The Dispersal Option

Perhaps the time has come for Stop Norwich Urbanisation to again re-iterate that this group of community representatives is NOT against building new homes. It seems no matter how many times we say this there are others who prefer to brand us as activists who are against all growth. We are just a group of local people who got together to voice the concerns of the majority of the local community who are opposed to the building of an  enormous, so-called 'eco-town' in Rackheath and the Northern Distributor Road which was resurrected solely to act as a service road for this massive development.

Stop Norwich Urbanisation would prefer our local planners to adopt the dispersal option, favoured by South Norfolk District Council, which supports the sustainable growth of our villages and towns and allows the local services such as schools, shops and pubs to thrive in growing communities and encourages the establishment of local industries too. This might not have the 'wow factor' of an eco-town but it destroys less of the Norfolk countryside and farmland. It might not be the preferred option of developers who need large scale building to bring them the profits they have been used to but it is surely the right option for Norfolk which has the tradition of agriculture and tourism which has secured its wealth for past generations and hopefully for future generations too.

13 comments:

  1. Rackheath Resident22 October 2010 at 12:19

    Well done SNUB, when will Broadland ever listen to the residents and not their Developer cronies. Our Council is a disgrace as we elected them AND pay them to serve us and not those outsiders wishing to make a fast buck by destroying our village

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  2. It is such a shame that the Town Planners think they know best.
    All their training is based upon things - houses, roads, roundabouts and they seem to no have concept of the people who will live there. People who are individuals with hopes and aspirations.
    So they will be shoehorned into intensively built housing estates because that will suit the devlopers, the Council will dictate how much water they are allowed, choose the neighbours and penalise private buyers. Cars will be limited to one per household and penalties will apply for not meeting their dictated eco standards.
    Its stalin-esque but it is Broadlands vision.
    They say we are against development but we see communities where they see profits. A community evolves but housing estates are dormitories.

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  3. Just thought all SNUB blog readers should know this: Unless there are two Edith Crowthers, the Edith Crowther who frequently contributes comments to this blog is a BNP member and stood for election in May as a BNP candidate.

    For confirmation, look at the GNDP website, at the full list of submissions to the EiP. Edith Crowther is there, representing the BNP.

    I'm all for accepting support from all political parties, but I'd draw a line at the BNP, and I hope SNUB will be wary of involvement from racists and fascists.

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  4. Richard Williams24 October 2010 at 09:18

    Hi John
    Where did that come from. Some of the regular visitors to this blog have been aware of Edith Crowther's political views even before the first posting. So what prompted you to bring this out now, did someone tell you or did you suddenly decide to research it.

    Is this supposed to be a smear by association? Just two weeks before the Examination in public. Nicely timed.

    This is a community group and as our constitution makes clear, it is apolitical. So far as I know there is no moderator on this blog and nothing is censored. Perhaps the editor can can confirm that.

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  5. Richard

    You are right - we chose to allow anyone to post a comment without moderation. However, we do reserve the right to remove any comments which are offensive (although we have not yet had to use this facility).

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  6. Richard Williams24 October 2010 at 15:45

    Back to the subject
    This post is about the dispersal option. Salhouse Parish Council were amongst the first to produce a Parish Plan and it contained provision for additional housing and a site for affordable homes.
    When they responded to the consultation last year and said they preferred the dispersed option they got a surprise. The Strategic Planning Officer at Broadland DC wrote them a threatening letter asking for a meeting where they could discuss the siting of the 400 houses which would be allocated under such a plan.
    This is the BDC answer to the dispersed option, every Parish gets their allocation. This is almost as stupid as the concentration in the Growth Triangle and shows that they have no real concept of what constitutes sustainable communities.
    It is also divisive. Many communities need to maintain the viability of their community and may wish to take additional housing whilst others whose needs are lower or have infrastructure shortcomings would not be suitable to take "an allocation". Perhaps they just can't be bothered to work towards such an inclusive plan.

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  7. Richard - since you ask, I can tell you that I found Edith Crowther's name on the EiP submissions list, as representing the BNP. I was surprised at this and thought I'd be doing the rest of the Snub blog readers a favour by letting them know! I had no idea that this was already a well known fact - in fact, I imagined that people weren't aware of the person's connection with the BNP.

    As for 'an attempt at smear by association' - that's absurd and I can't imagine why such a thought would even cross your mind. I can't see why the revelation of this fact on the blog could in any way harm Snub's case at the EiP anyway, unless Edith Crowther is making representations under both her BNP banner and Snub's - which I guess is not the case.

    Snub can't help it if a fascist chooses to join, but I feel it important that everyone knows who these people are and what they stand for, when the latter is based on racial prejudice and ethnic purity. So no apology I'm afraid!

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  8. Posting a comment on this Blog doesn't make the contributor a member of SNUB - I believe Councillor Proctor has posted a comment in the past and I am sure he wouldn't consider himself a member!

