KILLING THE COUNTRYSIDE

One of the most terrifying aspects of the vicious nimby campaign being carried out by VVASP (Vale Villains Against Sane Practices) is what it reveals about the newcomers' attitudes to the countryside.

Back in 1962, Rachel Carson published a massively influential book entitled "Silent Spring". It's credited with helping to launch the environmental movement.

Carson had noticed how unnaturally quiet rural areas were becoming as a result of the widespread use of agricultural chemicals like DDT. Basically, human beings were killing off the world's wildlife in droves.

Horrifying, I'm sure you'll agree.

Ah, no - not to the nasty nimbies. They LOVE the idea of a completely silent countryside. It's what they moved here for, goddammit!

They grew up with some daft idea of what the countryside is. Real country dwellers recognise it as a working landscape, a kind of vast green factory, whose job it is to feed us.

But the weeny-brains who insisted on invading our villages and planting their hideous new-build homes in our midst don't realise this.

They hate farmers (ugly yokels). They hate farm machinery (ugly, dirty). They hate farm animals (dirty, noisy). They hate rural activities (coarse, noisy, populist) - unless of course we're counting those middle-class exclusive things that incomers want to do. They don't much care for church bells (noisy). Or children (noisy). Or anything, really (noisy, ugly, dirty).

Which means that they yearn for the Silent Spring that the rest of us - the sane, the caring - so deplore. They want a dead landscape, swept clean of life: a picture postcard that never changes, in which no work is ever carried out, and from which no one - but no one - benefits other than themselves.

Theirs is a crazy, deluded, utterly selfish, false image of country life - and that's what they're trying to impose on the rest of us.

So when the chief dingbat of the VVASP (Vain Victims of Anti-Scientific Propaganda) declares that the proposed windfarm will "kill the Vale countryside", you'd think that the nimbies would cheer their dark little hearts out. Killing the countryside is what they're all about. Privatising it, shooshing it, making it an exclusive playground for the middle-classes, but NO NOISE WHATSOEVER. NO SOUND, NO LIFE, NO ACTIVITY AT ANY COST!!!

It is they who are killing the countryside with their ignorance, their stuffiness, their paranoid foolishness, their unreasonable arrogance, their hatred and their lies.

The windfarm will bring life to the area.

That's what the nookies really can't stand.