OK, now you can call me a liar because I'm going to comment on it anyway. Here's my ill-informed opinion. This is my personal viewpoint and is not necessarily shared by the protestors.
Whilst the legal and planning systems are something we need to deal with, they're still just a construct made by people: and as people, we can also change them should we so desire. I have little faith in these systems as my experience reporting from the front line of many direct actions has shown me that following all the legal niceties can still mean that local people's feelings are ignored, and the community short-changed.
There's a simple fact about systems of power: they never give anything away freely. People can also only rely on the rights and freedoms they have fought for and are willing to defend. Direct action (for me, the non-violent type is the best and only way) is one way of defending our rights and freedoms where laws are either unjust or applied in a partisan and discriminatory way.
I'm sure the RDA has "the law" - planning law - on its side. But what is this law and how was it formed?
If you take a look at the history of the political classes in the last few hundred years, you will find that becoming a member meant starting as a Justice of the Peace, perhaps a Magistrate, and then ascending through various positions like Councillor, and maybe ending up as a Member of Parliament.
These positions (and others, I'm sure) were only open to landowners.
The planning system seems arcane to a "newbie". Don't get me wrong, I agree with Simon Fairlie when he writes "It is still the only protection we have to stop large areas of Britain becoming like a California suburb, and we should never forget that."
However this system is built upon hundreds of years of accumulated legislation which at every turn has been affected by the attitudes and interests of those who own land.
An ideology is often most potent when it's least apparent. There is an ideological basis to the laws which govern land use, and it's seldom questioned, possibly because it's "just the way things are": not recognised as an ideology, but just taken as a fact of life.
I disagree with this ideology. Or, as I saw on a young man's t-shirt last summer (at The Great Party of the King of Pilton): "Stuff your jobs - we want land"
If the Morlands Crew can chip away at the granite hearts of the faceless bureaucrats who've spent lots of our money and ridden roughshod over the opinions of the local community, then I'll help them in any way I can. The whole world belongs to me: and the whole of it belongs to you too. As far as I'm concerned, I can only own as much land as I can fit in my pocket.
So there's my arrogant opinion about that. I hope it makes sense to someone, as the way we as a society manage the land and our shared space on this crowded island makes little sense to me...but as Jules in Pulp Fiction said: "I'm trying, Ringo, I'm trying real hard."
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