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With a little flurry of leaflets (three in fact) from our local blue egg, it seems that the local election campaign is off to an early start. As is traditional in Swindon election leaflets, there’s a couple of photographs of the candidate standing in front of some graffiti tags. (I wonder if the taggers get a buzz from having their handiwork feature in election bumf.) In addition, there are mentions of the canal (nice idea but concerns about the local impact), town centre redevelopment (though I’m not quite sure why Central will be the ‘envy of the rest of Swindon’ when the vast majority of the development is in Eastcott), an invitation to sign a petition against post office closures (which is a little late seeing as the consultation period has just ended) and an oh-so-toned-down comment about the problems with waste collections.

I’m sure if I just replaced the photographs and the colour of the ink, I’d get a close approximation of the leaflets I’ll be getting from the other parties over the coming months.

It’s difficult to know where to start when attempting to comment on the campaign by Joanna Lambert against a new windfarm… especially when plenty of others have already subjected her to plentiful dose of ridicule. Never mind, I’ll try.

When Watchfield air base was started it was a heavy drop air base, and the reason for this was that they found there were exceptionally low wind levels around Watchfield.

Remind me of that later please….

My reaction when I came over the hill on Friday to see they had gone up was that they are so much bigger and more dominating than I imagined.

So dominating that you didn’t see them until you went over the hill. Massive, then.

I was someone who thought they wouldn’t be awful, but they are and have completely devasated the landscape.

Err… to the west, Swindon; to the east, Didcot power stations. Blinkered vision is a dreadful impediment.

They are so enormously tall and move all the time so the eye is drawn to them, not like a building which is static and you learn to look beyond it.

So you’d prefer five 50 metre high blocks of flats to be built there would you? No? Thought not.

Millions of people over the last 4,000 years must have walked along the Ridgeway marvelling at the intimate beauty of the Vale.

For most of the last 4000 years, walking was more a necessity than a leisure activity. I suspect they had more pressing thoughts on their mind than “Isn’t it pretty here.”

Until that awful day ten days ago the walker’s eye drifted to the church towers, to the tall poplars and oaks.

And to the six cooling towers of Didcot A power station in the background.

Yet now five massive industrial turbines with angry noisy blades cutting the air will dominate the landscape for decades to come, and shatter the peace and serenity for those around.

I’d never realised the traffic on the A420 and the trains on the Great Western mainline were so quiet until you mentioned it. And what was it you said about it being an air base? Guess those aircraft were silent too. Oh yes, and did you say something about there not being much wind? That’ll be the meek and quiet variety of ‘angry noisy blades’ then.

Even when the blades are turning, electricity is not necessarily being generated unless the wind blows at the right speed. Because of this irregularity this plant will have to be inefficiently backed up by fossil fuel power.

It’s fortunate that we’ve got Didcot power stations sitting so prettily in the background then, isn’t it?

It seems a cruel trick that 10 to 20 per cent of all our energy bills in future will be a hidden levy to fund this ongoing rural destruction without any serious clean electricity produced

I trust you’ll be submitting a letter in support of a Watchfield nuclear power station then? No?

All campaigns need publicity. I suspect this sort of attention wasn’t quite what Ms Lambert had in mind.

The latest planning application for one of the affordable housing blocks in East Wichel includes a revised design for the noise bund (or mound of earth) that is meant to reduce the noise from motorway traffic for residents in the boxes houses of the new development. The new design, in the words of the report supporting the application,

uses a steeper aspect ratio, enabling the crest of the bunding to be moved slightly closer to the M4 motorway.

Of course, in doing so it allows the foot of the bunding to be moved closer to the M4 too, allowing a bit more space to cram more houses in. Fortunately for the residents of Wroughton, they are going to get rather wider (and more attractive) sound protection.

Today komadori sampled the lunchtime offering from the new all-you-can eat ‘pan-asian’ restaurant in Swindon, Cosmo. At just £5.90 per person (plus £1.30 for whatever beverage one chooses, alcoholic or not), this is certainly not the highest quality authentic oriental cuisine. But for the price it is very good, as evidenced by the fact that by 1 pm the restaurant was full. The lunchtime menu is not as extensive as the evening one (the ‘5 live cooking stations’ that their website boasts were distinctly dead), but there was a good range of ‘Chinese’ food and assorted curries. There was a good range of vegetarian options too, though some that, on face value, one might have expected to be vegetarian were not marked as such. There was also a good range of desserts, though these were not sampled, as after a full plate for starters and a plate-and-a-half for main course, komadori had already reached his all-he-could-eat limit.

Given its proximity to Swindon’s warehouse boozing establishments in Fleet Street, prices are higher on Friday evenings and Saturdays, when the atmosphere is also, apparently, more disco than family-meal-out. As their website suggests, advance booking is advisable, and at the busiest times don’t expect to be allowed to sit and relax after you’ve finished your meal: the staff will be anxious to see you on your way to make space for the next group waiting to be served.

