Made-up housing numbers inexcusable excuse for Labour’s destruction of our green belt

Madness has taken hold of this Labour government and in tandem so has our Southend Labour administration who are carrying out their orders from on high.

In the very literal sense no blade of grass is safe. In this parallel universe, green is new grey and as such the countryside - if Labour have their way - will be drowned in concrete.

A few weeks ago I unceremoniously coined the term ‘Concretors’ to describe those who wish to vandalise the green belt despite knowing there are already 1.4 million planning permissions granted. These same people would have you believe that we must accept the inevitable and bow to their ill-advised agenda because rules, once concreted, cannot be undone! Some Concretors have taken offence and on a personal level I am apologetic, however, feelings verses monumental and irreversible catastrophic destruction is not really a contest.

Whoever is truly pulling the strings to have enacted the changes to the National Planning Policy Framework is a criminal in my eyes. They know exactly what they are doing and who it benefits - them.

Green Belters understand there are housing requirements, but not at the expense of irreplaceable countryside. And that is the point, if you could pierce the founding premise on which the countryside is being destroyed it is that of the well publicised but unproven “housing crisis”.

The numbers

I am at pains to state that no one in our country has any idea of what the exact housing requirement is because there is no one going door-to-door asking what we actually need. Instead they rely on a deeply flawed economic model whose calculations are dictated to by politicians desires rather than anything that resembles realistic. For instance, the 1.5 million housing target Labour have been so proudly promoting is nothing more than the String Puller(s) telling Labour that’s the target they want.

Have you ever wondered what they mean by a “housing crisis” where almost all of us have a roof over our heads? Yes, homelessness it real and, yes, people do need homes. For those involuntarily homeless this must be solved - it’s the first thing I would look at solving were I in power because it is a mark of the society we live in to end it. But if you add up all the homeless people in England and those on the council waiting lists it won’t be anywhere near 1.5 million people.

To illuminate this fact - when you walk about your daily lives can you see 1.5 million homeless people? Of course not. That’s because according to government figures there are around 8,000 people on the streets, which when you think about it, shouldn’t be that hard for a government to solve. There are 130,000 families in temporary accommodation, but not homeless. Again, this should not be hard to solve - we are the 6th largest economy in the world! The current birth rate of England is 1.4, which means our population is shrinking. So where are the people coming from? At the risk of coming across insensitive, there is very specific problem of addressing homelessness and that in of itself is a crisis. However, to characterise housing demand as a crisis is evidentially wide of the mark.

Without free-falling into the immigration debate, we can train our own people to fulfil any role in our society, so that argument in time is moot. That is not to say I am anti-immigration, it is merely to point out the obvious that if we want nurses in the NHS it is not hard to train from 70 million people!

In truth, we are being gaslit.

And so I turn to Southend. On every material consideration it is impossible that officers could have passed the Thorpe Estate proposals for 2000 houses on the green belt. There are no “special circumstances” that outweigh the damage the development would do because the housing numbers are a magic trick.

Upon all the infrastructure in world I wouldn’t agree with these plans. In any case, we know for certain we will never get what is needed because we do not have it already however much Bayo Alaba MP, DBS MP and Cllr Cowan wave the hypnotists pendulum to convince us we will get a brand new multi-billion pound hospital!

There is no way this land is “grey belt” - the ridiculous new term invented to open up previously protected land - the 900 “affordable” houses are not affordable because that only means 20% off market value and not forgetting all developers shrink that figure to as close to nothing as possible; the houses won’t be prioritised for local people; the land is healthy, vibrant and capable of growing crops as stated in the Local Plan; and it goes against any climate change ambitions with thousands more cars running about clogging up all the roads.

What do we have left but to make heinous assumptions as to why this is happening. Nothing adds up aside from the String Pullers purses.

Yet, there is so much we can do. Bear in mind all is possible when we act together. Never underestimate the power of collective power. 97% of residents said they were against this development - whether it is a legitimate survey doesn’t matter. If that figure is extrapolated across the country that means tens of millions of people - voters in fact - few the same. The only mission left would be to galvanise and organise and then we go.

Not easy and time is not on our side, but we are not alone. There are more and more of us Green Belters becoming aware of what the Labour government is doing and it really is only a matter of time. Luckily, developers do not have as much free cash as they would hope and the destruction can only move slowly - plenty of time for a new government to reverse the Labour sell-out changes. And plenty of time to reverse Southend Labour’s (and the Lib Dems and Rochford and Southend Independents) betrayal of the real wants and needs of those who gave them the very powers currently being abused against us.