If the headcases are going to impose educational, green belt, and looser planning controls on business in our communities, what’s the point of Eric Pickles?

Mr Pickles demonstrates his Communities philosophy

Following on from yesterday’s Slogpost about Adolf Gove and his Stoke Poges experiment in educational isolationism, The Independent also had a great piece yesterday about the Education Secretary’s dreams of selling the schools system to business. There’ll be more on this later – it’s really just another strain of the privatisation of politics. But given my own passion for real devolution to the community – and away from Westminster/Whitehall pestilence – I think we have to ask ourselves, given the ConDemned don’t give a toss about localism and the preservation of life-quality, whether there is any point at all in having someone using up the already crowded space around the Cabinet table. Especially when that someone is the size of Eric Pickles.

A little bit of history

Just as those in the Commons Bubble have lost the plot about who they should serve (us, not monied influence and grubby lobbyists) some forty years ago the UK’s food manufacturing sector did the same thing: they replaced a focus on the end-consumer with one on the rapidly-growing multiple grocery trade. So too did extensive farmers.

The result is that today, we have a busted, dwindling agricultural base and almost all of our major food companies have been sold to foreign owners. The big boys – Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Morrisons – have gone on to bigger things, chiefly the ruination of town cultures by bribing local officials to allow planning permission for new stores. Local farming, local retailers, and community variety have been replaced by a huge food imports bill, empty high streets full of charity shops, and compromised environments…with frequent blatant disregard for local planning rules. We have replaced a manufacturing base adding to our exports with mass distribution networks adding to our imports.

Big business, Westminster, corrupt local officials and Lobbyists are to blame for this. It was a terrible mistake that nobody now wants to discuss – except saddos like me.

Community – what community?

If the community’s supply chain has been sold to multinational nutters, and Camerlot is routinely ignoring Green Belt and planning laws to exacerbate the problem, what is the point of having a Communities Secretary?

Eric Pickles has been handling this ‘job’ now for just over three years. His main contribution to an improved community environment has been not falling and thus causing a potentially devastating earthquake. He has made no impact at all on the persistent problem of paedophiles holding influential positions in the areas of childcare, care homes, and schools.

Earlier this year, Pickles said that when Romanians and Bulgarians gain the right to live and work in the UK any “influx” would cause housing problems. There’s no chance of an outflux re this one, but his comments have made no difference to Camerlot policy. He told the Beeb that he “didn’t want to start a scare story”. Why not? We don’t have room for them, so why not raise the alarm?

In September last year, the Balloonist warned that he would strip local councils of their planning powers and hand them to a centralised planning inspectorate if “they continue to be slow” – aka, continue to be soft on building permissions as the Camerlot payback for a £3.5m donation from the UK construction industry. So, the Romas are coming and isn’t it terrible – we better f**k up some more communities.

Last week, he dutifully gave Osborne his required budget cuts, and received a sarcastic pat on the head for his trouble.

Is Eric there for the citizens or for the developers? Is he there for the parents or the paedophiles? Silly questions really.

Dump the Giant Pickle

We should abolish Defra, Communities Secretaries, and Localism steering committees. They should be rebranded, respectively, Housing & Badger Gassing, Multinational Facilitation, and Globalism.

But if Eric loses his job, we must be careful to restrict his freedom to travel. If he visited Greece, for example, the combination of him and Venizelos might be the tipping point, and turn the Hellenic Republic into a new Atlantis. In the European theatre, in fact, the same sort of crushed independence and globalist spin is being applied as the model for media development. As this extract from the failedevolution blog observes:

“Neoliberal dictatorship will try to erase the independent voice of public broadcasters in Europe – through the Greek experiment – and dictate a Too Big to Fail model for the largest private media, following the same pattern applied on the banking sector, in order to erase the independent information in maximum degree. The next big step will be to find a way to control the independent Internet information, in order to complete its domination.”

Hard to argue with him, in my view. And on that cheery note, we move onwards and upwards to the next example of plot-loss bollocks.

Last night at The Slog: Why positive revolutions begin from the bottom up