LIVING IN THE PAST

The National Trust has gone all nimby.

True, it's chair, Simon Jenkins, has sounded off about wind turbines at every available opportunity, even going so far as to make out that his own blinkered opposition to wind power is shared by the charity he chairs. This outrageous slur was countered by a statement from the National Trust explaining that Jenkins's backward views are his own and have nothing to do with the official stance of the Trust itself.

But now the National Trust has revealed itself as nimby to the core. It has shown that it makes the same fundamental mistake - following the same fallacious logic - as the nimbiest of nimbies.


After an appeal hearing, an inspector from Her Majesty's Planning Inspectorate has given the go-ahead for the four-turbine Barnwell Manor windfarm in Northamptonshire. The National Trust is up in arms about this, because the turbines will be visible from the Grade 1 listed Lyveden New Bield, a property belonging to the National Trust.


The seventeenth-century lodge and gardens were never finished, largely because Sir Thomas Tresham, who was building and landscaping the site, died in 1605. His son Francis inherited the estate but then got mixed up in the Gunpowder Plot and died in the Tower of London before the year's end.


Unsurprisingly, on the day of the planning inspector's unaccompanied visit to the site, the dimwitted nimbies of the Stop Barnwell Manor Wind Farm campaign group flew a blimp. This has become standard practice among nimbies - which just goes to show how little imagination these fruitcakes have, not least of all because you'd have to be pretty stupid to believe that the blimp demonstrates anything at all. Windfarms and blimps have very little in common, and it is far from unusual for the nimby idiots to fly their wretched blimps in places that are, shall we say, somewhat removed from the intended site of the windfarm, purely to create a false and misleading impression (as happened at Gartree). The routine flying of blimps is simply nimby agitation with no relevance whatsoever to the issues involved.


Neither the nimbies nor the National Trust seem to have worried about the airfield which is somewhat closer to Lyveden New Bield than the windfarm, and from which gliders and tow aircraft take off throughout the summer, when the vast majority of visitors to the National Trust property actually turn up. There were few enough aircraft and gliders around in Sir Thomas Tresham's day, and so you'd think that the nimby nutters would be honest enough to admit that the area is scarcely "untouched". But you'd be wrong.


The nimbies of Stop Barnwell Manor Wind Farm came out with all the usual nonsense to oppose the windfarm, pretending that the area was not windy enough (i.e., not windy enough for a windfarm, but windy enough for gliders) - the planning inspector saw through that one. There was also the usual fuss made about bats, but the council had withdrawn this as a basis for its original refusal of planning permission, almost certainly because it was a red herring. It usually is.


Overall, the planning inspector accepted that 10MW of installed wind capacity at Barnwell Manor takes the region a few steps closer to meeting its commitments, and any supposed or alleged "damage" done to local heritage had to be offset against that useful development.


The National Trust, though, is unhappy. Regardless of airplanes and gliders flying past Lyveden New Bield, the Trust believes that the gardens and lodge which were left unfinished four hundred years ago are so important to the fate of our nation that they should have had priority over an important clean-tech development.


This is the mistake they're making. It's the same mistake as that made by most nimbies.


Forget all the guff about windfarms not being "economically viable" - which is a joke - or them having an illusory "adverse effect" on health or property prices. Forget all the mendacious gibberish about windfarms doing nothing to reduce CO2 emissions or their supposed impact on bats - whether or not there are any bats in the area. What it all boils down to is the view.

It is a truism of planning and property ownership that you cannot own a view. And yet, when the nimbies bought or built their houses in the country, they really do seem to believe that the "view" came as part and parcel of the title deeds. It didn't, of course, and deep down in their black hearts, they know this. Which is why so few of them are honest about it, and why we routinely get such a torrent of dishonest rubbish peddled about wind power. Of course, we hear all sorts of nonsense about "visual amenity", but it tends to be buried underneath a pile of spurious objections concocted out of subsequently retracted stories published in the Telegraph - that most Delingpole of "newspapers" - and the sort of garbage that nimby groups raid from each other's nimby websites, even if the claims have previously been scorned by independent analysts at the Advertising Standards Authority.

Like the accursed nimby blimp (boring, boring!), these made-up stories just keep doing the rounds. They've been proven false time after time, but cretinous groups of self-centred nimbies rehash them endlessly. They have to, because otherwise they'd have to admit that their only real objection is that the proposed windfarm will "spoil their view". Which isn't really an objection at all, is it? Because the view isn't theirs to begin with.

The National Trust has walked into the same trap. They seem to think that "their" property - Lyveden New Bield - will be "damaged" by having a windfarm some distance away from it. There will be no noise impact (unlike with the airfield) and no nuisance. But the Trust, idiotically, imagines that because it runs the Grade 1 listed property, it must also own the view.

See? Same foolish mistake as the nimbies. The "view" does not belong to them, and it does not belong to Lyveden New Bield. So, realistically, they do not have the right to try and stop a vital, beneficial, harmless green energy development simply because they don't like the look of it. The Trust seems to imagine that anybody visiting the gardens (which were never finished) should be able to look out over a landscape which bears very little resemblance to the way it looked in the days of Sir Thomas Tresham. They're trying to flog a false view of history, and putting their preserved-in-aspic piece of it ahead of a development which is vital and necessary for the nation's future.

So, too, are a number of Tory and Lib Dem MPs - 44 of them, including most of the more fanatical anti-windfarm loonies on the government's backbanches (the self-serving Cash, the reckless Heaton-Harris, the odious Leadsom) - who leaked their "secret" letter to the PM to, where else, the Tory Telegraph. These "Protect My Privileges At All Costs" hypocrites have decided that economic recovery can wait. What really matters to them is "their" view.

No one, but no one, should be allowed to build anything where a complacent Tory backbencher, a raving nimby or a visitor looking around a National Trust property can see it, apparently. Which is about as insane as you can get.

This monstrous special pleading on behalf of vested interests must stop! It is holding Britain back, denying us a safe clean future, all because a few very selfish individuals think that they own something they don't. The National Trust does not own the view from a four-hundred year old garden that was never finished. The grasping frauds of the Tory backbenches do not own the views from their country piles. The average swivel-eyed nimby does not own the view from the house they bought four years ago. None of them owns the view. And none of them has the right to advance the preposterous argument that the "landscape" has remained unspoiled and will now be "adversely affected" by a windfarm on the horizon. It's a favourite argument of the nimby class, and it is utterly bogus.

We can do better than this. We can preserve our heritage without trying to live in a false past which never existed, and without insisting that the National Trust, hard-right Tory extremists or tin-pot little nimbies are the Lords of All They Survey. We can start being reasonable, rational and honest. We can admit that, a) windfarms are not a "blot" on the landscape - they are elegant, efficient and essentially noiseless technological marvels, and b) they are the future.

So, for God's sake, Britons - stop living in the past (especially one that never existed in the first place)! Stop putting your own narrow-minded and misplaced self-interest ahead of the national good! Stop pretending that you own something you don't!

Get real or shut up, basically, before you do any more harm to this country of ours. And let's allow the 21st century solution to our problems, rather than sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that we still live in feudal times.