DETERRING DEMOCRACY

The likelihood that planning permission for windfarms will be taken out of the hands of district councils is increasing.

As the Times Online revealed this week, the number of windfarms in the UK is set to quadruple. Contrary to the nonsense spouted by nimby groups like VVASP and their pet rag, the Daily Mail, a team of international scientists led by Professor Michael McElroy of Harvard has concluded that a global network of sensibly-sited windfarms could supply 40 times the world's current electricity needs.

But to catch up quickly, to hit Government targets for renewable energy and to start harnessing this extraordinary resource - the wind - to maximum effect, the planning process needs to be streamlined. Both energy companies and the RSPB have complained about the needless delays created by ill-informed nimbies whipping up hysteria, spreading irresponsible myths and organising mobs of hectoring, howling protesters at public planning meetings.

Naturally, VVASP and their fellow nimby nutters are outraged at the suggestion that planning for these things could be removed from local councils.

The reality is that the protesters have only got themselves to blame. Their lies, fear-mongering and sheer mindless aggression have turned local planning into a farce. District councillors have complained of feeling browbeaten and bullied by the crazed mobs organised by anti-windfarm protest groups.

Well, if that's how the nimbies want to behave, so be it. It just means that district councillors will be absolved of the responsibility of judging windfarm planning applications and will no longer be threatened by demented hordes who have been repeatedly lied to and misled by their nimby leaders.

Objections to windfarms should be based purely on local matters - in other words, fraudulent arguments about the so-called 'inefficiency' of windfarms are of no relevance, thankfully. Aesthetics, too, are not much of an argument, because it is clear to anyone with half a brain that the Lenchwick Windfarm will not 'kill the Vale countryside', as a VVASP mouthpiece has claimed. Besides, many people - decent, open-minded people - find them beautiful.

This just leaves noise. Consequently, nimby groups like VVASP take each and every opportunity available to them to play up the noise issue. The real noise generated by windfarms tends to come as a surprise - they're actually remarkably quiet. But that's not the point. VVASP has an interest in misleading residents about the noise made by windfarms, and so that's what they do. Constantly. Shamelessly. And with utter disregard for the truth and contempt for the people they're misleading.

Most planning applications for windfarms which are turned down at district council level are done so on the basis of noise. This does not mean that windfarms are noisy - only that district council planning committees, faced with a mob of ugly, red-faced loons shrieking and shouting at them, plump for noise as the only objection going.

Planning officers at district councils regularly recommend that their planning committees approve the planning applications - but then, the officers are seldom confronted by gangs of hysterical nimbies in the same way that council members are.

The councillors don't ignore the advice of their experts. They're just coerced by raging maniacs into rejecting the planning applications, and the only reason they can legitimately give for doing so is 'noise'.

Again, the protesters, by lying about windfarm noise and then bullying their democratically elected councillors into voting down the proposals on that phoney basis, are destroying local democracy and leading to a situation in which such decisions will be taken far away, in Westminster and Whitehall, where deranged mobs of misinformed protesters can't pressurise the decision-makers into making the wrong decision.

Then, at least, we might start getting somewhere. And it will, in fact, be a good day for democracy. Because it is the nimbies - VVASP and their ilk - who have destroyed democracy at a local level by placing their own narrow, short-term interests ahead of the wider long-term need.

Lies, in the long run, never work. They come back to haunt the liars.

And when the decision-making process is taken away from local councils and assumed by central government, the lies and despicable tactics of the VVASP and their like will have been the cause.