TV documentaries and wind turbines: an essay on the grotesque

Do you remember the hall of distorting mirrors that used to come to the Hoppings every year?

Admittedly a bit scantily dressed for the Hoppings

That, I discover, is very much the experience provided by an appearance on TV. I realised that I had put on a little weight since my engagement five years ago. In my more honest moments, I might even admit to being rather fat. But it took a documentary film crew to make the staggeringly unflattering revelation that I am not only possessed of a vast corporation, but that it actually moves about independently as I walk.

This is, for me, the most depressing aspect of Iceland Foods: Life Inside The Freezer Cabinet, which begins its run on BBC2 at 9pm next Monday, October 21st.

My own bit part in this series as Iceland’s PR adviser was somewhat inflated by the fact that filming coincided with the Horsegate food “crisis”. The robust language I used at the time is apparently mainly responsible for the programme’s post-watershed slot.

Overall, I think the impact on my future career prospects was neatly summarised by the Iceland director who assured me that it would be a great break. “There will be lots more people wanting to work with you once they’ve seen this,” he said. “Not doing PR, obviously.”

The “reality documentary” is, it seems, a great growth area for broadcasters, perhaps because the “talent” performs for free. They have already shown us everything we could possibly want to know about airports, airlines, railways, call centres and Greggs the bakers. Next comes Iceland, and soon every retailer will want one.

I think there is a lot to be said for shedding light on the workings of businesses, but I’d be glad if the film-makers spread their net to other areas, too. In particular, I would simply love to see a fly-on-the-wall documentary following the process of building a wind farm.

This already has all the ingredients that made the Alien film franchise such a box office success. The structures are repellent and it seems all but impossible to kill them off.

In August my stomach and I were photographed among a happy band of local residents outside County Hall, after Northumberland’s planning committee unanimously rejected an application for a large industrial turbine at Follions in Whittingham Vale, on the edge of the National Park.

The committee had heard eloquent speeches by our own councillor Steven Bridgett and by Tim Stienlet, whose nearby holiday cottage business faces ruin if the beauty and tranquillity that draws in his customers is shattered by this grotesque development.

Those members of the Committee who spoke against the proposal made it clear that they did so from intimate personal knowledge of the area, and the damage that a huge turbine in this location would do to a unique and precious landscape.

Yet now the developer has slapped in an appeal, with a demand for costs, on the grounds of the council’s “unreasonable behaviour” in turning down the application without a site visit.

Allowing members of the public to clap and cheer opponents of the scheme apparently also threatened the impartiality of the committee, which seems to have overlooked the fact that there is a “presumption in favour” of “sustainable” developments of this sort.

Well, God forbid that democracy should prevail and that the feelings of those who actually know and love an area should have the slightest bearing on planning decisions of any kind.

But if Eric Pickles’ recent pronouncements about giving due weight to the views of local communities have any meaning at all, the Follions application should be booted swiftly back into the bin to which the council rightly consigned it just two months ago.

In the meantime the costly appeal grinds on, and I would urge anyone who cares for Northumberland, and has the slightest interest in keeping its tourist industry alive, to visit the website http://www.fightfollionswindfarm.co.uk/ and view the page on the planning appeal process.

The deadline for representations is October 23rd, which means that you will be cutting it a bit fine if you leave it until 9pm on the 21st to start composing your letter. But you will find something else to fill the time, won’t you?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Whingeing in Northumberland's noble cause is no conspiracy

This column believes that variety is the spice of life, and was hoping to move on from wind energy to opera (not least because I have a book coming out on the subject).

However, it is hard to resist the appeal for enlightenment from Mr Ian Kerr of Chapel House, who enquired last week why wind farm “whingers” like me never seem to “name and shame” the “wealthy landowners” who are “really gaining the most from these developments”.

As one who loathes balls and has never been invited to Christmas drinks at any “big house” in his life, I can assure Mr Kerr that no sinister conspiracy is involved.

If I have not swung my sword of truth and justice at greedy and selfish landowners in the last couple of weeks, it has mainly been down to shortage of space.

