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    Re: Legal challenge to Surrey County Council over their approval of Horse Hill oil drilling Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on November 5, 2019, 8:23 pm, in reply to "Re: Legal challenge to Surrey County Council over their approval of Horse Hill oil drilling"

    [Sigh] here we go again...

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    http://paulkingsnorth.net/2004/05/03/in-praise-of-the-nimby/

    'Since the late Nicholas Ridley, as Tory environment secretary in the late 1980s, first popularised the word, “Nimby” has been the first insult that big developers throw at their opponents. It stands for “not in my backyard” (“back garden” would be more culturally appropriate, but Nimbg wouldn’t have the same ring to it) and it suggests that opponents of roads, airports, waste facilities, mobile-phone masts and housing estates are selfish, short-sighted enemies of progress, prepared to put their narrow interests above those of wider society.

    All this, however, is the propaganda of the powerful. It is the whining of the thwarted lobby group, the frustration of the man from the ministry, brought up short in his grand designs by the tiresome objections of people who will actually have to live with them. Often, the Nimby is not the enemy of progress but its begetter. In a land, and increasingly a world, where democracy is bought and where the global trumps the local every time, the Nimbys – those prepared to defend what they know and love against the depredations of the distant and the disengaged – are the true heroes. It is they, not the housebuilders and their tame ministers, who represent the best of what democracy is about [...]

    This is becoming the struggle of the rooted against the rootless; a battle between those who believe that places matter, and those – on the left as well as the right – who see local and national geography as an embarrassing obstacle to a truly global future. [...] Each time, the rallying cry is simple, ancient and deeply democratic: Place matters. This is ours. We decide.

    The so-called Nimby, in other words, is practising the oldest form of democracy – the local variety. [...] “Not in my backyard”, then, is not a cry to be disparaged or dismissed: it is a rallying call to gladden the heart. The yard, the garden, the village green, the town square, the local plot of land, inhabited, visited and protected by those who know it, is the well from which democracy springs, and the bench at which government and its grand projects are judged. This is why politicians, housebuilders, planners, bureaucrats, civil engineers and “global citizens” everywhere hate Nimbys with such a passion. Nimbys have power, and they are not afraid to use it..'

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    'NIABY: Not In Anyone's Back Yard: term to describe opposition to land-uses which should not be allowed anywhere - for example, unregulated industrial polluters.' - https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/NIMBY_and_YIMBY_related_terms

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    Not everybody in 'Tory heartlands' votes conservative or is happy by the way they're governed. Presumably it would be better if they just kept quiet and let it happen?

    I

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