It seems that hardly a week passes at the moment without yet another local government partnership crawling into sight.

• Swindon Community Safety Partnership (Swindon Borough Council, Swindon Primary Care Trust, Wiltshire Police, Wiltshire Fire & Rescue Service, Wiltshire Probation Area and Wiltshire Police Authority)

And what has brought them to my attention? Their suggestion, at least ten years after it was introduced in many other towns, that glass in bus shelters could be replaced by clear polycarbonate, to reduce vandalism. It’s nice to see such quick thinking.

However bad First Great Western’s rail service may be (and, undoubtedly, it is poor), today’s widely reported so called fares strike is nothing more than dressed up fares evasion. If you’re not satisfied with a product or service, don’t use it: buy from an alternative supplier. As the focus of the campaign is local trains around Bristol, not the mainline service to London, there are alternatives, such as local bus services or private car. But that would inconvenience the campaigners….

If someone suggested a campaign of shoplifting to protest about queues in supermarkets, I’m sure it would be met with derision. It’s strange that this campaign is not regarded in the same way.

It seems I may have been a little harsh in my criticisms of the Swindon Front Garden Action Group’s claims about the wetness of the Swindon Front Garden. Today, after a week of fairly continuous, and at times very heavy, rain, the area eventually to become West Wichel (but for the moment still called South Leaze) contained four large expanses of water. ’Tis rather unfortunate, given that the plans only include one. The access-road embankment will make a fine viewing point for the water below. Rather than seeking a developer who is

Someone who doesn’t just deal in the bricks and mortar of sustainability but someone who knows how to create sustainable communities.

I suggest Mr Bluh would be wiser to seek out a good boat builder.

The plans for some of the affordable housing blocks of East Wichel recently submitted look positively Victorian. Whilst some of the earlier Swindon Front Garden planning applications had that semi–fake-victoriana look that is becoming so familiar in the infilling of every vacant space of Old Town, these look, from the ‘street scenes’ (developers’ fantasies to you) that the developers are obliged to include with their plans, much closer to the real thing. Previous plots show a lack of scale, with steep rooves and three or four storey houses, to pack as many houses into as small a space as possible. ‘Parcel 18’ is the lucky winner of rows of victorianesque two-storey terraces.

komadori suspects it is only the proximity of this plot to the M4 motorway that has prevented the developers being more greedy: taller buildings would not have been effectively protected by the ‘sound barrier’ (big mound of earth to you) that is being constructed between these houses and the motorway.

The answer, apparently, is quite a lot. A quick trawl through the web came up with the list below.

• Swindon Local Area Agreement (Swindon Borough Council, the Government Office for the South West, Swindon Strategic Partnership and other quangos)
• Swindon Strategic Partnership (Swindon Borough Council, parish councils and voluntary groups, with observers from the South West Regional Development Agency and the Government Office for the South West)
• Swindon Strategic Economic Partnership (Swindon Borough Council, the South West Regional Development Agency, the New Swindon Company, Swindon Learning Partnership, other quangos and local companies.)
• New Swindon Company (urban regeneration company owned by Swindon Borough Council, the South West Regional Development Agency and English Partnerships)
• Great Western Community Forest (an unincorporated association of Swindon Borough Council, other local councils and the Forestry Commission)
• inSwindon (town centre management company, set-up by Swindon Borough Council with town-centre companies on the board)
• Swindon Learning Partnership (seemingly not a partnership at all, just an office of Swindon Borough Council but with over 120 ‘members’)

Now, I’m sure some of these do worthwhile work but, looking at that list, it does seem rather incestuous, with partnerships forming further partnerships, all with the added cost of yet another bureaucracy. A bit of digging on these organisations’ websites reveals that they are all a consequence of one or other central government ‘initiative’, wherein getting hold of some extra money for Swindon from central government (or stopping central government taking money away) is dependent on setting up a new quango.

If national government thinks that a way to improve local participation in democracy is to add multiple layers of bureaucracy, then its understanding of democracy is clearly very wrong indeed.

Methinks the local blue nest may have got themselves a little confused over their own party’s policies. There’s a motion on the agenda for the coming week’s council meeting supporting the election of police chief constables.

10. Motion – Elected Chief Constables
Councillor Nick Martin will move and Councillor Peter Greenhalgh will second:

This Council supports the concept of a local, directly elected chief constable or commissioner of police. This Council ask the Leader of the Council to write to

a) the Home Secretary to offer Swindon as a location for a pilot scheme.

b) the chair of the Wiltshire Police Authority to see if the Authority would support the application for a pilot scheme.

Which is a little odd, because the one thing their party’s policy makers have explicitly excluded is the election of chief constables — directly elected commissioners to replace appointed police authorities yes, but not directly elected chief constables.

I’d prefer the local police to be concentrating of reducing crime, not on fighting elections.