Plus the fact that most take care to keep their identities well out of public view when turbine planning applications are made, preferring to shelter behind the energy companies or their agents.

I have seen three names so far attached to the Follions application about which I have written lately, and a fourth person turned up to speak in favour of the plans to a stonily silent council meeting. None was the farmer whose land is involved.

Given the level of anger aroused among his immediate neighbours, so evident in their objections to the planning application, it would be fascinating to know what degree of financial need drives anyone to pursue a course so likely to make him a pariah in his own community.

But I believe that Mr Kerr is wrong about the division of the spoils. Wind farms rob money from all of us, through the huge subsidies that are ultimately added to our electricity bills. They particularly steal cash from those who have invested in businesses like holiday cottages and other tourist attractions whose entire appeal is based on being located in unspoilt and peaceful countryside.

They then transfer this money chiefly into the pockets of the largely foreign-owned “green energy” companies and turbine manufacturers, who have latched onto Northumberland as a county too sparsely populated to mount an effective resistance to their cynical and calculating efforts.

In which category one must undoubtedly place Energiekontor’s recent submission of their planning application for the Belford Burn wind farm at a time when so many potential opponents may miss the two week window to file objections, because they will be enjoying their summer holidays.

Yes, landowners are beneficiaries, too, and the sums involved can be very substantial. If you own a chunk of Northumberland moorland but live in Mayfair or Monaco, the temptation to cash in is obvious.

But those “wealthy landowners” who actually live on and care for their estates seem, on the whole, worthy custodians of our shared heritage. The Duke of Northumberland’s views on wind farms are well known, while among the most cogent arguments against the Follions application were those filed by the trustees of the late Lord Armstrong.

In our still semi-feudal county society, there may well be eager “greens” who feel browbeaten into silence about the wonderfulness of wind turbines because the local squire is against them. Just as there are certainly others who feel they cannot speak out against applications on their landlords’ farms for fear of eviction.

Personally, I would be happy to give the responsible great landowners a more formal role in the political process, perhaps by offering them seats in a second chamber of Parliament. Why has no one thought of that before?

But anyone who loves and defends the beauty of Northumberland is on my side, very much including the 14 county councillors who last week voted unanimously to overturn the advice of their own planners on Follions.

When Churchill visited Cambridge during the war, it is said that he was bearded by a woman angry because the college grounds had not been turned over to vegetable production.

“Madam,” the great man replied. “Those lawns are what we are fighting for.”

Take a drive out of Chapel House, Mr Kerr, and admire the sheer glory of unindustrialised rural Northumberland while you still can. That is what we “whingers” are fighting for.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Revolt against this madness of the wind turbine blight

Have we all gone completely mad? That is the question to which I keep returning as I contemplate the future of my beloved home county of Northumberland.

On many days the pictorial “View of the North” that graces this paper’s letters page features a glorious, panoramic view of the unspoilt Northumbrian countryside. The one from Auchope Cairn yesterday was a particular gem.

Surely anyone can see that these landscapes, and the precious tranquillity they offer, are our greatest economic asset? They are the reason people move here and spend their leisure time here, and so support a wide range of local enterprises. Why are we even contemplating the utter folly of trashing all this beauty and peacefulness with growing numbers of gigantic wind turbines?

Yes, I know a few people find them beautiful: one person e-mails me every time I write on this subject to tell me so. I also appreciate that others sincerely, though misguidedly, believe that we have no alternative but to make this supreme sacrifice in order to “save the planet” from the effects of manmade climate change.

Such zealots may be relatively few in number, but they seem to have had, up to now, a wholly disproportionate influence on those framing national energy and local planning policies.

Hence we have crazily allowed an array of giant 410ft turbines at Wandylaw and Middlemoor to wreck the once glorious views from the “Heritage Coast” to the National Park. Yet any idea that “enough is enough” seems utterly alien to the subsidy-hungry promoters of these monstrosities, who are now eager to pile on yet more damage to the adjacent fine scenery at Middleton Burn and Belford Burn.

This is the view that St Cuthbert would have enjoyed from Lindisfarne, and one wonders when and how he is likely to react. After all, he has form in these matters, having famously shrouded Durham cathedral in fog to save it from approaching German Baedeker raiders in 1942. Perhaps he will send down 25 years of impenetrable coastal haar.

