The Salient Tigress

There is a very special part of England, the eastern part of East Anglia. It has areas of special landscape importance and this was made famous by the paintings of John Constable in the eighteenth century.

During the course of the twenty-first century, one of the means of generating electricity that has really grown has been wind power. This means that the transmission of electricity from the East Anglian coast to the great centres of population, especially London, has become paramount. The government seems to be hell-bent on building pylons for this, these being highly disfiguring and offensive, causing harm to the natural habitat and heritage context of the environment. Many people wish to stop the building of pylons with aerial cables and also the very wide, open trenches needed to underground ac cables that require the removal of all trees, hedgerows and obstacles in their path. The whole enterprise,…

Can anyone believe this? Turns out that a communication mast for mobile phones was built near to a high-pressure gas main. It had been there for decades, quite literally. The providers decide, or are forced, to remove it without notice leaving some thousands of people without signal. This is 2026 – we can’t live without signal. The providers put in a planning application to replace the ugly old mast with a sleek new one but the local planning authority refuse it, just like that, double quick.

Do you think something about this is really odd? Do you think they could have planned the replacement over the last twenty-five years so that the new mast received its permissions and was working before the old one was decommissioned?

Now let me ask you, where do you think this happened? Some potentate state? Some developing state? Some bureaucratically entangled state utterly crippled by…

Have you noticed how expensive everything is now and how difficult it is to pay for things? Do you think this is the same for everyone, or do you think some people find it quite easy to pay and others are finding it even more difficult? I only ask.

Did you know that planning applications in the UK used to be decided by publicly elected committees? Then, the smaller applications could be decided by the planning officers?  If the ward councillor asked for a small application to go to the committee, this would be allowed.

Then, it became much more difficult to have applications heard by the planning committee because the planning officers did not want it to happen. By stages, public access to the elected committees have been made much more difficult – now it is almost impossible and the Planning Charter indicates elected members of the council can be referred to the police if they support applications against the planning officers’ recommendation.

The democratic process has been subverted. Have you noticed an improvement in planning decisions over the past few years as a result? Let us know.