Thursday 23 February 2012

BDS Fails to Impress in Liverpool

A planning meeting in Liverpool was left distinctly unimpressed by BDS campaigners. Here's the report from local paper the Liverpool Daily Post:
At this week’s meeting, proposals for a new waste gas burning centre in Garston stirred up objections from the local branch of Friends of the Earth and Friends of Palestine, owing to company Veolia’s record running a controversial landfill in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine.
While the not-in- my-backyard brigade are often out in force at council planning meetings, the concerns emanating from within the kaftans of the objecting 50-somethings of Garston were seemingly a backyard too far for planning chair John Mackintosh, who in his own inimitable way tried to steer business back to more local issues.
At the point at which the lady objector warned that “what is happening in Israel could happen in Garston” (not, sadly for some, the building of a large wall around the district, but questionable waste disposal policies and their health risks), Big John felt compelled to remind her and the committee that “We’re talking about Garston here, not Gaza” – although his Everton drawl did make the two places sound indistinct, if only in name.
Development control manager Mark Loughran perhaps summed it up most succinctly when reminding the committee that “morality, ethics and human rights” were not really considerations for planners – without doubt a view that many of those present at the meeting to unsuccessfully oppose developments in their own backyards would ruefully concur with.
The planning application was approved and the official report [pdf] on the meeting makes absolutely no mention of anything remotely to do with BDS.

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