All across the country there is a pattern of local democracy being overridden in the name of things we allegedly need.
Lately, I am awoken to the scrapings of a giant digger illegally working a few yards from a site of special scientific interest, with features of unique ecological importance, that is supposed to be protected, but isn’t. The developers must have been given the nod because they are working even as a special inquiry is in progress making the exercise look more like protecting backsides than protecting the environment.
If we were asked to choose between our house overshadowed by a giant data-centre – so that we could have a chatbot to answer our questions – or no data-centre, we’d all choose the latter. For those of us who picked our homes for quietude in our gardens, we’d all choose not to be enveloped by the textbook urban blight of 1200 concrete homes over our rolling green hills.
The government should not place itself on the wrong side of local democracy and local need. When authority rides roughshod over local interest and local need, they increase the sense of profound alienation that already grips the country and they invite, and frankly incite, higher levels of activism rather than participation. It’s been brewing for decades.
The good people of Devon are rightly furious that they weren’t told for a year that secret plans were proceeding for a giant data-centre to be dumped on their pristine moorland. The council in Slough voted against a data-centre, but central government overruled them. The good people of Scotland are waking up to the fact that their energy and water are going to be taken for massive new humming data-centres (for England) the size of several large cathedrals.
We need to prioritise quality of life over the race to be economically profitable and relevant. You can’t have economic security if the price is the end of the weakened gulf stream and temperatures plummeting in Europe and ever more violent storms.
It suits those in pursuit of profit to call local opposition NIMBYism (‘not in my back yard’), but perhaps NiMBYIsm multiplied thousands of times isn’t so much a plea for local humanity as a national plea for less brutal inhumanity from government elected to, please, protect us, not bully us.
Read about the proposed North Devon data centre here: https://westcountryvoices.co.uk/this-is-a-bonkers-proposal-for-a-vast-energy-guzzling-water-wasting-ai-data-centre-covering-hundreds-of-acres-of-land-thats-totally-unnecessary/
