When word hit the streets in June that the schemes were set to get the go-ahead, campaigners wasted no time in taking to the woods. Braving torrential thunder storms and a lack of fresh water supplies, they established a camp deep in the woods on Tortington Common which soon attracted national media attention - hardly anyone can have missed it. Then at the last minute, and against all expectations, the Government dropped its support for the Arundel and Worthing bypass schemes. What a pleasure to see the boot on the other foot for a change and the road lobby freaks left frothing at the mouth in dismay!
Arundel and South Downs MP Howard Flight was certainly caught by surprise, having sent out a statement to local press a couple of days before the announcement welcoming ‘the Government announcement to proceed with a bypass for Arundel’. Mr Flight, as a convicted speeding offender, was no doubt gutted that he couldn’t look forward to racing up and down the new road at 100mph on flying visits to his adoring constituents. A hint as to the reasons why the Government backed down in West Sussex, while ploughing ahead with road plans elsewhere in the country, came in a report on the Evening Standard website on the morning of the announcement (July 9). Written before the decision was revealed, and seemingly expecting the Arundel road to be given the green light, it commented: "The Government will be desperate to avoid clashes with committed activists such as ‘Swampy’ - so-called ‘king of the eco-warriors’. It is still nervous of provoking the kind of confrontations that created ugly scenes at Twyford Down and the Newbury bypass in the late nineties." We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: direct action works!
Those brave few who took to the woods at Arundel for the sake of the watermeadows and the woodlands deserve the thanks of all of us who value Sussex and want it to be remain something other than a vast grey desert of ring roads, superstores and ugly commuter housing estates. And if these road schemes aren’t sneaked back onto the agenda at a later date, as the campaigners fear (but don’t worry, they’re ready to take up the fight again!), the plucky Arundel road protesters could well be the toast of Sussex country lovers for generations to come!
* On Saturday August 9 a celebration walk will be held on the route of the now-rejected Arundel bypass. This will also serve to urge the area’s re-inclusion in the National Park proposed area and declare the intention to fight any future resurrection of the scheme as a result of pressure from road lobby interests. Meet outside Ford railway station at 1.15pm (direct trains from Worthing, Brighton, London and elsewhere). Warning: this may well end up in a pub!
More info:
www.freewebs.com/arundelbypass
Option 1) Householders ensure maximum collection efficiency by, on their allocated day, taking all rubbish to a new special pick-up point at the civic amenity site in Dominion Way, between 1.30am and 4.30am. From there it will be collected and taken to the civic amenity site in Dominion Way.
Option 2) Householders take all rubbish out into the street in front of their homes and tip it out on to the roadway. Passing traffic will scatter the refuse and it will be harmlessly absorbed into the urban environment! The great thing about both these options is that they involve no cost whatsoever to the council, leaving it free to spend money on more pressing issues such as Sheila Player’s expense account and £32,000 a year pensions for life for ex chief executives. And all for a council tax increase of just 18%. Unbeatable value!
Also, a number of readers contacted us to report bad experiences of the drug within their families. Wrote one woman: "I had my own nightmare experience when I was prescribed these for some months a couple of years or so ago - the side effects were absolutely awful and trying to come off them was even worse. I went cold turkey in the end (exactly what you’re not meant to do) and came off them, thank god."
Another reader told us: "My daughter was a victim of Seroxat - starting off two years ago with an average case of post-natal depression - and against my fervent advice she went to her GP who prescribed Seroxat and within days she was seriously suicidal. Every time she went back to the doctors and later psychiatrists they prescribed more of it and she and baby finally finished up in a ‘clinic’ where she was for 18 weeks completely mad - suicidal most of the time - sometimes so seriously that she had to be incarcerated and on one-to-one watch.
"During all of her time under psychiatrists and in the clinic it was only I who said ‘she’s reacting to the drug’ to which they said: ‘Nonsense it’s quite safe and it makes people well - it’s her illness that’s making her suicidal so she needs more of it’. They finally put her up to the highest dose a psychiatrist can legally prescribe and when she went completely screaming smash-up-your-room crazy they said that it ‘wasn’t working’ - not that she was having an adverse reaction, which was my claim. They then withdrew her from it in five days!
"My daughter’s anxiety went off the planet and she nearly did kill herself. It has also taken her a very long time to recover from having her mind taken over by something completely foreign to her own nature. I have finally persuaded her to take legal action against GlaxoSmithKline."
* If you have been affected by Seroxat and would like to join in a group legal action against GlaxoSmith Kline, contact solicitors Hugh James on 0800 1383178 or go to www.hughjames.info There is a time limit, so get in touch as soon as you can.
* IDENTITY cards will be compulsory for everyone and it will cost nearly £40 each to get one, the Government has decided (Sunday Times, July 6). "Each card will contain biometric data, such as an image of a person’s iris or fingerprint" and "the government will hold information on the population on a central computer database". Home Sec David Blunkett was quoted as saying: "There is a highly organised minority who will campaign vocally against a scheme". Not as highly organised and not so much of a minority as the people who are bringing it in, though...
* REGIONAL states of emergency with special draconian police powers will be possible for very little reason if the government’s draft civil contingencies bill goes ahead (The Guardian, June 20). The frightening state powers would include "allowing police to order evacuations, confiscate property and animals without compensation, ban demonstrations and travel and impose curfews". Meanwhile the definition of what constitutes an emergency "is to be extended to deal with crises ranging from environmental spillages to an attack on the internet. It also covers those which ‘affect national security, human welfare, and political, administrative or economic stability’." Not without reason, the Guardian’s editorial described this as "potentially the greatest threat to civil liberty that any parliament is ever likely to consider." Then in the next breath the oh-so-liberal newspaper added: "That does not necessarily mean that it should not be passed." Errr.... Doesn’t it?
* THE Pentagon is developing a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk, for use in a new "anti-terrorist" surveillance system (Associated Press, May 19). It has financed a research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology that is claimed to have been 80 to 95 per cent successful in identifying people. Said the internet newswire report: "If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, orders a prototype, the individual ‘gait signatures’ of people could become part of the data to be linked together in a vast surveillance system the Pentagon agency calls Total Information Awareness."
* SUPERMARKETS are experimenting with RFID (radio frequency identification) chips in products, whose unique codes allow the items to be permanently tracked. Boast the people behind it: "The Auto-ID Centre is designing, building, testing and deploying a global infrastructure... that will make it possible for computers to identify any object anywhere in the world." These chips have already been implanted into people... (from July 18's SchNEWS See also www.nocards.org)
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