David Cameron's legacy: "Green vandalism driven by greed"

If there is anything David Cameron's government will be remembered for, it's the destruction of the traditional landscape in vast areas of Britain. The village of Orston in Nottinghamshire  is just one example:

The village of Orston used to be the sort of place where nothing ever happened. People liked it that way.

The most notable thing about this quiet, leafy settlement in Nottinghamshire was that the parish church had a drum from the Battle of Waterloo.

But suddenly the 450 villagers have been pitched into a battle of their own, against green energy developers.

Four industrial-scale projects including a pair of huge wind turbines are proposed for fields on the edge of Orston, just outside the village conservation area.

“This is green vandalism driven by greed,” says one local, unfolding a map in the pub, The Durham Ox. --

The battle is being fought not just in this village but across the whole of Britain. There has been a surge in such projects in recent times as companies rush to take advantage of lucrative consumer subsidies, as the Government strives to ensure that 15 per cent of Britain’s energy needs are met from renewable sources by 2020.
Last year, wind turbine owners received help amounting to £1.2 billion. That was effectively £100,000 per job in the wind farm industry, paid for by a supplement on electricity bills. The total subsidy is expected to rise to £6 billion by 2020.
Over the last few days, energy companies have warned the Prime Minister that bills will continue to rise if they have to keep paying for green subsidies and environmental taxes.
Mr Morris, 64, the former renewable energy consultant, says: “The wind turbine situation is absolutely diabolical. Anybody with a business background can look at the economics of it and see that without the subsidies it would be an absolute no-goer.”

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Sir Simon Jenkins on the uglyness of wind turbines in the English landscape

The Ardrossan wind park in Scotland. (image Wikipedia)

The British columnist, author and National Trust chairman Sir Simon Jenkins, who's book England's 100 Best Views has recently been published by Profile, explains in the Spectator why he has not included views of wind-turbine parks in his book:

I am asked how I could include the Ribblehead rail viaduct as one of the great views of England, yet not the wind-turbine arrays of Romney Marsh or Bodmin Moor. The answer is not hard. The viaduct, surely the grandest relic of the railway age and in the wildest stretch of England is less obtrusive than any turbine. It respects contour and lies in the valley bottom not the top. It is made of local grey stone and breaks no skyline. Turbines are invariably white, waving giants drawing the eye away from their surroundings. I am not insensitive to a turbine’s beauty, but the beauty of any structure must embrace its setting. I like cooling towers and even like the London Shard in an appropriate place (like Dubai). But appropriate means what it says. On Romney Marsh two dozen huge turbines now turn just a few hundred yards from the walls of the ancient town of Rye, dominating the view over the marsh. It is devastating, and all to make some local landowner a millionaire at public expense. Centuries of gently evolving landscape lie wrecked. I complained to a coalition minister and he could not see what I was talking about. These people would blow up the National Gallery if they got the chance.

What Sir Simon says about British politicians' lack of understanding for the countryside is regrettably true about politicians elsewhere, too:

Which makes even more baffling the modern politician’s lack of feel for the countryside. I doubt if Ed Miliband would recognise a blade of grass. He told his conference of something called a town’s ‘right to expand’ into the country, a right I can find in no political philosophy. David Cameron and George Osborne are no different. I enjoyed Private Eye’s spoof of them and their friends travelling to Manchester the other week by train and gazing bemused out of the window. Why were all these hills and fields and trees just lying about doing nothing, when they could be subsidised wind farms, Tesco warehouses and toytown estates?