I just told the government to stop Dominic Cummings’s war on our planning system.
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Dear Tory Government
I am writing to object to your Planning for the Future white paper.
For starters, the introduction by Boris Johnson is as flatulent as it is untrue.
Everything he says can be turned upside down to mean the opposite.
His extended metaphor comparing the planning system to a building is pinchfart wit.
He can’t get anything right it seems. His grammatical clause that ‘as we approach the second decade of the 21st century’ is bad writing, and plain wrong. We’ve had two decades. We’re approaching the third decade of the 21st century.
But the whole document is a devil’s charter for developers. It is not about building the affordable housing so long promised and so long unforthcoming. It is about giving a green light to your developer friends to build anything they like – without check or regulation – by disempowering the public to oppose planning applications.
I have opposed developments regularly since the Tories returned to power in 2010, in Hammersmith, in Norton Folgate, at Bunhill Fields, and even right now in Arnold Circus. I have observed how arrantly miniscule you politicians seem beside your builder chums, like kids at a Monopoly board. How they must laugh at you as – again and again – they make you look like financial amateurs. For a few brown envelopes you sell your reputations, your party, your constituencies and your country to these creaming profiteroles and their remorseless projects.
We know they won’t build affordable housing. They are morally incapable of doing so.
Be warned, things are changing around the world: Greece, New Zealand, Bolivia etc.
But as PINOCHETISMO dies in Chile, all you have to offer in England is PINCHFARTISM.
Yours sincerely
Niall McDevitt
Pinchfart | Definition of Pinchfart by Oxford Dictionary on Lexico.com also meaning of Pinchfart