New Homes Will Create a Nightmare for Estate Residents.

 

North Staffs Green Party has joined residents in the Stoke-on-Trent community of Meir in expressing concern about the latest phase of a housing development.

Bellway Homes have lodged detailed proposals with Stoke-on-Trent City Council to build 181 homes on greenfield land off Caverswall Lane.

In late December last year Persimmon Homes were given permission by the council to build 169 homes on the site. This latest application would, if approved, extend the number to 350.

In a statement published in the Sentinel last weekend Bellway Homes say the development will deliver a range of terraced, semi-detached, and detached homes.

These, they said will be ‘sympathetically designed’ and delivered in a ‘high quality landscaped setting’ with an existing hedgerow along the eastern boundary being retained.

The original application attracted strong opposition from residents with 49 people submitting objections and a 700-signature petition against the site being developed.

Concern about access to the site has been expressed in relation to both developments, currently the only route in and out is via ‘The Wood’, although it has been suggested another route may be created.

Even were this to happen one resident told North Staffs Green Party it will still create a ‘nightmare’ on the ‘tiny streets of our estate’.

A spokesperson for North Staffs Greens said, ‘we have written to the council raising concerns about access and the fact that, again, they have opted to build on a greenfield site when there is brownfield land available’.

Research carried out for the Campaign to Protect Rural England in October last year found there is enough brownfield land available to meet the government’s objective of building 300,000 homes a year for the next five years, much of which already has planning permission [1].

The CPRE has called on the government to do more to make it attractive for developers to make use of brownfield sites. This includes making it easier to identify and analyze sites, providing funding to make doing so more affordable [2].

The spokesperson went on to say, ‘at a time when concern is growing about climate change and the rapid decline in biodiversity, we should not be developing green spaces because whatever mitigations developers put in place nature will inevitably be harmed’.

Details of the application can be found at [3], planners are due to make a decision on 23^rd November.

(Picture Credit: Jey Harvey)

 

[1]https://www.cpre.org.uk/about-us/cpre-media/enough-brownfield-land-to-meet-targets/

[2] https://www.cpre.org.uk/explainer/an-introduction-to-brownfield/

[3]https://planning.stoke.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents&keyVal=_STOKE_DCAPR_73007

 

 

 

 

 

Even by Tory Standards Taking £20 from Universal Credit Claimants is the Cruellest of Cuts.

 

All governments tend to operate with one eye on the history books in the hope they will say about them. Even more so when led, as the current one is, by a prime minister who has pretentions towards being something of a historian himself.

A little over two years in and the judgement on the Johnson government does not show signs of being a positive one.

How badly have they messed up; let me count the ways?

There’s the pandemic for a start, from day one the Johnson government has lurched from disaster to catastrophe and back again, most of them of their own making. Then there’s ‘levelling up’, that hasn’t turned out at all well with the blue paint hastily daubed over the red wall starting to look rather thin already. As for Brexit, words would fail Shakespeare were he to try and describe the mess that has turned into.

All this though pales into insignificance compared to the next mistake set to come thundering down the track. As usual it is one, they have been warned about but decided to ignore.

This time it takes the shape of the plans to remove the £20 uplift to Universal Credit introduced at the start of the pandemic and set to vanish along with the furlough scheme at the end of this month.

Figures from the Department of Work and Pensions show that 6.0 million people were claiming Universal Credit in January, a 98% increase since March last year, many of them are in work.

The UK has an enduring and shaming history of allowing too many of its people, currently 14.5 million according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, to exist, as opposed to live, below the poverty line. Even before the pandemic average incomes for people on the lowest incomes was falling behind the national average with in work poverty currently at 13%.

The root cause of this problem is a decade of ‘austerity’ driven freezes and cuts to benefits and a national living wage that is far from generous. Most families claiming Universal Credit are routinely faced with the choice between paying the bills or putting food on the table. An ugly and brutal economic trade off any decent society would have relegated to the history books long ago.

