Closed Shop

It turns out that Natural England is to hold a conference in London later this year to determine the fate of our countryside and  much of it will be relevant to the upland and the areas around Blacka that have been subject to the (alleged) consultation of Sheffield Moors Partnership. But don’t book your train ticket yet. It’s invitation only. The unwashed, or perhaps we should be called the ‘un-brainwashed’, are to be kept out.

Outside Mt Olympus or the Pearly Gates there is nobody quite so arrogant in assuming exclusive godlike powers as the English conservation industry. They have adopted an assumption of total authority in determining the fate of our landscape according to their own terms and in their own interests. All the rest of us are outsiders denied entrance to their secret garden of Eden and its management. But if only it was an earthly paradise.  Blacka Moor has shown their corrupt vision to be anything but. Whenever they have intervened they’ve demonstrated their failure of values and management.  But possession and ownership are everything. The vested interests among  the cronies of their upper levels of management in the landowning classes have determined not just what our land must look like but how its fate is to be discussed and by whom. They are a closed shop, a cartel and thus utterly discredited. Offhand I can think of no other largely public sector vested interest that’s as unscrupulous as the combined forces of Natural England, the wildlife charities and those elements in the academic world who support them doubtless in the hope of gaining some preference.

This coming event will be on 27th March, almost exactly a year after I was asking for a similar conference to be held when I attended the Sheffield Moors Partnership’s Feedback Session. The key difference is that I was asking for a fully open and public debate but the one that’s being held will be for interested parties only who stand to gain from the funds they vote for themselves. It's a culture not far from that which gave us Libor fixing. The stated topic of the conference will be landscape scale conservation which is, in the words of one independent voice, 
…  ‘a "charter" for massive intervention management, and which of course gives a "purpose" and an income to our conservation industry.’

He goes on to say:  ‘I dread what the "shared agreed vision for large-scale conservation in England" will say, as it will be another death knell for wild nature. It won’t exactly be "shared" either!