DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

It's like buses. You wait months for a response from ScottishPower Renewables, and then four come along at once.

A quick glance at the Wychavon District Council website reveals that, on the very last day of 2010, a series of documents were uploaded. These include SPR's response to the submission from Parkinson Wright solicitors (submitted on behalf of the manic nimbies of Church Lench and paid for by everybody else, as usual), SPR's response to the DTA report on Landscape and Visual Amenity, SPR's response to the MAS Environmental "report" (i.e., total guff) on Noise and SPR's response to Captain Nookie of the good ship VVASP.

These make for excellent reading. The consultants charged with rebutting the reports commissioned by Wychavon District Council on the visual and noise aspects of the windfarm planning application take a sober and detailed approach. The one which refutes the rather wild and aimless claims made by MAS Environmental (Noise Experts By Appointment to Nimbyland) does a brilliant job of pointing out the flaws in the report. There is evidence aplenty to suggest that Wychavon only hired MAS Environmental after a sustained campaign of nonsense from our old friends of the nimby Politburo, and VVASP made a great big splash out of the illogical and unsupported comments offered by the "experts". You can bet that they won't make much of a noise about the fact that the claims made by those "experts" have been effectively rubbished by the consultants working for ScottishPower Renewables.

(One point which keeps cropping up is that SPR's noise consultants consistently took a "worst-case" approach, which MAS Environmental repeatedly criticised on bizarre grounds. How odd.)

The report on Landscape and Visual Amenity, commissioned by the District Council, is also slammed for wandering off its remit. Makes you wonder whether the nimby brigade also insisted on those consultants being retained (at public expense) by the council. Anyway, it matters little. These "experts" do like to have their two-penn'orth and pass comments on things that don't concern them.

More exciting still are SPR's responses to VVASP and the solicitor hired by VVASP's friends and neighbours in the Parish Council-funded Stop-the-Windfarm Working Party. Both responses robustly attack the misapprehensions and mistakes with which both Big Chief Nookie and the solicitor acting for Church Lench Nimby Inc. liberally scattered their woeful submissions.

The timing, however, is interesting. VVASP have little time to get their nasty propaganda machine working against these measured responses. Their own submissions have been dismissed as worthless, the consultants they tricked Wychavon into hiring have been found wanting, their full-page ad campaigns, it turns out, were based on pretty hopeless reports. Far be it from VVASP to publicise the full story (remember their mission statement: 'Providing Extremely Selective Information to Help the Community Make a Misinformed Decision'), so they won't make much of the fact that their arguments have collapsed like a failed souffle. Similarly, they made very little of the fact that the Church Lench Noise Measurement Group's noise survey revealed only that the planning application submitted by ScottishPower Renewables had been telling the truth.

But they will struggle to bombard all and sundry with dogmatic attacks on the science and planning laws with which SPR and its consultants have slammed the various reports sponsored, one way or another, by Dr No and his irresponsible cronies.

On 27 January, the Development Control Committee at Wychavon will meet to consider the Lenchwick Windfarm planning application. Thirty minutes will be allocated to each side of the "debate".

Two days before that, the councillors will be taken on a site visit to view the location of the proposed windfarm from a variety of angles. Expect much merriment. Vale Villages Amateur Society of Players (VVASP) will stage a re-enactment of George Romero's Day of the Dead, with the zombies played - very convincingly, we understand - by a smattering of brainwashed dupes. All those spare VVASP placards that are still lying around will magically appear in inappropriate places (because the VVASP membership genuinely believe that they own EVERYTHING - they'd paint the sky yellow, with a great big NO in the middle, if they could only figure out how to do it). With luck, not one single Wychavon councillor will be fooled by the latest display of nimby foolishness.

In a promising move, the Wychavon planning officer has invited our (real) friends at BLoW to submit a page to be included in his report to the planning committee. How good is that?

But, with all thise activity looming, will VVASP be able to spread their predictably dishonest garbage in response to the sensible responses from SPR in time? Or will they just concentrate on rehearsing their zombies?

We'll do our best to keep you posted.

Oh, and happy New Year, everyone!