“ECO-TOWNS: what an oxymoron is that! How can a new town be ecologically friendly when it is built on a green field site which entails concreting over large areas of the countryside and destroying natural habitat?” asks Sally Wood in her Straight Talking column in the June issue of Freedom, the British National Party’s monthly newspaper.

Sally continues:

You only have to think of all the additional traffic and congestion it will generate, free to spew pollutants into the air.

Take the small village of Micheldever in the North Hampshire Downs. Here in this delightful rural landscape of rolling hills and wooded copse: home to owls, bats and a rare pair of stone curlews, Eagle Star Insurance have plans to concrete over it and construct one of these new eco-towns.

Another eco-town is proposed near Couldwell and Roslington in South Derbyshire. Bank Development are planning a 5,700 unit settlement which will entail the felling of national forest trees and a new road to feed its new eco-town of ‘Grovewood’. How eco-friendly is that!

It appears that 40% of these homes are to be affordable housing, but for whom?

The English are simply not replacing themselves, but they are now fleeing our ever increasingly crime-ridden cities to be replaced there by economic migrants. Surely if these economic migrants were told to stay in their own countries their carbon footprint would be lower, and that has to be good for the planet.

From every angle these eco-towns can only be an eco-disaster.

ALLOTMENT WANTED!

ONE of my earliest memories is of peering through railings at an elderly neighbour tending his plot in the allotments at the end of my road in South London.

I still think of that today when I flash passed in the train and spot the same site. The allotments have long since disappeared only to be replaced by an ugly block of flats with a garish mural which adorns the entire flank wall. It seems like something from another country.

Where I live now there was much consternation when the Liberal Democrats, who ran the Council at that time and who are always keen to proclaim their green credentials, decided to allow a Housing Association development on the nearby allotments. Since then many of the council houses in our area have become occupied by Eastern Europeans and others from overseas. When I recently tried to put my name down for an allotment on the sole remaining site I was told there was a waiting list of at least forty people before me and I could be given no indication as to when I was likely to reach the top of the list. Prepare to put your name down when young if you wish to get one in this lifetime!

With the United States now converting a fifth of its corn to ethanol to provide approximately 3-4% of the fuel needed to run its cars and trucks, the price of food worldwide has rocketed. Coupled with that, the droughts in Australia and China have resulted in a shortage of rice which has caused some countries to cease exporting rice completely for fear of food riots.

Britain was last self sufficient in grain, meat and dairy in the 1830’s and today self-sufficiency stands at only 60%, which makes us particularly vulnerable to a decline in food imports. During the last war when this was of concern, ten percent of our food was produced from gardens and allotments. It is hard to imagine such a figure could be reached today especially as many gardens in urban areas are now housing developments having been designated as ‘brownfield sites’.

As for that allotment . . . look around for one and you could well look in vain, for where it used to be you may find instead an ugly block of flats housing people from other lands and giving us the responsibility of all those additional mouths to feed.