PREVENTION OF TOURISM

One of the leading charges made against windfarms by nimby hysterics is that they have a devastating impact on local tourism.

There's no actual evidence to support this claim, and the nimbies may not even believe it - they just want everyone else to believe it.

And so we find, up and down the country, demented groups of self-serving anti-windfarm campaigners banging on and on about the dire effects on tourism. It even happened in the great Lenchwick Windfarm Farce over a year ago.

Our minted friends over at Stop Bridgnorth Wind Farm (previous winners of the Wind of Change Nimby Whopper Award for their bizarre claim that the lorries which transport wind turbine parts are "longer than an aircraft carrier") have long insisted that the installation of two community-owned wind turbines near Bridgnorth in Shropshire would destroy the local tourism industry. Standard nimby nonsense. Nothing unusual there.

But what's this? Ten miles down the road from Bridgnorth, there are plans to erect nine turbines near Shifnal. The local nimby busybody group is supported by right-wing Tory MP Bill Cash (whose son leads the Stop Bridgnorth Wind Farm campaign) and has recently been sounding off with its usual crazy gibberish at a planning appeal hearing.

The Stop Turbine Action Group (STAG) boobies of Shifnal told the planning inspector that the nine-turbine windfarm would bring tens of thousands of tourists to the area. Naturally, this is a Bad Thing. Can you imagine? All those sightseers blocking the roads, buying stuff locally and getting in the way of the peasants!

One Bill Boon, "traffic witness" for the STAG group, reached his findings by studying "the experiences of four other windfarms". And, to his horror, he discovered that windfarms attract tourists in their droves.

So - at Bridgnorth (as elsewhere, apparently), a proposed windfarm will "devastate" the local tourism industry. Allegedly. While, ten miles down the road, a proposed windfarm would attract "tens of thousands" of tourists, making life unbearable. This latter claim is based on evidence gathered from other - presumably successful - windfarms.

Incredibly, some nutters are members of both Stop Bridgnorth Wind Farm ("windfarms kill tourism") and STAG ("windfarms encourage too much tourism")!!!

Evidently, then, there are some local protesters who are making one claim at Bridgnorth and a completely different claim, diametrically opposed to the first claim, ten miles away at Shifnal!

Where it suits them to argue that windfarms are bad news for tourism, that's what they say (very loudly and dishonestly). When it suits them to argue the opposite, windfarms magically become promoters of a blossoming tourism industry (but only, of course, where this is seen as undesirable).

Only in the second instance do the unhinged nimbies actually produce anything approaching evidence to support their claim.

So - which is it? Do windfarms wreck tourism or create tourism?

All the evidence points to the latter. In which case, those witless nimbies (such as the cretins of CATS, now sponsored by Buffalo Bill Trump and his monstrous machinery of lies) who keep insisting that windfarms and tourism don't mix are clearly telling very big porkies.

One wonders at the kind of person who can make both claims at once - windfarms stifle/stimulate tourism - depending on which local campaign they're fighting at the time.

It's pretty clear that the fools of Stop Bridgnorth Wind Farm simply do not believe in telling the truth, when they're quite happy to make the opposite claims a few miles down the road.

It's also interesting to note that a group of deranged nimbies has now blown the gaff on their "windfarms bad for tourism" claims. If, that is, they really did bother to study the "experiences of four other windfarms". Because, as the pompous oafs of STAG were so keen to point out to the planning inspector the other day -

WINDFARMS ARE EXTREMELY GOOD FOR TOURISM!!!