The Judge RANTS!
Date: 24/08/06
Dumped On Again
Forty-odd years ago, Liverpool Corporation announced that it
intended to flood the Celyn valley in north Wales to create a reservoir.
It would mean destroying a thriving generations-old Welsh-speaking
community.
People from across Wales and beyond protested at this wanton
destruction. When the people of that valley went to Liverpool to talk
to the Corporation, they were refused a hearing. When they marched
through the streets of Liverpool, the local population swore and spat
at them. Liverpool needed the water, they were told, otherwise
the denizens of that city would go thirsty.
It was a complete lie, of course: Liverpool wanted the water to
supply its factories, not it's people.
Despite every Welsh MP (bar one) voting against the Parliamentary
bill which was necessary to carry out the act, the bill was passed by a
huge majority due to the votes of English MPs. And so the village of
Capel Celyn was wiped from the map, creating a psychic wound from which
our nation may never recover.
Last year, Liverpool City Council (as the Corporation is now
called) issued an unconvincing apology for its vandalism, probably
because it was angling for the National Eisteddfod to go there. A
recent study shows that the Liverpool area uses virtually no
water from the Celyn reservoir nowadays.
From the mid-1970s onwards, Liverpool cheerfully exported the dregs
of its 'culture' to north Wales. In they flooded, the dolies and the
smackheads, the criminals and the scroungers, with the result that
there is now probably a smack dealer in every village from Saltney
Ferry to the far end of the Llyn Peninsula. The holiday resorts of
Prestatyn, Rhyl and Colwyn Bay are full of festering flats and bubonic
bed-sits where these creatures live and breed, adding further to the
social problems of those areas.
No apology has yet been forthcoming from the leaders of Scouseville
for these depredations upon our land.
Instead, they're adding domestic refuse to its human equivalent,
and dumping
their actual rubbish on us. Earlier this week, a company called
Mersey Waste Holdings started a landfill site at Hafod near Wrexham.
This was completely against the wishes of the people near the site (a
former colliery), who had fought courageously every step of the way to
prevent this outrage. Due to planning permission given over a decade
ago by a London bureaucrat, and the knock-kneed cowardice of our
beloved Council (then controlled by a particularly nasty and corrupt
local Labour party), and due also to a convenient 'loophole' in the
regulations which means that what can no longer be dumped in England
can still be dumped in Wales, the people of Johnstown lost their case,
The company was given the green light to dump, and the police were
there this week to make sure that the company's 'rights' were upheld.
Ah yes, the company. 'Mersey Waste Holdings' is an 'arms-length'
(modern euphemism for "nothing to do with us, squire, honest!")
company owned and controlled by the councils of Knowsley, St Helens,
Sefton, Wirral and...Liverpool.
So they're doing it to us again. Perhaps a few tons of
sewage carefully dumped from the air on their wonderful 'City of
Culture' (and who says irony is dead?) would get them to look at it
from another angle. But then again, who'd notice one more pile of shit
in Liverpool?
Footnote: Research from the IPPR, one of
those dreaded 'thick twonks' (sorry, I mean 'think tanks'...I think)
lists the recycling rates of all English local authority areas. Two of
the bottom three are....Wirral and Liverpool. Great! Not only to we get
their crap, but we get more than we need to simply because those
councils and their residents are totally irresponsible).
