The Jewel In The Mud Award

This issue’s selected gem from the muddy media waters was written by Charles Clover, editor of the Daily Telegraph, and published in the Spectator at the end of last year. Charles, it seems, is an ardent supporter of Newbury’s eco-activists.

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pg. 57.

Last week I walked nine miles of England which will soon be altered forever. Tree-felling could begin any day on the Newbury bypass, the most contentious road scheme in Britain. I went there, on a clear September morning, to form a first-hand view of the road, prepared if necessary to take the side of the residents of Newbury, smothering in traffic fumes and driven mad by a claimed 50,000 vehicles a day, against the young protesters already sleeping in tree houses on Snelsmore common. I went prepared to be dispassionate, balanced, analytical, and I came back appalled.

One has to walk the proposed route for the significance of the forth-coming battle - and there will be a battle, no doubt of that - to sink in. For the saga of the Newbury bypass is about more than just a road. It is not just about transport policy - whether to drive or not to drive, which is contentious enough. It raises questions about whether we place sufficient value on our country’s human and natural history, which is all that distinguishes these islands from anywhere else.....

It is where the route charges on raised embankments 200 metres wide across the Kennet and Avon canal, the River Kennet, its minor channels and water meadows that any misgivings one might have suppressed until then turn to outright dismay. The Kennet and its tributary the Lambourn are among the most beautiful, unpolluted, unspoiled rivers in England. English Nature is in the process of designating them as sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) for the fine coarse fish, brown trout, rare waterweeds and mayflies they contain. Neither of these designations existed at the time of the 1988 public inquiry. In any case being an SSSI is no protection of the landscape, which will now be filled with the howl of vehicles at over 70 mph. Sadly, only anglers get to see this lovely section of the river which is owned by Sir Richard Sutton. We trespassed on an anglers’ path. Sutton Estate which objected to the road at the public inquiry is now turning loss into profit by winning permission to quarry gravel for the road from under the meadows. They have also lodged an application to build 1,200 -1,500 houses on land cut off by the bypass.....

What the Newbury bypass will trash is more extensive than at Twyford Down, the green hill outside Winchester sliced in half by the M3..... Many people, including myself, misjudged the battle of Twyford Down. The road-builders were confronted by an alliance of ordinary people - from colonels to new-age travellers - who hadn’t followed the legal niceties but who felt that this road would destroy a part of England they would rather not lose. Road-building has the ability to bring out a love of land in the strangest people.

The same thing is now happening at Newbury..... There are two camps of educated young people, mostly in their twenties, around Newbury, one on Snelsmore Common where the protesters’ camp 70ft up in ash and oak trees. They cook food and socialise in ‘benders’, gypsy shelters made of tarpaulins stretched across bent hazel branches. There is a man digging a tunnel which will cave in killing him and anyone else foolhardy enough to use it if heavy machinery moves on to the common. People are ready to die for this land.

How did this route get approved in the first place? The answer is that, under the rules that prevailed in 1988 it stood no chance of being turned down. At the time of the public inquiry no Department of Transport inspector had ever turned down a road scheme on the grounds that it was likely to be environmentally damaging. The Department was then, as the Highways Agency still is, a great unanswerable conspiracy for spending our money on roads, based on the dodgy assumption that because people buy cars that entitles the Department to build roads over other people’s land.

In the case of the Newbury bypass an inadequate environmental assessment was carried out (the subject of a complaint pending with the EU). The statutory conservation bodies knew better than to challenge the Department which had carried all before it for 30 years. Having overlooked bat roosts and dormice colonies in the path of the road - species supposed to enjoy protection under EU law - English Nature actually helped the contractors, Mott-Macdonald, to move the dormice and to identify the trees where the bats lived - the best mature trees - so they could be cut down.....

What riles people is the degree of deceit, humbug and vote-buying on an 18th century scale that has gone into justifying this road..... Local Tories, Liberal Democrats and Labour are locked into a mantra which forces them to support the bypass..... And what was Dr Brian Mawhinney doing, giving the bypass his blessing as the final act as Transport Secretary on the very afternoon of the July reshuffle in which he became Tory chairman?

If this road is built it will be the death of all I grew up to believe was England; fairness, its sense of landscape, history and nature. If he is the man I think he is, the bicycling Transport Secretary Sir George Young will simply let the Newbury bypass fall off the list in the autumn spending cuts. But if he builds the road I will have no hesitation in standing on Snelsmore Common in front of the bulldozers myself. And there will be plenty of Sir George Young’s former fellow-members of Friends of the Earth beside me. It will be a memorable fight.