Paul Routledge – Out of the cage
ONCE upon a time, you would never have bracketed Rossington with eco-fame. It’s a former pit village pretty much off the beaten track south of Doncaster. Seeing the colliery winding gear from the East Coast Main Line always made me feel I was back home.
But that was then and this is very much now – when privatised industries are capitalising on former public assets. Land, not coal, was the chief dowry of the mining industry when it was sold off by the Tories. Its business future is zero carbon-based, you might say.
UK Coal, the current owners of defunct Rossington pit, wants to build an eco-town of 5,000 houses on the site. The idea, looked on favourably by housing minister (and local MP) Caroline Flint, has outraged local opinion. A parish opinion poll last week recorded 898 votes against EcoRossy with just 36 in favour.
So it’s going to be an uphill struggle if the Government is true to its word that eco-town developers must consult with local people before calling in the concrete pourers. Flint is also seeking to deflect criticism that the schemes will not really be green by toughening standards. All homes will have to be zero carbon-rated, one job per household must be accessible without using a car and
40 per cent of the land must be green space – half of it parks or open to the public. Further, 30 per cent of the homes must be affordable. “There will be no compromise on quality”, she insists.
All of which is not good news for UK Coal, which has already scaled back its ambitions to exploit the site. It originally proposed an eco-town of 15,000 houses, but then retreated in the face of local hostility. The company rubbished the parish poll, pointing out that it was based on the original package and therefore out of date. And only 9.6 per cent of the villagers voted.
But I detect that Tyke dander is up here. Flint has to decide on EcoRossy and nine other sites early next year. This former mining community has demonstrated that Tory voters aren’t the only ones who don’t want eco-towns – not just in their back yards, but on their former slag heaps.
MEANWHILE, just down the road in Wentworth, local government minister John Healey loudly trumpets Government plans to establish a Yorkshire and Humber regional select committee of MPs at Westminster.
“For the first time, regional policy will be the business of our national Parliament”, he asserts. What, so it was never, ever, before? That simply cannot be true. And if it ever gets off the ground – which I doubt – this body will be an otiose (as Jack Straw would say) shouting shop.
THERE must have been some who thought that sacking Rotherham MP Denis MacShane from the Foreign Office might at least have the merit of shutting him up.
Not so. More than ever, he is a semi-permanent resident of 4 Millbank daytime television studios. I don’t see Newsnight very often, but I imagine he spends his late evenings there before going home to hammer out another intense piece for the public prints. Phlegm was never his strong point, but then his origins are Polish, so he is entitled to a bit of Slav zeal.
We get even more of him up ’ere than they do down there. Scarcely had the handcuffs been clapped on Radovan Karadzic than MacShameless was dashing out his 1,200 words for the Yorkshire Post. He took not a little credit himself for this unexpected shift in Balkan politics. “For four years, I travelled to Belgrade to urge the post-Milosevic government to hunt down Karadzic and Mladic.” And he urged Gordon Brown to follow his lead.
The Prime Minister should forget his Southwold holiday and dash off to Serbia to capitalise on British political-military prestige, he demanded. A Brown visit would “face down the growing Russian efforts to meddle and thwart the efforts to bring stability and progress in nations between Greece and Austria, between the Black and Adriatic seas”, he claimed. I say, steady on old boy. Voter-whipped of Glasgow East may not find it so easy to bend Moscow to his whim.
Intriguingly, MacShane also wants an inquiry into the behaviour of British ministers and officials over their “disastrous” handling of the Balkans during the Slobodan Milosevic era. “Some of them remain close to David Cameron and remain influential in Tory foreign policy thinking”, he insists. Who are these guilty men? (I assume they are men.) Name names!
PS. And it’s about time MacShane bought that Gay Hussar lunch over the lost bet about how many votes our former man in Tashkent, Craig Murray, would get in 2005.
