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.

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.

So what does the Conservative Party actually exist to conserve?

When I pitched up at university in 1972, as a fresh-faced though already tweed-jacketed adolescent, the first two organisations I joined were the Conservative Association and the Conservation Society. Both names appeared to share the same root, and I perceived no conflict between them.

How unbelievably naïve I was in those days. Within three months a supposedly Conservative government had enacted the most radical constitutional change in a thousand years by taking Britain into what was always planned to become the European Union.

Under Margaret Thatcher, the party became even more extravagantly radical. As a reactionary, I naturally welcomed the smashing up of the old, monolithic nationalised industries because this seemed like a genuine attempt to put back the clock.

I enjoyed that brief window of dealing with locally based utility companies in which I could also own shares, not realising that the process of “creative destruction” was set to continue so that I would soon end up buying my power from some unaccountable, foreign-owned conglomerate with apparently zero interest in the wellbeing of its long-suffering customers.

Given that record, I suppose it should now come as no real surprise to find George Osborne and Eric Pickles limbering up for a bare-knuckle fight with such unlikely adversaries as the National Trust and the Daily Telegraph in their effort to force through a radical reform of the planning system, based on “a presumption in favour of sustainable development”.

An appropriately meaningless phrase that apparently covers everything from the concreting over of cherished green spaces to build new homes to the erection of regiments of useless wind turbines and their supporting infrastructure across our uplands, and crazed vanity projects such as the new high speed rail link. The Dale Farm travellers’ approach to development goes nationwide.

Underpinning their determination, they claim, is the conviction that “sticking with the old, failed planning system puts at risk young people’s future prosperity and quality of life”.

Assuming, it would seem, that prosperity and quality of life are natural partners. Even though the belief that we can all go on getting ever richer seems as fatally flawed as the long-established presumption that house prices could only keep going up.

There is also precious little evidence that increasing wealth adds to the overall sum of human happiness, though I have no doubt that it gladdens the hearts of developers and their financial backers, who will be the prime beneficiaries of the proposed changes.

So what does the Conservative Party of 2011 actually set out to conserve? Certainly not the armed forces, which were traditionally considered safe in Tory hands. Nor the English countryside about which Stanley Baldwin used to wax so lyrical.

A proper Conservative: with a wing collar and a pipe

A contemporary Conservative with his mid-morning snack of 2lbs of sausages ... oops, no, sorry, they're his hands

Where are the initiatives we might hope for to wrest powers back from Brussels as the euro project collapses, or to stop the abuse of “human rights” legislation by wrongdoers?

I have remained a member of the Conservative Party for 40 years now, but increasingly struggle to see how its interests are aligned with those of us who would like our chief legacy to our children to be a country that is still faintly recognisable as the Britain in which we grew up.

In Scotland, one would-be leader of the party is proposing a name change to expunge the tainted Conservative brand. Is it too much to hope that the party in England might adopt the same course and take a name that actually describes its priorities? The Sustainable Development Party might have a ring to it. The Creative Destruction Party would be more honest.

That would leave the name “Conservative” free for those of us whose priority is just that: to preserve and restore what was best about our country before what Baldwin might have called the hard-faced men and women who have done well out of politics took over every potential governing party.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.