Sandleford on the Letters Page Options

[Simon Kirby]

Two pages of letters this week! Nice to have a good smattering of opinion.

Two letters about Sandleford from the tories replying to last week's from the lib dem camp. Depressing seeing them swinging their political handbags. It's a serious business that will affect a lot of people so it would be good to see it discussed reasonably.

For all their noise the anti-sandlefordians have made a poor job of articulating their legitimate concerns, or a poor job at any rate of legitimising what concerns they have. There's been a lot of emotional nonsense about Watership Down which has undermined their credibility and done nothing to mitigate the obvious suspicion of nimbyism. Traffic congestion has been mentioned and that's the only concern that resonates for me, but the argument hasn't been developed in any sensible way.

The lib dems have no doubt done a good job at organising the opposition, but their political motivation it's transparently obvious, and Alan Law gives Tony Vickers a good drubbing in the letters page for this. Tony Pick also attacks the flimsyness of the anti-sandlefordians' brownfield strategy. Brownfield is very much a pet policy of the lib dems but like much political dogma it makes little sense in the real world.

More troubling is that Alan Law still doesn't say anything positive about the country park, and not a peep from any of the local WBC tories, and I'd have really expected them to have a view. A country park is definitely something worth shouting about, so why is no one even talking about it? Do the tories not actually want a country park?