Covid-19 has taken existing inequalities and yanked the dial up to eleven, adding an uplift of £20 to the meagre amount struggling families must live on was a good thing to do, but not nearly enough to solve the problem. Snatching it away when nothing has been put in place to support them is both foolish and cruel.

Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly the government isn’t inclined to listen to any of the many voices advising a rethink. Even though one of these belongs to Iain Duncan Smith, the ‘father’ of Universal Credit.

In July he, along with five other former Tory Work and Pensions secretaries wrote to chancellor Rishi Sunak calling for the uplift to stay in place. Speaking to the BBC at the time he said that removing it would ‘damage living standards, health and opportunities’ for those most in need of help as we emerge into something more like normality.

Sadly Therese Coffey, the current incumbent, appears to be stuck in a ‘get on your bike’ 1980’s time-warp. Also speaking to the BBC earlier this week she said that losing the £20 uplift would just mean claimants needed to do ‘two hours extra work every week’ to make up the loss. Going on to airily promise that the government would do something to help them find this, after all there are always leaves and the like that need sweeping up around the estate.

Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, explained with stark simplicity how ‘a small increase in working hours will be nowhere near enough to cover the £20 a week cut’.

This is how it works, for every £1 extra they earn a Universal Credit claimant loses 63p because payments taper off, so two hours work at £8.91 each, the current National Living Wage, would be cut to £6.60, if they do enough hours to pay tax and national insurance and this falls to £4.48, add in childcare, travel, and pension contributions and this is down to £2.24. To make up the £20 pound lost it would be necessary to work for nine hours, not the two suggested by MS Coffey.

That she kept her job in Thursday’s reshuffle is sad and surprising, seemingly unthinking loyalty trumps capability. Her attitude though perfectly encapsulates that of the government of which she is a part.

Behind the ‘bumbling Boris’ persona complete with fright wig hairstyle and eccentric mannerisms is a hard right disciple of neo-liberal economics taken to the level of fundamentalism sneering for all he’s worth at the people he fooled into voting for him. Driving the project that began in 1979 to its ugly conclusions is the only objective for Johnson and his government wrecking the lives and hopes of working people are just so much collateral damage.

Even by these standards scrapping the uplift to Universal Credit is something like political and social madness. It will trap a whole generation in poverty and poor physical and mental health, potential that could have made us all richer will go to waste.

History is the court populist politicians like to appeal to claiming that it will ultimately justify their actions. If justice exists it will have only one judgement to pass on Boris Johnson and all those who are complicit in the actions of his government: guilty.

 

 

A Pincer Movement Against Our Civil Liberties.

 

The civil liberties that have always been seen as an intrinsic part of being British are under serious threat. Not, as has been the case at other times during our long history from some outside aggressor. The threat comes from our own government.

The threat comes in the shape of two bills currently grinding their way through the mills of parliament. There are, respectively, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (PCSC), and the Elections Bill.

The Elections Bill, by making it a legal requirement for people to produce photo ID before being allowed to cast their vote at a polling station will make it harder for citizens, often from communities that most need to do so, to exercise the most basic of democratic rights.

It has, according to the authors of the bill, been made necessary to do so to combat the threat posed by ‘personation’, the act of voting under a name other than your own. A crime so lacking in prevalence in the UK that most lawyers have probably never even heard of it, for the record between 2010 and 2018 just two convictions were recorded.

In an article published in The Independent this week Green Party MP Caroline Lucas identified requiring voter ID for what it was, the insidious introduction of voter suppression. A tactic to keep the poor away from the ballot box and the rich in the seats of power that disfigured US politics in the pre-civil rights era and is creeping back into some Republican states today.

Quite correctly she points out that considering turnouts in UK elections have been below 70% for the past twenty-five years, we should be encouraging people to vote; not putting barriers in their way.

The PCSC Bill will deny people in England and Wales the right to protest by using vague wording around protests that cause ‘noise’ or are ‘inconvenient’ to lower the threshold for the police to set prohibitive conditions.