Meanwhile, as I wrote last week, another applicant is seeking to insert the thin end of the wind farm wedge into Whittingham Vale and Coquetdale, with an application for a 256ft turbine at Follions Farm.
This may be smaller than the behemoths of Wandylaw but it will still dominate local views, plonked in the middle of open countryside designated as of high landscape value and right on the fringe of the National Park. There could be few worse places to erect a turbine unless we intend the National Park to be completely hemmed in by wind farms on every side.

Bafflingly, in view of the overwhelming weight of objections from local residents, visitors, parish councils and the National Park itself, this proposal has been recommended for approval and comes before the Planning Committee at County Hall at 6pm this very evening.

Distributing leaflets to bring this to the attention of my neighbours on Sunday, I found considerable anger that their views are apparently being ignored by those in authority; but also, in some, a fatalistic sense that “there is nothing we can do”.

Well, there is. The ruination of our county by onshore turbines is no more inevitable than the widely predicted triumphs of fascism or communism, or UK entry to the euro. We just need, collectively, to make it emphatically clear to our elected representatives how we feel on this issue, and that they won’t be in office too much longer if they choose to ignore us.

After all, we have even got the substantial figure of Eric Pickles on our side, with his pronouncement of July 29th that: “The views of local people must be listened to when making planning decisions. Meeting Britain’s energy needs should not be used to justify the wrong development in the wrong location.”

Do please join me and my neighbours at County Hall this evening if you can. We shall come in peace, though I may see whether we can borrow the newly recreated banner of St Cuthbert to accompany us.

Even if not, I feel sure that he will be with us in spirit.

We peasants may be growing madder, but surely sanity will ultimately prevail. Won’t it?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The planners' tunnel vision threatens Northumberland's far horizons

The great historian G.M. Trevelyan famously described his home county of Northumberland as “the land of far horizons”.

Today we rely on altogether more prosaic “Landscape Character Assessments” to determine just how many gigantic wind turbines may be shoehorned into any particular patch of cherished countryside.

Reading the recently issued county planner’s report on the application for a large industrial turbine in my own neighbourhood of Callaly, I was initially encouraged by the quoted assessment that “this landscape … may have an increased sensitivity to this type of development … [and] the high intervisibility and the proximity of this landscape to the National Park suggests the highest level of sensitivity.”

The application has attracted 107 letters of objection and precisely none of support, which is some achievement given that it is never hard to round up a few useful idiots prepared to assert that any “green energy” development is a fantastic idea, whether on the grounds of “saving the planet” or “creating local jobs” (both, of course, equally untrue).

It is also opposed by four parish councils, Northumberland National Park and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, on a variety of grounds including visual impact, road safety, the effect on tourism and the potential for setting an unfortunate precedent.

Yet all these petty local concerns are magisterially set aside by Senior Planning Officer Joe Nugent, relying on advice from the county council’s experts on highways, conservation, ecology and public protection that those who actually live in and love the area do not know what they are talking about.

Because the “potential impacts on the local landscape and visual amenity … are not considered to be of such significance [as] to outweigh the wider benefits of the proposed wind turbine in terms of renewable energy provision.”

The mindset of council planners has long been completely beyond me. A neighbour is told that he cannot replace the jerry-built extension to his listed house with a sound one of identical size and appearance because it would be “too big”. Yet ask to whack up a giant industrial turbine, with all its supporting impedimenta, in the middle of glorious, unspoilt countryside, and it apparently presents no problem at all.

The planner devotes five paragraphs to explaining why the National Park, who might be expected to know a thing or two about protecting fine landscapes, have got it completely wrong. While the tourism argument is dismissed on the grounds that few actually come to admire a field on Follions Farm, and are unlikely to be deterred from visiting Cragside or Wallington.

As for that concern about precedents, once the landscape has been degraded by one turbine, it should surely come as no surprise to find that the local Renewable Energy Plan has already concluded that the area could accommodate up to 12 of the things without anyone noticing at all.

