WHEN DID WE BECOME SO DISHONEST?

A walk has been organised. It'll lead people to where the wind turbines will be erected. So that people can get all worked up about them.

Someone has been commissioned to create photoshopped impressions of what the wind farm will look like in situ. Now, that's a bit weird, because when ScottishPower Renewables held its public drop-in sessions, the deranged nimbies went hopping mad about everything - especially the visual representations of what the wind farm will look like.

VVASP didn't trust the photo mock-ups of the wind farm produced by SPR, so they're having some of their own made up. But how accurate are these likely to be? The protesters wailed about Scottish Power's pictures not showing what the wind farm would look like. That said, SPR have yet to be caught out telling lies about the proposed wind farm, whereas VVASP have lied repeatedly about it. Even the independent Advertising Standards Authority told them to stop telling lies. So what are the chances that the VVASP-approved images of the potential wind farm will look anything like a real one?

One of our correspondents wondered why this walk was taking place to look at a wind farm that isn't there yet. Wouldn't it make more sense to organise a visit to a wind farm that does exist? Then they'd be able to judge for themselves what a real wind farm (and not a VVASP mock up of a wind farm) looks like.

That's a good point. But of course the nimbies don't want to know what a real wind farm is like - and they certainly don't want any of their supporters to go looking at them. Because people who have been to visit wind farms tend to come away wondering what all the fuss was about.

(This does not apply to the hardcore leadership of anti-windfarm protest groups, who visit them with the sole intention of finding somebody who might be inclined to complain about them).

So - VVASP would rather lead people round a non-existent wind farm (in order to stoke up outrage) rather than visit an actual wind farm (in order to find out what they're like). Yep, the nimbies strike again. Ignorance rules.

But this meaningless walk is being advertised locally - without any mention of VVASP's bogus agenda - as a 'Blossom May Walk'. This, supposedly, in order to attract a few normal people to take part.

It'll be a very strange kind of 'Blossom May Walk', in that it will involve walking in the opposite direction from where all the blossom is.

What is it about the protesters that it never seems to occur to them just how dishonest they are? They are advertising, in a suspiciously friendly manner, a 'Blossom May Walk' that has nothing whatever to do with blossom. If they advertised it as a VVASP-sponsored 'Visit the Site of the Proposed Windfarm Walk', that would be honest. But they're incapable of such honesty, so it is sold to Joe Public as an innocent-sounding, thoroughly apolitical 'Blossom May Walk'.

This dishonesty is what will undermine VVASP's cause. No one who isn't trying to get elected will take them seriously when the sheer depths of their dishonesty becomes apparent.

They've lied about wind farm noise, house prices, costs, efficiency, dangers to wildlife and some kind of eternal alteration of the Vale. They've lied about whether they are protesters or not. They lie on their website about providing comprehensive information to the community (for 'comprehensive' read 'biased and inaccurate'). They've lied, consistently, about everything. Now they're lying about a 'Blossom May Walk', and there's a fair-to-middling chance that the photos of the windfarm that they'll be showing to their sheep-like drones and anyone else who mistakenly takes part in the ramble will present a totally unrealistic image of the windfarm. Why? Because VVASP simply cannot tell the truth. It's beyond them.

But at what point did it become socially acceptable to lie all the time? When did that become normal middle class behaviour?