The Fourth Estate...

Local media, especially dear old local click-bait "news" site KentOnLine, have been strangely quiet about the winery lately. It's not as if there is nothing going on, but then it seems that Vineyard Farms haven't quite been getting it all their own way, despite the resources (which includes Medway Council's planning department) at their disposal.

You'd think some of the stories would be worth reporting.

There was the business about Vineyard Farms putting up a national Facebook ad, begging for public backing and encouraging people to fill in a proforma that would be sent to the council as a letter of support. One can't blame them in a way. Before their ad, there were around 300 objections and only about 20 letters of support on the council's planning portal. Despite the propaganda blanket-bombing, it still seems that most people (with the exception of those working in Medway Council's planning department) aren't in favour of letting a billionaire tax exile build a concrete bunker on protected green belt land in a Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (ANOB) for (his) pleasure and profit. 

Unfortunately, it seems that someone used the name and address of our local MP, Kelly Tolhurst, to submit a phoney letter of support on her behalf using the Vineyard Farms e-mail template. Kelly wasn't best pleased about that, and wrote to some of her constituents telling them so. It appears she absolutely hates the idea that anyone might think she has an opinion on it. 

Now I hear that the planning department have asked Vineyard Farms to take down their "pleeese vote for us" template, given that it has been proven beyond doubt that fake letters of support can be submitted by its use.

You'd think that a funny little story about "democracy" (and its abuse) like that would be worth reporting, wouldn't you?

Perhaps a local reporter might also wonder about the curious silence of said MP, Kelly Tolhurst, on the issue of the winery development. After all, Kelly was quick to support Hoo villagers in their campaign to prevent the development of the old Deangate Ride golf course, and yet she has tied herself in knots trying to avoid a public stance on the far more damaging development that is the Upper Bush winery.

You'd think a curious local press reporter would want to know why.  

Maybe such a reporter would even go the trouble of finding out what Kelly Tolhurst does for the £15,000's-worth of donations her office received in 2021 from a mysterious association called Businessfore - other than to attend a Christmas party hosted by them at the House of Lords where she had a cosy chat with the bosses of a Businessfore client, a civil engineering contracting company called the VGC Group (check out their Facebook page and put "Tolhurst" in the search bar...).

It's the sort of thing you'd think a keen reporter would be swarming all over.

Especially funny is the protest web page that sprung up as a repost to the VF Facebook advertising campaign. Rather cheekily, the protest group bagged the kentishwinevault.com domain name, which the Vineyard Farms PR team had rather carelessly left unclaimed. Now, if you type "Kentish Wine Vault" into any Microsoft search engine (e.g. Edge or Bing), the first site that comes up is the protest site rather than VF's one for the Kentish Wine Vault (Google is a bit clunky and has some catching up to do, I'm told).  Apparently, ".com" outranks ".co.uk" in search engine preferences (again, so I'm told: IT isn't my "thing") and so the protestors, despite not having zillions of pounds and a PR team to help them, have managed to make Vineyard Farms look a bit silly.

Worth a few tongue-in-cheek lines in the local rag, maybe? Nah. Zip.

Then there's the more serious business of Medway Council pre-empting the result of the scheduled planning committee meeting of March 9th to approve or reject the winery scheme, giving the impression that it is already a done deal.

What faith can anyone have in the planning process when Medway Council boasts that it will “soon be home” to the KWV in its vainglorious bid for city status (see p.16) weeks before the application is actually up for approval?

Extract from Medway Council's 2022 city status bid, p16, published January 2022

This is in addition to Medway Council using Vineyard Farms own propaganda to publicise the development on the council web page. You'd think something like all this would be worth a few lines in the local press, wouldn't you?

But then our "local democracy reporter" (and as a Cuxton lass, she certainly is local) has recently been exercising her own democratic rights, so it seems. Indeed, she has apparently filled in the Vineyard Farms dodgy template and sent in her letter of support for the winery to the council (although with the VF template, who knows if it really was her?). Good for her (if she has). Last time I looked, objections still outnumbered letters of support by three to one, even with Vineyard Farms' Facebook begging letter, so VF need every bit of support they can get. A tame journalist in their camp would be very welcome, I guess. 

Quite what that may do to any pretence of unbiased reporting on the winery development by KOL and its sister "dead-tree" news outlets is open to debate, of course.

"News You Can Trust" says KOL.  Yeah, right...

Update;  Wow, fame at last.  Seems the mighty KentOnline didn't think much of this tiny little mickey-take and have taken a break from attacking Kent's only Labour MP (ironically as a result of a hostile blog post) to turn their guns on little old me instead. They are even accusing me of libel, though I can't quite see what is libellous about anything I've written here. It certainly wasn't the intent. Heavy-handed and not very funny, maybe, but libellous? 

Thanks for the publicity, though. I really am a nobody and it seems kind of pathetic that KOL feel a need to go after a tiny dissenting squeak such as mine. Very few people read what I write but thanks to KOL, maybe they will now. 

This was just a little photo-blog to celebrate local history and wild-life. The advent of the winery and the side-stepping of green belt protections to enable its planning and likely construction has really upset a lot of folks who don't have a voice, so I've tried to use this obscure platform to argue back. Seems some people don't like that. It gets me down that those with power and influence seem to be all in favour of this development, despite it flying in the face of national planning guidelines designed to protect green belt land.

Still, I do owe our local democracy reporter an apology. It seems that she too is indeed a victim of the fake support letter scam I mentioned above (so she says), although I did indicate that I thought that may be the case.

So I'm sorry if I have impugned the fearless impartiality of our local democracy reporter, and she and her chums at KOL are completely entitled to use their much bigger media reach to have a sneer back at me. Which they have done.