a routine practice. A companies stock value is something to play with, to generate a higher stock valuation or manipulate a fall in value before a buyin. Welcome to the russian roulette of the stock market. Except the bullet ends up in all our heads. We are the losers, irrespective of whether the gamblers win or lose.

A companies stock should be there to help it grow and sustain itself for the long term, any stock value rise reflecting its successful strategy should be a bye reward. The stock market player and their institutional backers have stood this on its head. Today's stock market value is the only thing that counts and the consequences for the company, short term or long term, its survival, prosperity or it imminent bankruptcy are all of no consequence, other that how those situations can be best exploited to gain a stock market increase. It is sheer utter lunacy.

These massive loans that a company has to default on (its business just cannot not feed that amount of interest payment), get traded on, as if they are real assets, an illusory promise to pay is used to raise yet more money. Crazy, absurd but it is going on and no one is saying stop, this is plain stupid. The politicians are silent, we are on the road to recovery! The institutions are silent, so long as their investors see growth who gives a toss about a companies or a nation's future. The company, its employees and we are all helpless as our voice counts for nothing. The Stock Market is run, controlled, mediated by and serviced by the Institutions, who are answerable to zilch.

Yet interest payments are not wealth, increasing debts, good or bad, are not wealth. Wealth comes from producing goods or services that others want to buy. That takes the long game, time, care, commitment and a long term investment in renewing, updating and streamlining the provision in this increasingly competitive global market. The demands for this long game view could not be higher or more important. Instead we saddle companies with unnecessary debt loans that kill them off, the good with the bad. Their goes our future. We have to make it stop. Institutions have to be reigned in and their dominance of the Stock Market taken away. No Institution should be allow a shareholders voice. All decisions of a buy-out must have a majority of (non-institution) shareholders voting in agreement. Put people back in control. Invest in and support all those worthy companies who are working for our and our children's futures.