If I am proud of anything in my working life, it is that I now occasionally get asked along to lend a quiet voice to activist groups, generally groups trying to protect something that someone is trying to inflict on them.
Last week, it was 100 or so people in the rather un-activist surroundings of a Ramsgate yacht club, and it is in what they are fighting that we get a compelling glimpse of just how, and for whom, modern Britain often works.
A few miles south of the town, a giant electrical cable from Suffolk is due to make its landfall in a small nature reserve called Minster Marshes, bringing with it High Voltage Direct Current electricity generated in farms in the North Sea, a share of which goes to power houses and businesses in the Thames Valley. The project is called Sea Link, and its owners are National Grid Electricity Transmission.
Best practice is to land subsea cables en masse in brownfield sites closer to where the power will be used, but that would cost NGET an increased £1.8 billion, so they don’t want to do it. There are a number of resulting issues: first, bringing a high voltage cable ashore is not just a simple job of burying a wire; Minster Marshes still hasn’t recovered from the last one that was brought in in 2016. Secondly, it will involve the building of an enormous converter station on a stunning (take it from me) re-wilded farm just behind the marshes. And when I say enormous, I mean 7 hectares (15 or so football pitches) and 28 metres high (think 10 story block of flats). Beyond that, there is all the normal infrastructure that goes with this sort of project, such as a double line of pylons.
Now, you know as well as I do that these things tend to be multi-faceted, and there are always arguments on both sides. I do not have the time, or you the patience, to go through the various arguments,(although you can always do so by googling Save Minster Marshes), save the say that there is an exquisite inevitability that this scheme will oil its way over the remaining hurdles and become reality. Because that is what is happening all over the country.
This is the reflection of a giant lie that we are living through, which goes something like this:
- We need lots of electricity so as not to degrade our standard of living, don’t we?.
- That electricity needs to be clean, doesn’t it?
- Clean electricity needs communities, and even nature reserves, to take one for the team, doesn’t it?
- So let’s have no more Nimbyism.
There are a couple of problems here, vast problematical elephants trotting around behind the sofa whose existence no one really wants to admit to. First, we cannot sustain our standard of living in the sense of the power we need to fuel it, and we shouldn’t be seeking to. We need to change. All that happens is that the fossil fuel we use directly at the moment, we will increasingly use indirectly by building turbines and letting their infrastructure smash through nature’s last strongholds. Secondly, the profit motive will always ultimately ensure that each project will probably get done in what is the cheaper way, rather than the better one. Thirdly, Messrs Milliband and Starmer, in this case, will always tell us that it is for the greater environmental good, and that we need to roll with the punches, which encourages us not to question these schemes in the first place.
We have a cosmic obligation to protect and enhance the nature that we still have. That obligation must one day override our lesser obligation to power our needy lives as we have lived them for the last forty years or so.
In other words, fight back.
Old enough to know better 