WHAT IT'S REALLY ALL ABOUT

President Obama's determination to establish some form of universal health-care in the US is proving just how demented, deluded and downright evil some people can be.

In the Land of the Free, where Fox News, part of Mr Murdoch's global empire, is allowed to spread whatever lies it feels like spreading, the notion that we're all in this together doesn't always go down too well.

And in the ideological battle between private wealth and the public good, the right wing is never too shy to exploit any ludicrous myth, to tell barefaced untruths and to marshal mobs of placard-wielding crazies - just to prevent a wholly rational, intelligent and socially-responsible policy from being implemented.

Can you tell where I'm going with this, yet?

Looking around our local villages, it's impressive to note that outright opposition to the proposed Lenchwick Windfarm is concentrated in those small areas where there's the most money sloshing about. It seems to be in those places that concern about the future for all of us is pretty well non-existent. All sorts of phoney concerns have been and are being raised, but the opposition to the windfarm can hardly be based on such issues as the threat to wildlife (a canard, if ever there was one), noise (something that VVASP has consistently overplayed) or even property prices (otherwise, we'd all be worried).

No - the opposition to the windfarm, such as it is, is based purely on self-interest, and a rather misplaced self-interest at that.

It's a kind of blind and irrational opposition, like the opposition in the US to Obama's health-care proposals. It spreads lies and fear, it whips up angry crowds, and it does so all because of a political resistance to certain developments.

In America, they think of it as Socialism - the idea that nobody should go without the basics of health-care is deemed, by the right-wing nutters, to be a dangerously 'Communist' idea.

Something similar's been going on in these parts. A few crazies have tried to pretend that the proposed windfarm is nothing more than a conspiracy cooked up by the EU, Gordon Brown, money-grubbing power companies and a few 'greens'. And VVASP will happily try to sell you that lunatic hogwash.

But what are they really opposed to?

Can it be that their opposition is based purely on a hatred of any social cause? On a refusal to yield one inch for the sake of future generations and the health of the planet?

There aren't really any stronger grounds for opposing the windfarm, unless you've been terrified by VVASP's lies into opposing something you simply don't understand.

Remember that constant, fraudulent refrain - 'We're not against renewables, just not round here'? Doesn't that tell us what's really motivating the protesters of Church Lench and its environs? A total lack of care for the rest of society. An arrogant belief that, if you can afford to move to the Lenches then you can buy your way out of social responsibilities. A crazy right-wing conviction that private wealth is the only thing that matters.

Every time a member of VVASP regurgitates yet another misleading bit of propaganda, we can be assured that they don't believe it. They just want you to believe it. They want you to fight so that they can maintain their lofty disdain for everybody else.

Had there been any genuine, legitimate grounds for opposing the windfarm, this blog probably wouldn't exist.

It's the fact that the protesters are putting themselves, and their own narrow self-interest, before everything else, and are prepared to lie, bully, mislead, frighten, misrepresent and pontificate in order to force everyone around them to support their selfishness - that's why this blog's here, and why people all over the area, and even overseas, are reading it.

The battle lines have been drawn. Misguided self-interest versus the greater good. A tiny patch of land versus the planet. Greed versus right.

We'll just have to put up with a lot of hot air and red faces before common sense finally prevails.