Up and down the country in various boroughs, towns and counties, UKIP is on the verge of becoming the official opposition… to absolutely everything. It is time we lay down our pride and admit that the Tories, eventually, got something right and that the proposed Ebbsfleet Garden City is not actually a bad idea.
I was at the marvellously arranged Freedom Festival in Bournemouth when the news of the proposed Garden City broke, and in the company of many fellow small c conservatives, as well as members of the Tory party – many of which say they are looking forward to voting UKIP this May in an attempt to kick their party up the backside. I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not writing this article to cause trouble, I am UKIP through and through, have never been a member of another political party and cannot see myself joining any other party in the next five or six years. Although I support the party in every way I can, recently I have been put off by the split-second Thick of It style policy, and the anti-everything approach that I truly thought had been put to bed.
Ebbsfleet, for the time being at least, consists only of an HS1 and Eurostar train station, a huge car-park and a football club (one which recently changed its name from Gravesend and Northfleet not too long ago in a bid to gain sponsorship money from Eurostar). It is a few miles east of Dartford and neighbours the towns of Gravesend and Northfleet where my father was raised and lived happily for many years.
Gravesham, the local authority of Gravesend and the surrounding areas, has huge unemployment levels with statistics around the 9% mark, a council which admits ‘there are simply not enough vacancies to assist more than a small proportion of those waiting each year for housing’, anti-social behaviour issues and poor state care for the elderly; like many other towns around the country at this present time you have to plonk your old folk miles from anywhere to even stand a chance of getting a place in a care home. On top of that, five of Gravesham’s wards are within the top 20% of the most deprived wards in England.
Gravesham has been let down and it deserves better. It has easy access to London, the South East including the marvellous Kent seaside and the Medway towns, and even the rest of Europe with the Eurostar connection – it is perfectly placed for that undergraduate looking for their first home but can’t afford inner-city prices. A recent opinion poll by ComRes found that 61% of British adults believe the government should make ending youth homelessness a priority and the National Housing Federation estimates that for every £1 spent on housing, £2.41 is generated in the wider economy, and that every new home creates 2.3 jobs (http://www.housing.org.uk/media/home-truths/home-truths-report-in-numbers/). If a project like the City Gardens, which will create 15,000 homes and countless jobs (34,500 if we go with the above statistic) is planned next door to a community who very much feel forgotten about, then we should support the policy regardless of its coming from the Tory party. As a party we bang on about there not being enough space or jobs for British people and immigrants a-like, yet we are wary of the idea of ‘making more room,’ and although I don’t personally believe it is up to the state to create these jobs, if they can then why not?
Just a few weeks ago a good friend of mine left UKIP in search of a better life in the Conservative Party. His reason? He believed that UKIP was slowly becoming a party of just anti-everything and wanted good strong policies to get behind. Okay I’m not sure why he joined the Tories on this basis either, but I am starting to agree with him. It is time to start becoming the party with policies which show what we are for and not just a long list of what we are against. We are meant to be the party who hates opportunistic point-scoring politicians, and although I agree that we must start showing the electorate we can be trusted, we also need to stay sensible in order to keep the grassroots of the party happy too; without them the party has nothing. I believe in UKIP and what it stands for, but we must start putting our dislike of every government policy aside and concentrate on making the UK a better place to live in. After all, that is the reason we are all in this game, isn’t it?
Totally agree with Simon Blanchard on this. I live about 1 mile from the proposed Ebbsfleet site and know the area well. Local schools, hospitals, Dr surgerys, and roads are all under pressure from the existing population increases. Flooding is of course a growing problem as more and more land goes under concrete. It was understood that UKIP policy would be that local people and local councils would decide on planning applications, or is this going to be another policy that will be queitly dropped?
The big concerns with the Ebbsfleet garden City, are that the roads and infrastructure, ie Hospitals, schools, GP surgeries, community centres etc can’t cope with what is there NOW, let alone adding 15,000 more homes and potentially 32,000 homes, if you include the proposed Paramount Studio site.
local residences say they can’t move their cars at peak periods of the day, because of the Bluewater Shopping Centre, Darent Valley Hospital(It was too small when it was built in 2000)and the Dartford Tunnel.
I have no objection to more homes, just to bad planning and that planning has been taken away from local accountability.
The Ebbsfleet site is a former chalk quarry, taken down to a level at or below sea level. The water has to be pumped out 24/7/365 to stop flooding. In recent stories, about the Somerset Levels, it may have highlight a another potential problem in the future, of who will maintain the pumps and who’se to blame when they’ve stopped working.
The latest is that the Urban Development Corporation,( this is just another quangocracy) will handle the planning process, instead of locally elected councillors. They will streamroll through any objections, not providing any additional roads or facilities.
Rob, a good posting and I agree pretty much with all you say. The concept of Garden Cities is really good and provides a better solution than making old towns bigger when they just now don’t have the right structure or road systems to cope with more people.
I agree entirely with your idea that we should be open minded to appreciate and applaud other parties when they do good work. I consider that Ian Duncan Smith is probably the only politician that has ever had the guts and nerve to take on the bloated welfare system. Likewise I applaud George Osborne for his efforts to tackle the structural deficit that Labour ramped up in the last 2 years of its term. I haven’t heard any convincing noises from UKIP about how it would handle or continue to reduce the structural deficit. As for the other lot, they still believe they can reduce it by borrowing more and throwing the money again at public services, exactly what got us into the present mess. Like you and quite a few others, I am getting a bit anxious waiting for positive policies from UKIP head office.