Delingpole on Friday

Did you hear about the Welsh landowner who decided he didn’t – after all – want to have a wind turbine on his property?

Huw Jones stood to make £42,000 a year from hosting the 67 metre turbine on his land in Cardigan. Gosh, what could possibly have persuaded him to forgo this easy money?

Well, Awel Deg/Cardigan Fair Wind, the local wind developer, had a pretty good idea:

“We entirely understand Huw’s decision to withdraw in the light of the huge pressure he and his family has been under in recent weeks.”

What the developer seems to be suggesting is that poor Huw was bullied by his neighbours into changing his mind. And if so, I say good for the “bullies.”

When the democratic process has failed us as badly as it has with wind farms, what option do threatened local communities have other than to take matters into their own hands?

By this I certainly don’t mean to encourage direct action, such as violence or threats of violence either to person or property. But there are plenty of other ways that communities can make their pleasure known.

Probably the most effective is ostracism. Rural society is still a fairly close knit world: neighbours depend on one another and regularly bump into one another at the local shop, at school, at the village fete or the hunt ball. If a local landowner is selfish enough to ruin his neighbours’ tranquillity, views and property values with a ruddy great wind turbine from which he alone financially benefits, then surely those neighbours have every right to signal their displeasure by cutting the greedy tosser stone dead every time he crosses their path thereafter?

Some might consider this an extreme measure to take against people who are, after all, “only” in the business of making a perfectly legal buck, while simultaneously helping the British government fulfil its EU-mandated CO2-reduction targets and boosting Britain’s “energy security”.

But while that excuse may have been valid a few years ago when people were still in relative ignorance about the flaws of wind energy, I don’t think it washes now. People who agree to host wind turbines on their land are doing so with their eyes open. Effectively, when they sign their devil’s pact with their friendly local wind developer, what they are saying is: “Sod the neighbours. Sod the bats and the birds. Sod all the taxpayers and energy users who are ultimately going to be billed for this scam. Sod the landscape. Sod the riders and ramblers whose views are going to be ruined. I’m doing this because the money is just too tempting – and I’m prepared to suffer whatever consequences arise as a result of my greed.”

Well what we need to do, we homeowners, naturalists and lovers of the British landscape, is to make absolutely damn sure that there ARE consequences for this greed.

To repeat, I’m not advocating violence or threats of violence. What I am very much suggesting is that anyone selfish enough to host a wind farm on his land should be made to pay a hefty price for his crime against his community.

After all, if you were to break into your neighbours’ £500,000 houses and help yourself to £125,000 worth of antiques you would – rightly – be put in jail.

You might argue that putting up a wind farm and knocking off up to 25 per cent of your neighbours’ property values is not in the same league. And I’d agree: it’s actually much worse because in the case of wind farm blight your poor neighbours can’t even claim their losses back from their insurance.

Time, I think, for some enterprising soul to create a national online register. It could be called something like Wind Judas – and its job would simply be to identify all those selfish, greedy sods around Britain who have sold their neighbourhood’s tranquillity and beauty and value for thirty pieces of silver.

Not only would the threat of exposure – the modern equivalent of being put in the stocks – make people think twice before choosing to enrich themselves at the expense of their community. But it would also enable the community to enact its revenge through social ostracism.

Next time you bumped into these selfish greedheads as you picked up your morning paper, you could look straight through them. And next time they wanted to do a lift share on the school run you could refuse. And next time they wanted to borrow a cup of sugar or your rotovator or your spare generator you could tell them to get stuffed.

Isn’t this, after all, what the Big Society is really all about: local communities taking charge of the own destiny, rather than allowing it to be dictated for them by faceless functionaries in the service of the Westminister bubble?