The Challow at Newbury, the Horror at Badminton.
We were spoiled for choice on Boxing Day. A brisk day, as the traditional gathering of old friends, farmers and neighbours met to see the trail being set and the horses and the hounds move off. We’ve got mates with the Beaufort, Ledbury and Warwick, and yet more are supporters, members and neighbours in the bordering countries of the Old Berks, Vine & Craven and VWH.
At The Beaufort on Boxing Day, and I’m guessing it was not much different anywhere else, there were lots of speeches, Churchillian “Nevers!…” and “We Shall Fight them…” and words like protection, farming, tradition, rural, proportionate, food security, biodiverse, essence and character, uttered gravely.
What a load of absolute tosh.
These supporters and members and families and farmers were all standing on land owned by the estate that had just leased an enormous tranche to some foreigners to build a solar farm, which would destroy their surroundings for years and decades and centuries to come. What is even more extraordinary is that these landowners aren't stupid, and neither are their advisors. So they must know that the game plan is for large foreign conglomerates to pay large sums of money to greedy landowners (who will eventually be held to blame) to use their land. The foreigners build vast solar and wind farms on that land, which are inefficient in the first place and, for the next decade at least, near-pointless, because there is no grid capacity for storage or distribution. That, in turn, means the government, via consumers’ energy bills and direct and indirect taxation, pays the conglomerates to build the pointless monstrosity in the first place.
We have neither the steel production facilities needed to support any infrastructure development, nor the industrial base to support energy production equipment. We have nothing to scale that will be meaningfully operational for at least a decade.
So today, I’m writing an open letter to Lord Herbert to ask him, as Chair of The Countryside Alliance, to come off the fence and get a grip on this national loss of farmland and amenity.
To the Rt Hon Lord Herbert of South Downs, CBE, PC, Chairman of the Countryside Alliance.
Dear Lord Herbert,
