DEMOCRACY BRINGS: Rotten Rule from Right Wing Conservative and Labour Councils and Governments

1. Fully support the UK's 8 tax havens for the super-rich to maintain their greed and selfishness.
2. For 40 years, this year, have unanimously supported the reinstatement of their earlier obliteration of the tram network by putting it on the railway network that they also destroyed with the trams and, with the bizarre conviction, that cars, vans, lorries, homes, offices and shops must run down the railway lines but never ever trains.
3. Since 2009 have fully supported the move for frequent flyers to have the option of flying through the air on land, as well as the air, by the gift of High Scam 2 that only stops at the Four Big Cities and two of their airports.  Some High Scam trains may also stop at Crewe, Toton, Chesterfield and Sheffield.
4. Fully supported their friends who, in the 90s and 00s, fought against allowing Dudley Muslims from upgrading their Central Mosque from an externally shabby Grade 2 listed primary school building into a purpose-built mosque that would also have been available for the rest of the non-Muslim community.
5. This is now the fifth decade of every MP and every councillor of every party, except the one-term Green Party councillor, who have all wanted and fully supported NOT the reinstatement of Dudley Castle Hill railway station to finish the already built, 120  Kms (74 miles) principal, mainline Black Country Railway but, wait for it, a piddling little tram stop, of all things!!
6. Yet, many want city status for Dudley borough.  A city for the largest town in the UK without a railway station!
7. Following the very bad example of Wyre Forest DC in wasting resources and adding to the runaway greenhouse effect, Dudley MBC is also moving their 1980s (?) and popular leisure centre all of one kilometre from the edge of town to the centre of town!
8. These right-wing politicians and planners think this is the best way to regenerate Dudley town centre - with tram stops and a brand new leisure centre - rather than highly energy efficient, small to moderate-sized homes that are very cheap to heat, have PV solar and allow the countryside to be used for farming to feed us all.
9. Trams to have more Dudley shoppers shopping at Merry Hill instead of in their own shops.
10. One billion pounds of greenhouse gases is being built, not to insulate every building in the borough but to bring glitzy, glamorous, over-indulgent, super-flash, wealth flaunting everything else.  Super immature, super-dopey and misguided.
11. No cycle-walkway on even one side of Duncan Edwards Way.  Only a tramway next to the important, wasted railway line!
12. The 22 Kms Black Country Cycle-Walk Mudway remains just that!

USA's "huge stimulus programme", "go big" (Today News, 23.6.21) fueling inflation and fueling the runaway greenhouse effect for earth to follow venus

USA's "huge stimulus programme", "go big" (Radio 4 'Today' News, 23.6.21) fueling inflation and fueling the runaway greenhouse effect for earth to follow venus

Kate Raworth, like many others, has highlighted how economic growth has brought and is worsening the climate, ecological, nature emergency.   In brief, economic growth = living infinitely in a finite world and living unnaturally in a natural world.  Very foolish!  Economic growth has brought so many untold blessings with prosperity for the majority.  However, it is a mixed blessing and we are seeing the downside, the curse of human-induced climate catastrophe unfolding, while we all carry on regardless with business as usual.

Paul and Simon Chief Exec, Paul Robinson (probinson@worcestershire.gov.uk) and the WCC leader, Cllr Simon Geraghty (SGeraghty@worcestershire.gov.uk) are part of the greater West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) that has just seen its fifth anniversary, last week.  The CA is continuing with everything that is bringing us down.  An official £1.3 billion is being spent right now by our leaders on all the wrong priorities: with Metro "bus on rails" trams replacing buses on roads and, replacing trains.  70 years of turning our railways into roads and buildings; now, with the 40th anniversary of Metro, 40 years of roads being turned into railways and railways into tramlines in the Black Country and Birmingham!  This includes our own Worcester, Kiddi, Dudley, Walsall, Lichfield, Derby principal, mainline railway being broken up into heavy rail (HR), light rail Metro (LR), very light rail (VLR) test track and the ultra-light rail, Stourbridge Shuttle extension proposal - all, would you believe, on a mainline railway between Derby and Devon via Dudley!!

Midlands Connect and the Black Country Chamber of Commerce have NOT withdrawn their support for the 87 Km, 8 lane, Western Orbital Motorway to complete the Midlands motorway box.  They started a campaign three or four years ago, according to the 'Express and Star' report I saw at the time.  Yet more of nature turned into concrete, brick and tarmac when we humans are part of nature!

All this work and much more is great for economic growth but disastrous for the future of humanity and all life on earth.  I would like us to question them about these matters and, of course, those of local concern to the Wyre Forest area - housing, open space and active (fossil fuel-free or more human-powered) travel on public rights of way (not just tarmac!).

To Wyre Forest Green Alliance

Thanks for organising yesterday's excellent workshop.  It has prompted these thoughts.  Could this be forwarded to the others who attended, please so I get their comments?

I think we must fight doughnutty, weird and wonderful priorities:

1. The authorities (Midlands Connect/WMCA and the Black Country Chamber of Commerce) want the 87 Kms Western Orbital Motorway instead of the Kiddi, Dudley, Walsall, Derby mainline railway finished with passenger and freight trains and Railfuture's nine stations.  They are destroying the railway with their "bite-sized chunks" of trams, Very Light Rail (VLR) test track and the National VLR Innovation Centre yet, saying all the time, that they actually want the trains and stations back!
2. WFDC and WCC are non-constituent members of the WMCA, if I remember correctly.  Therefore, they are supporting the disastrous, greenhouse gas-emitting, showpiece, grossly extravagant, Metro "bus on rails" trams, instead of electric buses on roads and trains back on existing, mothballed railway lines.
3. Regenerating Kiddi and Dudley town centres are not giving small to medium-sized, Passivhaus standard housing as their top priority.  They should be, I think if they are responding to their self-declared climate emergencies.
4. Keith helpfully told us that housing is being put outside the doughnut (Kiddi town), instead of in the centre of it where the empty retail units are.  Can Keith write who highlighted this, perhaps?
5. Failing to put cycle-walkways alongside main roads, eg Dudley Southern Bypass.  What can be done in Kidderminster?
6. My suggestions, here are green growth to counter economic growth that spurs greenhouse gas emissions.
7. Can Worcs CC and Shropshire CC, with our writing in support, appeal to walkers (like me who has promised £1,000 towards the proposed R Rea footbridge near Marlbrook, nr Mamble) to sponsor a stile/gate, footbridge, favourite path?  The authorities have very little money for their maintenance, so we are very slowly losing the right to roam on our rights of way.

Are there any comments, feedback, agreement, even support that others would like to give me, please?