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  9. I'm sorry if my political affiliation upsets some people, and BNP activists are instructed to always remove their presence if requested, so I will if requested. We are used to this - though you don't really get hardened to it, and I appreciate the defence of free speech on this site a lot more than you probably realise!

    I commented here because SNUB are doing a wonderful job but (in my opinion) are not hard-hitting enough, so I thought it might help to know that others are far more "extreme" and those others often speak for a section of society which tends to remain silent until it has got so angry that it boils over.

    I have no connection with SNUB, they are too moderate for a committed environmentalist. If you look on the BNP website and click on "Policies" you will see under Housing:

    - Make all benefits and social housing only available to British citizens;
    - Make length of residency in an area the key criterion for council house allocation;
    - Preserve the ‘right to buy’ of individual tenants, but with the money from sales being used to build more council houses;
    - Take all privatised social housing stock back under local democratically controlled council ownership;
    - Ensure that the billions being spent on the utterly bogus asylum seeker and immigration swindles is redeployed to alleviate the appalling conditions under which many of Britain’s old people are forced to live...." etc.

    So we do not support this "HousingAssociation", PFI-funded, scam of so-called "affordable" housing which merely allows profiteers to bring in more mortgagees and tenants from abroad when they have bled dry the native mortgagees and tenants. We also would like to help the elderly to retain their own homes without worries, unless they actually WANT to downsize to a more modern house or flat. We also have posters which say "STOP THE BUILDING on all Greenfield sites", but this may need to be extended to Brownfield soon.

    I have recently discovered, thanks to the report of the Global Footprint organisation and various UN conferences on Water, Climate Change, BioDiversity, etc., that BNP housing policy is more observant of international law on the environment than other parties' policy. This is because, as a world map from Global Footprint shows, the world has moved from using 60 per cent of its biocapacity in 1962 to using over 150 per cent of its biocapacity in 2010. As a country, Britain was using over 100 percent in 1962, and still is - but what has made the world figure rocket is the developing world of course. New "emerging" markets have injected a poisonous, artificial Growth into post-industrial economies which should have been growing old gracefully and winding Growth down to Zero. Booming Third World populations have been pushed off land into cities and from there into European countries which had achieved ZPG but are now rolling backwards into exploding populations once again - and this time, there are no empty continents. The ultimate result is major extinctions through loss of habitat, and the loss of humanity's own life support systems. So it all has to stop dead. Now. Especially in Britain, still one of the worst offenders due to high consumption, top population density, and low biocapacity.

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  10. Well done Richard. SNUB has worked hard to represent the views of local residents and support our Parish Councils. When are the Councillors on Broadland DC going to realise that they were elected to represent us and not the developers after a quick £Million.

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  11. Thanks for your explanation Edith. Your concern for the elderly is touching. But what about old people who are black, Asian, gay, Rom or asylum seekers/ Oh, you gave your views on asylum seekers didn't you - utterly bogus swindlers, presumably regardless of whether they have fled for their lives from people who would torture and kill them if they ever got hold of them, or whether they are children, or environmentalists (like you claim to be be but genuine), targeted for making a fuss about government corruption etc.

    If Hitler's beliefs, attitudes and policies were to be sifted through, and all elements of racial supremacist and Aryan purism were removed, he might seem like a bloke with some reasonable ideas. That's the trouble with the BNP and facsists in general - their policies stem from fundamentally objectionable, racist, xenophobic principles that any compassionate, fair-minded human being would disagree with.

    The BNP is more than happy to spew its racist rhetoric among its own, at party meetings, rallies etc. But in public they skip over all that and try to present a facade of earnest concern for the nation's ills. Playing the 'green' card is a frequently employed tactic, used in the hope of winning over the well-meaning but gullible.

    I'm glad to hear you are not a member of Snub. I hope as many people as possible throughout Norfolk get to learn who you are and what you represent (but not in the way you'd like!).

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  12. It's not "earnest concern" - it's love. We love our country. We want to hug it like the Chipko Indians hugged their trees in 1974, to keep it from being cut down - but you can't hug a whole country. All the same, the contrast between the Chipko Indian women (led by men) or the Earth First activists in the States or Projet Apache in France or any tribal group defending its land, and the nauseating
    "Greenspeak" emanating from councils and developers and governments all over the world, is stark. THEIR actions don't match their words. Ours do, because the warriors are on board now. They weren't in the 1970s and 1980s - the British working class were still buying the consumerist dream. Ecologists were rich men like Teddy Goldsmith, or dreamy Professors like Schumacher and Illich (have met them all, as a teenager). Heroes all - but not warriors. The ones with muscles have woken up now. So now we have a chance. If you want to save your woods and fields, celebrate the biodiversity of humans - or else a homogenised humanoid super-race will cover the Earth like the black sea urchin covers great tracts of the Mediterranean kicking out every other visible life form.

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  13. We have an open policy which allows anyone to comment on our posts, however, we feel that this current discussion is distracting attention away from our core subject matter and would request that no further comments are added to this post.

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