Amnesty International and, in a rare break from their tiresome in-fighting the opposition Labour Party have identified this as, to quote Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner writing in the Guardian, as a ‘threat to our democracy’. Also as being likely to further entrench existing structural inequalities around race, class, and access to social and economic capital.

Taken together the PCSC and Elections Bills represent a pincer movement against our civil liberties that could kettle us, like members of one of those inconvenient protests, into a narrow and ultimately unsatisfying version of citizenship.

The assault on our freedoms has a long and inglorious pedigree, for the PCSC Bill it goes back to the Public Order Act (1986) and further, all the way back to the Peterloo massacre or the Peasant’s Revolt.  A cursory glance at the travails women went through to win the vote in the early twentieth century demonstrates all too graphically how the powers that be would rather we still lived in the days of rotten boroughs, when the lord of the manor appointed the local MP as he did the parson and expected both to do his bidding.

What should cause the most alarm is the way that the PCSC Bill manipulates moral panics, something we allegedly pragmatic Brits find all too tempting, around the threat to public order posed by groups like Extinction Rebellion. This is done through a deliberate ‘othering’ of protesters, separating them from a ‘hardworking’ and biddable silent majority.

This is a blatant distortion of the truth, there are no separate categories for ‘protesters’ and the ‘people’; protesters are the people. Any one of us, at any moment, might be driven to protest when we encounter something we cannot countenance and retain either our principles or our personal autonomy.

There is also a deliberate, they all did PPE at Oxbridge, misunderstanding of the nature of protest itself. To have anything like meaning protest must be noisy and disruptive to wake the wider population from the slumber it has been lulled into.

If we the people allow the rights our forefathers and foremothers fought for, and in the case of women are still fighting for in many ways today, we risk being inducted against our will into a painfully narrow world. One where the only roles open to us are those of producer and consumer, both involving being shackled to a treadmill forcing us to strive endlessly after the false needs created for us by those who own the means of production.

Any ‘safety’ from threats imagined or real this provides would be entirely illusory because it works to deny what Marx termed as our ‘species being’, that sense of purpose and autonomy entirely outside our utility to the economy that is intrinsic to being fully human.

Instead of a spurious safety we should instead embrace the noisy, sometimes dangerous and, to those who hold the levers of power, almost always inconvenient thing called freedom.

The best place to start would be by protesting however we can and whenever we can against these two fundamentally illiberal pieces of legislation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill Will Silence the Voice of Dissent Just When We Need It Most

 

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill currently making its way through parliament will change how policing in England and Wales works and has the potential to damage our democracy [5].

Provisions made in the bill give the police greater powers to impose conditions on peaceful demonstrations that are deemed to be ‘inconvenient’.

This has emboldened the police in some parts of England to use their existing powers in ways that can be viewed as oppressive and feeds an existing, though often unacknowledged culture of abuse and intimidation in our political culture.

Activists from campaign groups in the Stoke-on-Trent area have experienced this culture of intimidation and abuse at first hand. In a blog article published in June this year local anti-racist group NORSCARF described Stoke North MP Jonathan Gullis using his social media presence ‘to build a rhetoric of racism and disdain towards just about any group of people or issue which doesn’t sit well with his particular brand of Conservative Britain’ [1].

Members of the ‘Stop the Stink’ campaign against air pollution from Walley’s Quarry in Silverdale have expressed concern over being visited by officers from Staffordshire Police who warned them they could be arrested if they blocked the gates to the quarry as part of their protest.

Protester Audrey Young told the Sentinel "I had a visit from the police saying I would get arrested if I blocked the gates. I can't block the gates - but Walley’s can gas my family."

Mavis Cooper, another Silverdale resident protesting about the stink said about the tactics used by Staffordshire Police “It’s just not on. They shouldn’t have gone round to people’s houses and called on them when they’ve done nothing wrong”.

She added, “I don’t want to protest, but I’ve got to live with that smell. It’s every day. I’m not very impressed. They’ve got more important things to do.”

