Battlelines drawn in conflict over eco-town proposals
The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) says new towns are the ‘least sustainable way’ of developing housing and other plans should be examined.
Concerns being raised include the risk that the schemes degenerate into car-dependent housing estates along with most being predominantly planned for greenfield sites, with two in the Green Belt. The majority of the proposed eco-town locations go against local plans agreed with communities, and the sites have been chosen by developers rather than fitting in with planning in the wider public interest.
tags: eco-towns, environment, public consultations, sustainabilityAt home in an ashtray
Even our wild birds, it seems, don’t like being under the 24-7 surveillance of CCTV. Unlike most human beings living in Britain, however, a couple of Great Tits have proven themselves willing to take action, and have chosen fag butts over the cameras: they have chosen to nest in a cigarette bin outside Vane Farm’s visitor centre in Kinross, Scotland. The farm has several CCTV cameras on nests around the site beaming images straight into the coffee shop but staff are unable to view this one family because the box is sealed up and made of metal.
tags: birds, cigarettes, environment, Great Tits, hypocrisy, priorities, smoking ban, wildlifeSo who do we vote for when the good times are over and won’t ever come back?
Most of us don’t have party political allegiances. The shadows cast by the worst decisions of previous and current Prime Ministers tend to inform our decisions at the ballot box, and because some pretty appalling policies have been inflicted on us down the years by both Labour and the Conservatives, we spend a lot of our time at a crossroads of opinion subject to movement caused by the vagaries of the media as much as by our own experiences and anything the latest leaders do or say.
tags: Big Brother, civil liberties, Conservatives, database state, David Cameron, elections, environment, food crisis, free market, global warming, Gordon Brown, ID cards, Labour, Liberal Democrats, politics, sustainability, Tony Blair
