Edinburgh Council Gerrymander to Install 5G!

The fact that Edinburgh Council have degraded the very meaning of words to sneak through planning applications shows the depths to which the corporations has sunk.

Free! On the 21st September, Matthew Brown formerly from #Together will be discussing the corruption of science. You can reserve a ticket here.

The word ‘community’ has a meaning that is applicable through different dimensions: there is the community of interests; the community existing in institutions or professions or beliefs; there are countless online communities and there is the traditional community gathered around time and place. Each community can have, with a certain amount of ease, a boundary drawn around it, separating it from other communities or the amorphous mass of Others.

When it comes to planning, it is the community of time and place, located in the physical and temporal world that is important. Those who are nearby a potential reconstitution of the physical environment, and who are living at the time of the material change, are those who will be consulted. (No mediums or seers are required.) And, a reasonable person would assume, and it has been true in the past, that those who are likely to be affected one way or another by this reconstitution would be the ones sought out for their opinions and be empowered to voice any objections, within a given time frame. Implicit in this reasoned approach is that the affectees would be notified of the proposed change in a timeous manner, early in the process of deliberation in consistency with fairness, to the project’s initiation and scheduled proceeding.

It is how business has been conducted in the past and how it is conducted now. In fact, it is how all planning applications are processed in a democracy with the rule of law. So why would these common sense principle be ameliorated (unless for cases of egregious corruption or government emergency measures in a time of crisis)?

The proposal to build a thirty metre 5G mast on the top of Costorphine Hill ruins the tree line and plants an electronic device of unknown toxicity in a wooded stretch popular with the public and which, if resulting to be harmful, will radiate its short electro-magnetic frequency waves onto households, adults and children, in the surrounding area. It will spoil many people’s view and, given that emfs have been shown to be dangerous in other situations, it will potentially despoil more than the view. As an entity of unproven safety and verified ugliness, the 5G mast should be a matter of public debate, ultimately brought to the local community for a decision. (There is little research completed on 5G effects because, like the Covid vaccines, investigating the impact of them will, in all likelihood, turns up facts that the monied interests investing billions in this infrastructure roll-out would prefer not to be burdened with…or litigated about.)

We must then ask: Has the local community been consulted? Of course they have! Each and every person who dwells in the Costorphine nuclear bunker has been made aware of the imminent arrival of a towering sentinel of potential electro-magnetic pestilence. What? How! Is there a nuclear bunker in Costorphine? Is it staffed?

Originally built in Barnton Quarry as a Fighter Command Headquarters for the Royal Air Force, the building was expanded in 1952 to become a nuclear bunker. Its purpose was to be a regional centre of government if the nuclear missiles started falling, able to accommodate up to four hundred politicians and civil servants for thirty days in the case of Edinburgh being reduced to ash. It shows the admirable fortitude of Blind Hope in resisting reality: in a nuclear wasteland, who is really going to need politicians or civil servants unless for some kind of dystopic human larder, all other food sources being irradiated and dead?

Although recent events have made its abandonment and its subsequent succumbing to vandalism and time’s dissolving ruination seem an over-hasty, potentially disastrous, neglect for the survival of the current crop of designated survivors from the Edinburgh Council, the Scottish Government and whoever else from Holyrood that can fight their way in there, the bunker still sits within Barnton Quarry patiently awaiting its restoration. Empty, though.

Yet, despite being dismissed for any purposeful military or civilian use forty years ago, it has not escaped attention; it must have been quite surprising to the local postie to have to deliver a notification of a 5G mast’s erection not more than twenty metres from it (if Edinburgh Council bothered to send out notices to those who were appointed to be in the local community of place, and therefore were required to be acquainted with the edifice’s possible construction). Who would be there to read it? Some forty-year hermetic Edinburgh Lothian councillor, hiding, quivering in terror from the thought of a surprise Russian attack, or, with implacable outrage, seeking refuge from the Thatcher reforms of local government and defiantly maintaining that this structure, if nowhere else, would always remain part of Lothians Council and therefore would be a centre of resistance to Thatcherite centralisation? (It’s quite possible that some extremists from the Cult of Covid might be hunkering down there, still hoping to avoid the virus: that can’t be ruled, the past three years being testimony to the possibility.)

This is bizarre in itself - that an abandoned nuclear bunker would be listed as part of a community who would be affected by the implementation of a planning application! What makes matters more ludicrous and which also gives them a more sinister and cynical twist, is that only the nuclear bunker was designated as part of the community that could be affected by this egregiously ugly 5G tower. No dog walkers, leisurely strollers, nearby denizens of Costorphine’s red sandstone houses, its bungalows, its flats or anyone who has their view spoiled by the possible monstrosity was kept abreast of the machinations to inflict this infernal abnormality on the people of Costorphine. No one but the potential dwellers of an abandoned bunker were delineated as being part of a community of place and time which would be affected by the tower.

Why so? As far as we are aware, this is not a time of crisis where the requirement to build a 5G tower overrides planning law. No crisis providing extenuating circumstances leaves only one other reason available. Is it simply malfeasance? It must be. No serious person could finger an abandoned nuclear bunker as the sole constituent of a community in an area that is closely bordered by tens of thousands of citizens. It must be, it has to be, plain crookedness.

Can moralising and imprecation have any meaning when confronted with such craven duplicity? We shall try. To act in such a way is a complete abrogation of the spirit of the law, of local democracy and of good manners. It is possibly legal, in the weaselly sense that if the lawyers are corrupt, the civil servants are corrupt and the judge is corrupt then anything can be ‘legal’, but it is an absurd and devious decimation of the meaning of the word ‘community’ in order to achieve that conclusion. It fires a signal indicating the callousness of the matrix of telecom corporations, local government and civil servants; a lack of sympathy to others that is only equalled by the moral squalor in the hearts of those people who designed and approved the scheme, knowing all the time and at every step exactly what they were doing.

(On second thoughts, however, perhaps, the government is in crisis, in fact perhaps it envelopes society as a whole - a crisis of corruption so deep and wide that even petty officials are committing absurdities at the beck of private institutions.)

But why exhaust words and thoughts on them? It is up to the people of Costorphine to take action and, given the uncertainty of the long-term potential threat, to demand a cessation of the plans and restore accountability to their locale.

Free! On the 21st September, Matthew Brown formerly from #Together will be discussing the corruption of science. You can reserve a ticket here.