A SINKING SHIP

The bill for the solicitor's appearance at the planning committee hearing two weeks ago hasn't arrived yet, but when it does - who will be paying it?

The latest set of accounts for the now notorious "Windfarm Working Party" have been acquired by BLoW (Back Local Windfarms). What they show is that, after Church Lench Parish Council had overspent its Windfarm Working Party budget on too many interventions from a solicitor (although, bless his heart, the solicitor yielded to their pleas and cut his invoice in half - don't you just love solicitors??), Norton and Lenchwick Parish Council withdrew from what they had known all along was an exercise in bias. They demanded their share of the money that was left. So, in return for an investment of £750, Norton and Lenchwick received £30 (oh, and 29p), in addition to the knowledge that the opinions of their parishioners had been completely ignored by the fatheads of VVASP and Church Lench.

But the other Parish Councils involved in this whole dubious misappropriation of tax-payers' money look like they too might have got cold feet. Having overspent their whopping £4,500 budget for fighting the windfarm by any means available (sorry, that should read: "gathering and sharing information both in favour of and against windfarms"), the twits in charge of the Windfarm Working Party demanded another contribution of tax-payers' money to their belligerent cause. That's when Norton & Lenchwick pulled out.

Harvington instantly coughed up another £50. Harvington's role in this whole thing has been rather like Tony Blair's to Church Lench's George W. Bush. If you like, Harvington turned itself into the blushing, panting cheerleader for the bullies and ideologues of Lench - even though less than one third of Harvington households expressed opposition to the windfarm!!! Yes: Harvington as a whole didn't give a damn, but its Parish Councillors completely ignored that fact in order to pursue a Lench-like blinkered nimbyism for no good reason.

Apart from Harvington, though, who else has channelled yet more public money into the irresponsibly-managed coffers of the Windfarm Working Party?

Well, nobody, so far. Which is why Church Lench Parish Council has had to transfer £125 of its own money into its Let's Get Everybody Else To Pay For Our Solicitor Fund.

All of which strongly indicates what we've been saying all along: the Windfarm Working Party was a thinly-veiled putsch, a means of hijacking the local Parish Councils, taking their money and dictating what their response to the windfarm planning application would be, regardless of the opinions of their residents and the pros and cons of wind power. In other words, an absolutely blatant abuse of local democracy by a bunch of selfish nimbies who expect everybody else to pay for their mindless opposition to a Good Thing.

Now, a few days ago we mentioned an article published by businessgreen.com about the Windfarm Working Party and the rather awful precedent it might have set for an England destroyed by fanatical Telegraph-reading nimbies. That article is currently the Most Discussed on the whole, rather busy, BusinessGreen website.

In that article, those Parish Councils involved in the outrageous heist known as the Windfarm Working Party tie themselves up in knots trying to justify their utter failure to keep the Church Lench nookies in check. One, for example, makes a very interesting distinction:

"... the working group had no meetings with VVASP but did request one meeting with two representatives of the action group ..."

So, the Windfarm Working Party had no meetings with VVASP, apart from the meetings it had with representatives of VVASP, which is obviously a different thing altogether.

What is more, some members of the Windfarm Working Party acccompanied ScottishPower Renewables on "wind farm visits and tours". Well, why didn't they mention this earlier??? And why have ScottishPower Renewables been so reticent about these secret trysts with the WWP (sorry - representatives of the WWP)???

In fact, SPR have never been all that coy about the fact that they did organise a visit to a windfarm back in 2009. Eleven local residents attended, and all came back massively reassured, having discovered that VVASP had been telling porkies about windfarms from the start.

Are we now to understand that "some" of those who went on that visit were in fact (future) members of the Windfarm Working Party? Who then completely changed their minds about windfarms as soon as they started meeting in a house with a dirty great VVASP placard on the front gate?

Hmmnnn ... difficult to tell what's going on, really. But it would appear that members of the Windfarm Working Party are sort of running for cover. They don't want to throw any more of their precept money at Church Lench, and they don't want to get caught out having betrayed their parishioners, and they're worried that their massive betrayal of the local and national interest, the fact that they were completely suckered by the loons of Church Lench, will become public knowledge. So they're telling the press anything they can think of to get themselves off the hook.

Church Lench should be proud - their little proteges in the parishes have learnt their lessons well. But somebody really ought to tell the nimbies of Lench that their WWP ship is sinking fast - the rats are jumping overboard, and one day somebody's going to have some pretty serious questions to ask about the Captain.