Staffordshire Police, also speaking to the Sentinel, said officers had visited people previously involved in blocking access to the quarry to advise them that blocking the public highway was an offence that could lead to arrest.

They went on to say that “Staffordshire Police takes its role in facilitating peaceful protests seriously and works hard to find the right balance for all involved” [4]

In a string of Facebook posts and videos Mr Gullis has made comments about immigration, the Black Lives Matter movement and a ‘woke’ culture with which he is almost comically at odds. NORSCARF describe these as being ‘clearly designed to stir up division and hatred’.

They go on to say that views in combination with his voting record in parliament, which shows him consistently voting against measures to prevent climate change and in favour of a stricter asylum system [2], show a ‘blatant pandering towards right-wing and far-right ideals’.

A video posted on Gullis’s Facebook site shows him making a speech supporting the protest against the notorious ‘stink’ from Walley’s Quarry in Silverdale [3], despite his having supported the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that could see such protests ruled to be illegal.

Human Rights charity Liberty have described the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill as containing a ‘concerted attack on the right to protest’, arrived at through extending police powers that are already extensive and creating new offences that target ‘the manner, the method, the location and even the volume of demonstrations’.

This will, they say, have a serious impact on minority and marginalized communities and imperil ‘deeply cherished principles of freedom of assembly and expression’ and restrict dramatically the use of ‘vital tool and mechanism available to citizens of democratic countries to stand up to the State and make their voices heard’ [6].

Speaking in relation to the ‘over policing’ of protests following the murder of Sarah Everard on Clapham Common in March this year Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK said: “Temporary restrictions on our civil liberties during a time of pandemic are one thing - but a law that permanently restricts the right to peaceful protest is totally unacceptable”.

She went on to say that the bill could make such scenes the ‘new normal’ when it comes to how protests are policed, adding that "The Bill itself is so broad in scope that it is a threat to everybody. Threatening the rights to peaceful protest is only one alarming area of new policing powers, others relate to stop and search or restricting the rights to roam will only further entrench racism and discrimination within the criminal justice system” [7].

Oliver Johnson, a member of the Staffordshire Kill the Bill Alliance described being initially welcomed to speak at a ‘Stop the Stink’ protest outside Newcastle-under-Lyme Civic Centre by Conservative MP for the area Aaron Bell and members of the borough council.

However, “At the first mention of "Kill the PCSC bill" Mr bell immediately began shaking his hands and saying "No, not now". In my opinion Bell was protecting his hypocrisy”.

One local councillor, Oliver Johnson said called him "a disgrace" and said it was "not the time", he went on to say he feels there is more than a little disingenuous in the same councillor “now attacking Bell over the PCSC bill”.

 

He adds that the KTB Alliance understand and respect the wish of people living near to Walley’s Quarry not to have their campaign politicised, saying “The solidarity shown by the community of Silverdale really has inspired me and their right to peacefully protest should be protected”.

 

He adds that however, “what is happening at Whalley’s quarry now is a perfect example of what could happen when the bill is passed. Big businesses using the police to protect their nefarious interests”.

 

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is the latest stage in an assault on our rights as citizens of a functioning democracy, rights that, as Kerry-Anne Mendoza writes in her powerful critique of our current economic and social situation ‘Austerity’ (2015) are, along with adequately funded public services and a humane welfare system ‘incompatible with the neoliberal political and economic paradigm’.

 

Mendoza describes how over close to forty years beginning with the Public Order Act (1986) and progressing through moral panics over anti-social behaviour and manipulation of the threat posed by terrorism successive governments have chipped away at our freedoms. This, through the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) and other pieces of legislation a bewildering array of crimes and punishments have been created, for the purpose of constraining the ability of the public to hold those in power to account [8].

 

In each instance the method used had been the same, a moral panic has been created around an issue such as anti-social behaviour or terrorism and this has been used to justify an ever more draconian response. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, will, if passed into law, continue this dispiriting race to illiberalism.

