I try to give Rye’s Own an article every other month. The obvious subject for the May 2006 issue was the Rye Marina as last week’s Rye Observer had announced that the Millward Homes Development Plan had been kicked off the Rother Local Plan. But so murky is the planning process that nobody has much idea what this means in practice. So instead I cribbed some remarks about planning from John Papworth’s Purton Today and wrapped it inside an article entitled Real Local Power. Here is is the start of the 1375-word article that went off to Rye’s Own at midday today.
Most small towns in England have a local environment group. Here in Rye it is the Rother Environmental Group looked after by Christopher Strangeways. They brought the Wednesday Farmers’ Market to Rye. One vital function performed by these environmental groups is to monitor planning. No subject breeds more copious paperwork. A few paragraphs later I introduced Woking’s carbon emissions strategy. Here is most of the rest of the article.
Woking Borough Council calculated that in 1990 their population of ninety thousand souls emitted collectively a million tons of carbon dioxide. They read the report by The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and decided to see if they could reach the report’s targets by reducing these emissions by eighty percent. They never asked anyone’s permission. Who’s business is it other than their own? They just went ahead.
Woking did not feel the need for a Kyoto Treaty with Wokingham. Nobody came up with the idea of a Carbon Emission Trading Exchange for Berkshire. There were no thoughts that their share of the sixty billion pounds promised for cleaning up Nuclear Power Plants should be diverted to a County Fund for Countering Global Warming…as James Lovelock has proposed. They just had a few bright people think about the local problem of carbon emissions and come up with a local plan and a local strategy to reduce their own pollution to 200 000 tons.
One key element in Woking’s local plan is to convert the town to combined heat and power sources of energy. How can a town do such a thing? Actually quite easily. The economies of scale are one of the myths of our age. Producing your own power is much more efficient than taking electricity from the National Grid. Most fuel cells run on hydrogen but there are some that convert natural gas to energy at the cost of little more than a conventional boiler. Gas consumption is unchanged but electricity is generated as a byproduct. There are 25 million households in this country and British Gas who will be backing the Ceres micropower initiative reckons two thirds of them are suitable for these home micro-power plants…like disconnecting your BT landline and going with Skype.
Buying electricity from unscrupulous foreign-based intermediaries and letting the French off the pollution hook by paying rigged prices for the surplus nuclear electricity they clandestinely pipe through the Channel Tunnel is a mug’s game. Rye does not need to play. After all, what is best? A small group in Rye battling for the public weal or a small group in positions of power (presumed to be) battling for it for the nation at large?
The Rye Town Region has a tenth the population of Woking so our carbon dioxide emissions will be around 100 000 tons per year. The town should reduce this to 10 000 tons. That will bring in tourists from all around the world to find out how we did it. Next year’s Independent Rye Town Council should join with other like-minded town councils in associations like the South East Climate Change Partnership to claim back real Local Public Powers over airborne pollution as an extension of their responsibility for land-bourne pollution such as sewerage.
Rye Town Council already has the right to be consulted on planning matters. The new council should not feel itself limited to reclaiming old powers that have fallen into disuse. It should get ahead of the game and start wielding Future Public Powers locally. It should insist that Planning Applications within the town…and by agreement with the surrounding parishes also within the Rye Town Region…comply with Rye Local Plan Carbon Emission Targets. One of the golden rules of power is that it must be won. Sometimes this can be done without a fight.
Christopher Strangeways may have missed out by 111 votes in the May 2006 elections but his slate of a couple of dozen new local candidates from an Independent Democratic Rye Party should be a shoo-in 12-months hence when all sixteen council seats are up for grabs. It is time that Rye once again had a local scene of disinterested and dedicated citizens devoting their lives to making things better for the people in Rye and her surrounding parishes.
As such people start to acquire real power to make real decisions on local affairs…rather than to serve on powerless committees…so they will involve more and more local people in their work and the present cult of passivity in politics will start to change. When asked how to invigorate democracy my thoughts never turn to Messrs. Blair-Brown, Cameron or anyone up there to tell us local people how to run our local matters. ‘What do you thing of John Major?’ my mother once asked me. ‘I don’t think of John Major,’ was my response. Instead here in Rye…and in all the other Ryes around the country…I turn to good people like Sonia Holmes, John Izod, Jo Kirkham, Christopher Strangeways and others whom I know can be trusted.
