Big Yellow Taxi...

Many of the Medway councillors who sit on the Planning Committee (and who will be supposedly adjudicating upon the Vineyard Farms application to build an enormous restaurant complex on Green Belt land at Upper Bush) took the trouble today (15th. January) to come and take a look at what our not-so-local billionaire tax exile wants to concrete over.

Getting them here was itself a minor victory for the small group of local activists who have taken the trouble to battle their way through the smokescreen of glossy propaganda that forms the bulk of the Vineyard Farms application.

An unfortunately foggy Saturday morning for Medway's planning committee's visit...

The timing of the council’s visit did not do them any favours. Freezing cold fog in the middle of January hardly showed Bush Valley at its beautiful best, but nevertheless the councillors came along and squelched around in the fog and the mud on Barrow Hill, and hopefully got a feel for the peace and quiet of the place.

...if only they'd chosen the day before. The view from the bunker spot...

The date of the visit was well-known in advance and the protestors decided to put up a few placards along the route into Cuxton along Bush Road from the A228 and around Upper Bush for our visitors to maybe look at.  Needless to say, our brave councillors drove in from the Cobham end, although they did drive out along Bush Road so the posters weren’t a complete waste of time from that perspective. 

Some of the protest posters put up at Upper Bush....

Despite misgivings from the local Parish Council, a few people also arranged to park their cars up along Bush Road, just to show our visitors how tricky the road can be to negotiate when cars get parked up as they do at school run times.

As protests go, it was all pretty mild. Nobody was gluing themselves to anything and nobody was chanting silly slogans or shouting abuse (except for one demented, angry, mud-splattered Catweasel look-alike on a mountain bike who cycled past a small group of bemused residents at Upper Bush, shouting foul-mouthed oaths at them and spitting on parked cars as he went by).

Posters on Bush Road...

I walked through Upper Bush and down Bush Road that Saturday morning, and I didn’t think it looked as bad in terms of parked cars as it does on a typical school run time. Indeed, I’d say there was less selfish and inconsiderate parking than usual.

That evening, I’d thought I’d visit the Cuxton Village Facebook page, just to see how this little protest had been received. 

By and large, most people seemed pretty supportive.

There were a few inexplicably irascible people on there, however, who tried to give the impression that a thousand “Insulate Britain” protestors had descended on Cuxton village, gluing themselves to the road, manning barricades, throwing firebombs, blockading ambulances and fire-engines, bringing (non-existent) public transport to a grid-locked halt and causing mayhem, disruption and destruction on a massive scale. Some took to naming individuals who had left their cars in the road rather than parking on their own drives (heinous crime!) thus ensuring that they received lots of unpleasant personal on-line abuse from their perennially angry Facebook chums.

Posters on Bush Road...

Of course, none of them would have been saying anything about “selfish, inconsiderate protest parking” if they hadn’t known there was a bit of a “protest” going on in the first place. They wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual at all. The road was certainly no worse than at school run time, but that didn’t stop them using it as an excuse to sneer at and abuse those who are trying to stop Joni Mitchell’s dystopian ballad from coming true for Cuxton.

It seems to me that all of the anger about the winery actually lies with those who are in favour of it.  Most local people who object to it are upset by it and are determined to try and stop it, but they are not angry about it as such. 

Instead, its local proponents are the angry ones; angry, it seems, at anyone who disagrees with them. They are the ones coming out with the insults and the sneers, the accusations of NIMBYism and (oblivious of the irony) moaning that people are always moaning about something. When you try and engage them on the scheme’s drawbacks, they just (angrily) repeat what they seem to have read in the Vineyards Farms leaflet.

The protesters, by contrast, seem quite polite and tolerant of views other than their own and certainly aren’t going around throwing sneering insults at those who think that the winery is going to be the shiny, eco-friendly, local-job-creating glory that Vineyard Farms say it will be.

It made me realise just how effective the “divide and conquer” aspect of the Vineyard Farms propaganda has been. 

Our sunlit uplands: soon to be lost to paying customers of Vineyard Farms...

It seems that some local people don’t care about the wider implications of giving permission to build a development such as the winery on green belt land. The irreplaceable sacrifice of over a thousand acres of beautiful, peaceful green belt farmland to the profit-driven aims of a private company and the whims of its billionaire tax-exile boss are not that important to them.

It’s “good for jobs”, isn’t it? Maybe their fizzy wine will be cheap. And it’ll be somewhere nice to go and have a nice meal now and then, won't it? How dare a bunch of moaning NIMBY protesters try to stop that from happening?

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone.

Big Yellow Taxi for Cuxton’s local winery supporters, please...