 

The media have largely ignored the threat it poses to civil liberties and the official opposition have proved to be either impotent or implicated in allowing it to pass unchecked into law, depending on your view of their actions. That makes engaging in peaceful protest, either against the bill itself or other issues on which it would silence we the people, even more important.

 

As we emerge from restrictions on our behaviour brought in during the pandemic the ability of the public to protest is under threat like never before. Our leaders have shown themselves to be unwilling to relinquish their enhanced powers to control our lives. At a time when it needs to be heard most, they are using this bill to try and silence the voice of dissent once and for all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] https://norscarf.wordpress.com/2021/06/27/jonathan-gullis-mp-stokes-man-of-the-people-or-loud-mouthed-racist/

[2] https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/25898/jonathan_gullis/stoke-on-trent_north/votes

[3] https://www.facebook.com/799676273759668/videos/206492181454483

[4] https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/police-issue-arrest-warning-walleys-5831191

[5] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-crime-sentencing-and-courts-bill-2021-factsheets/police-crime-sentencing-and-courts-bill-2021-overarching-factsheet

[6] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Libertys-Briefing-on-the-Police-Crime-Sentencing-and-Courts-Bill-HoC-2nd-reading-March-2021-1.pdf

[7] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-policing-bill-will-normalise-dangerous-over-policing-peaceful-protesthttps://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-policing-bill-will-normalise-dangerous-over-policing-peaceful-protest

[8] Chapter 11 Civil liberties, human rights, and democracy, in Mendoza K, (2015), Austerity: The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy, Oxford, New Internationalist, pp:146-171

The Time Has Come to Take Action to Protect the Trees That Protect Us.

 

Familiar trees including Oak and Maple are among almost eighteen thousand species of trees under threat of extinction experts have warned [1].

The Global Tree Assessment draws on the work of 500 experts representing 61 organizations and brings together data on the status and health of trees gathered globally.

The picture it paints is a decidedly gloomy one, 142 species of tree have already vanished from the wild and 422 are on the brink of extinction. Altogether 30% of the world’s 60,000 identified tree species are under threat.

Trees are coming under pressure from forest clearance for agriculture and development, extreme weather and rising sea levels caused by climate change are also significant threats.

Conservation groups are calling for governments around the world to take action to halt the decline in tree species.

The actions required include preserving and strengthening protection for existing forests, creating seed banks to protect threatened species, and providing more funding for tree planting schemes.

Speaking to the BBC Sara Oldfield from the Global Tree Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature said that trees have a “unique ecological role to play”, adding that “With 30% of the world's tree species threatened with extinction, we need to urgently scale-up conservation action."

The World Meteorological Organization recently released data showing that the number of weather-related disasters has increased five-fold over that past half century.

Climate change has been cited as a major contributing factor, particularly in developing countries where deforestation has been prevalent [2]. It has also been linked to a rise in temperatures across Europe described as ‘troubling’ by the American Meteorological society [3].

Land temperatures in 2020 were more than 1.9C above the long-term average for the period between 1981 and 2010, making them the highest since records began in 1900, temperatures in the Arctic were also found to be rising rapidly.

In August Dr Robert Dunn a senior climate scientist at the UK Met Office told the BBC the rise in land temperatures were something to “sit up and take notice of, but it's not just the temperatures that are increasing, the extreme events, the heat waves we're seeing this year, and last year as well. We're seeing these responses across the world."

Forests, along with peatlands and other habitats have a vital role to play mitigating and possibly reversing the harm done by climate change; but they need to be protected. This is an effort in which national government, local authorities, communities, and individuals have a role to play.

In Stoke-on-Trent a small, but determined, group of volunteers supported by but not linked to the city council are setting up a network of Tree Wardens [4] to protect, enhance and promote the trees and woodland in our area. We are looking for like minded supporters with a few hours a month to spare to join our team.

For further information contact:

Adam Colclough

Email: colclougha@aol.com

Mobile: 07776432636

 

 

 

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58394215

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58396975

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58333124

[4] https://treecouncil.org.uk/take-action/tree-wardens/