Author: Kim du Toit

…and by “room” I mean space, or area, not a room inside a building.

The first problem with Britishland is that it’s tiny — I mean, the entire United Kingdom can pretty much fit inside Oregon.  The other problem is that (outside the cities) British countryside is unspeakably gorgeous. The third problem is that when (say) a political party screws up, the effect on the population as a whole can be nigh-catastrophic.

Here in Murka, by way of contrast, you can build a 2,500-acre solar- or wind farm with 600-ft turbines in, say, West Texas or anywhere in Nebraska and the chances are that unless you put it next to an interstate or similar, nobody’s even going to know it’s there.  So when the solar panels are destroyed by a lightning strike or the wind turbines get blown over, it’s the proverbial tree falling over in a forest — nobody notices.

The problem is that in Britishland, 2,500 acres is a big deal, and anything you build there (e.g. those 600-ft turbines) will not only be visible, but the chances are that they will, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson’s county planning commission, spoil an Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  And still on Clarkson’s farm, remember how the local council gives him a hard time on his farm of only 1,000 acres — less than half of one of those solar/wind farms as mentioned above.  How much more trouble would said councils kick up over so large an intrusion?

Well, not much, as it turns out.  Why?

The new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero didn’t waste any time in announcing his approval of a solar farm on the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk border covering 1,000 hectares or nearly 2,500 acres. This £600million development, Miliband said, was ‘crucial to achieving Net Zero’ and would provide ‘an abundant source of cleaner, cheaper energy on the mission towards 2030’. This is just one project out of many across the farmland and moors of Britain.

Miliband is also planning the imposition of wind turbines up to 200 metres (656ft) in height, again ignoring the wishes of local residents and their potential harm to the countryside. For example, there are plans to site 65 turbines of 200 metres on 2,300 hectares of Walshaw Moor, in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Campaigners against the scheme believe it will be damaging to bird life, such as skylarks and curlews, and increase the risk of flooding. Up to 10,000 tons of concrete will be needed to support these turbines at their base, together with quarried material for 22 miles of access roads. The unsightly structures will be visible for miles in a beloved part of the country. These developments include the construction of a network of transmission pylons across the countryside.

Not to be outdone by Ed Miliband, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has decided that part of the green belt should be relabelled grey to help build a target of 1.5million homes in five years. And while Rayner thinks some green belt land is ugly, she has dropped the need for aesthetically pleasing buildings. She protests that she isn’t going to build unsightly houses yet she is dismissive of the concept of beauty, commenting that ‘beautiful’ means nothing really, but ‘one thing to one person and another thing to another’.

Remember that of all the terminally-destroyed habitats in the world (e.g. the Aral Sea in the former U.S.S.R.), pretty much all of them are to be found in socialist- or formerly-socialist countries.

Nothing, it appears, gives a Stalinist (e.g. the aforementioned Rayner) greater pleasure than to screw up the environment — whether it’s to fulfill the latest Glorious Five-Year Plan or, as above, Net Zero (a nominally eco-sensitive initiative).  After all, as Rayner admits, beauty is just a bourgeois concept, after all.

I am amazed that the average British voter cannot see (or refuses to see) that all the great socialist dreams are never actually in pursuit of their stated goals (improve the lot of the peasants/proletariat, or “save” the environment), but are rather simply a nostrum for oppressing and controlling people’s lives.  But whatever, the Brits voted these foul Stalinists into power, and now they’re going to reap the whirlwind of the consequences.

Ordinarily in a situation like this, I’d just ask Pontius to hand over the basin;  but the fact is that I’m truly saddened by what’s going to happen to one of the most beautiful countrysides on Earth, a countryside that I’ve visited often and love — love a lot more than the British governing class, to start off with.