A telling column on these pages recently observed that Northumberland County Council’s planners seem to regard themselves as cheerleaders for the speculative wind farm industry, helping to push their proposals through in the teeth of opposition from ill-informed yokels like me.

I write “telling” chiefly because I do not recall anyone from County Hall writing in to deny the charge. 

We pay the wages of the council’s “experts”, yet they show no inclination to acknowledge the overwhelming strength of local opposition to such wind turbine developments. Nor, on the evidence of his deafening silence of late, does our elected county councillor.

Northumberland is still the most beautiful place I know, but the more the rash of wind farms spreads, the less this will be true.

True to form, an application that was quietly slipped in on Christmas Eve 2012 comes up to have the officer’s recommendation of approval rubber-stamped by the council’s planning committee next Tuesday, August 6, when so many of those with an interest in the subject may again be expected to be on holiday.

However, my neighbours and I are not (because why would anyone who could take their holidays in Northumberland ever go anywhere else?)

I hope for a lively debate between the tunnel-visioned “green energy” profiteers and those who have minds clear enough to appreciate the true preciousness of those far horizons.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The fathomless stupidity of humanity through the ages

As I have pointed out before, making no claim to originality, August is the polar opposite of the silly season. Throughout history, it has been the month when crises traditionally came to a head and wars broke out.

In the northern hemisphere, this makes simple, practical sense. The harvest has been safely gathered in to feed the troops and the ground is nicely firm to facilitate swift advances by cavalry or tanks, in the age-old hope that it will all be over by Christmas (though it so rarely is).

War - it's a laugh a minute!

So far August 2011 looks true to form. The conflicts bubbling away in the Middle East may not set off World War III before September (though it is never wise to make such predictions – just look back on all the embarrassed luminaries who confidently asserted that “there will be no war” in the summers of 1914 or 1939).

Your chance to see the world

It wasn't like this in the brochure

But in the potential default of the US Government on its debts we have an economic cataclysm in waiting that could yet have us all back to wearing animal pelts and smearing ourselves with woad. (Not so very different from the current scene on the Bigg Market of a Saturday night, now I come to think about it). Or at least significantly reduce our chances of eating unless we happen to own a patch of land or keep a handy supply of gold bullion under our mattress.

The news bulletins are proclaiming that catastrophe has been averted as I write, but there are still halfwits on both sides hankering to snatch economic meltdown from the jaws of sanity and salvation. Which at least prompts the comforting reflection that Britain is not alone in being led by people no one should trust to run a bath, let alone a country.

Everywhere, the higher up the ladder of authority one climbs, the greater the apparent incompetence of those in charge. I often read perfectly sensible comments from parish councils. But by the time one reaches county level, up pop the sort of power-crazed and proportion-free dolts who threaten prosecutions over the two temporary signs advertising my local village show.

Clearly a major hazard on the dead straight A697

A very large banner bearing the words “Haven’t you got anything better to do?” should be hung forthwith across the front of County Hall as its new official motto, and our employees there encouraged to meditate upon it, in the style of the Beatles’ Maharishi (though preferably without the use of consciousness-enhancing substances) for at least an hour each morning before picking up their phones or turning on their computers.

Similarly, the electors of Britain should pause to think deeply about how we managed to replace a government mad enough to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, in defiance of every lesson of history, with one deranged enough to get embroiled in Libya while simultaneously scrapping great chunks of the armed forces and preparing to offer many gallant servicemen and women the terrific new opportunity of life on the dole.

I find it hard to listen to William Hague explaining why it is right to try and stop Colonel Gadaffi slaughtering his own citizens, but simply hard luck on those being murdered by President Assad in Syria, without feeling the urge to bang my head against the nearest brick wall.

Which is pretty much the only way to react to the US debt crisis, too. For who would be the biggest loser if America did default? Why, the largest investor in US Treasury securities, naturally. Which is the US Government itself, trying to fund its social security and pension programmes. Now what sort of fool would imperil all that just to make some sort of half-baked party political point?

So perhaps the silly season is well named after all. Because behind all of August’s world-shattering events lies simply the fathomless stupidity of humanity through the ages.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.