In the face of a tidal wave of slick propaganda from Vineyard Farms (which now includes paid Facebook adverts begging for public support), the determined bunch of activists I have nicknamed "The Cuxton Bush Valley Preservation Society" have struck back with some pretty spiffy material of their own.
Unlike a lot of the Vineyard Farms documentation for their precious Kentish Wine Vault, the content of their new protest web page is grounded in hard facts rather than vague aspirations...
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| Home page of the new "NOT the Kentish Wine Vault" web-page... |
and
Please feel free to circulate them as widely as you can.
The more IT-savvy among you may notice that the protestors have (rather cheekily) bagged the .com domain for the Kentish Wine Vault. Hopefully, once the search engine stuff gets sorted, it should mean that the site will become the first hit for anyone looking for "Kentish Wine Vault". That'll be amusing, and only fair. After all, this is the site that REALLY tells you all about the Kentish Wine Vault development and its true impact.
It's still a work in progress but it needed to be put out quickly, now that Vineyard Farms have upped the ante with their Facebook ads, desperately pleading for members of the public to e-mail them via a proforma, so that they can claim the correspondence as "support" on Medway Council's planning portal.
The protestors have adopted the same tactic, although whether Medway Council will allow the Cuxton Bush Valley Preservation Society to garner support in the same underhanded way that Vineyard Farms are doing will be interesting to see.
The buttons at the bottom of the home page take you to some of the documentation that has been prepared in advance of various meetings taking place over the next few weeks. Whilst Cuxton's elected representatives on the Parish Council are forbidden to take part in these meetings (such is local democracy these days) the protest team have been working hard to ensure that Medway's councillors get to see the other side of the argument to that being espoused by the Vineyard Farms PR team or Medway Council's own planning department.
They have tried to cut through the "smoke and mirrors" of the thousands of pages of documentation and PR puffs that Vineyard Farms have belched forth in support of their planning application, along with highlighting the objections from professional bodies such as the Kent ANOB team, whose evidence against the winery development has been pretty much buried or airily dismissed.
Of particular note is the excellent "Community Insight" document that will be shortly winging its way in hard copy to Medway's councillors. It presents an excellent summary of the deficiencies of the Vineyard Farms planning application. At 32 pages, it is not a document for the terminally lazy or the hard-of-thinking, but it is an easy read and has some nice pictures. I challenge anyone with an open mind to read that and then still say that they think the winery development in Bush Valley is a good idea.
There are also links to some questions that really need answering satisfactorily before the development is approved, and also to some additional light reading provided by yours truly (hem hem) in form of links to some of my old blog posts.
After all, I've been watching Vineyard Farms roll this lot out for three years now, and their apparent contempt for Cuxton and the treatment of the land under their stewardship has managed to turn my initial optimistic support into implacable opposition (not that that counts for much, of course).
Do surf the web page. I hope you'll find it entertaining and informative. And watch that space. More stuff will be added I'm sure...
Update: I'm told by the site admin that someone has already tried to hack the web page and take it down, but fortunately its security was well up to resisting the attack. Seems someone out there doesn't like us...
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