New homes not needed
THE Kirklees Local Plan is due to be voted on tomorrow at an extraordinary meeting of the council.
It is likely the plan will be voted for and adopted at that meeting as Labour have the majority of seats and it is their plan, yet councillors should consider the following before casting their vote:
The Local Plan is based on ONS data from the 2014 forecast on population growth, but the 2016 data from the ONS reduces that forecast by more than 30 per cent (11,000 people), meaning that across Kirklees we only actually require 21,000 new homes. This means virtually all homes planned to be built on green belt need not be built.
The inspector noted the 2016 ONS data reduced forecast in a letter to the council and gave them the chance to reduce the number of houses, however the Labour council declined to take this step.
Councillors are therefore being asked tomorrow to vote for a plan that will now see homes needlessly being built on our beautiful green belt, a much higher increase in traffic on all our roads, causing increased congestion, increases in air pollution for which there is no safe level, noise pollution, impacts on our health and well-being, damage to local wildlife habitats and an unnecessary intensification of housing density in certain areas.
I sincerely hope all councillors will be voting with their consciences on Wednesday. in relation to schools which receive halal meat, claiming that the moral outrage demonstrated by anti-halal campaigners is ‘politically motivated’.
He may well be right, but there is still a question as to whether or not ‘moral outrage’ is in itself legitimate.
It is quite obvious that the good councillor has no interest in this question so he avoids it by pretending it doesn’t exist.
As the majority of people eat meat, animals have to be killed. If animals are really only ‘things’, as the term Factory Farming implies, then it obviously doesn’t matter how they are killed; but if it can be proved that animals are sentient beings (and it can be proved) then we have to choose a method.
It ought to be axiomatic that any form of killing should be done as quickly and painlessly as possible. Certainly, if someone has to have their pet ‘put down’, they will choose the method which causes least suffering. In other words, we should consider the effect of killing in relation to the animal’s suffering, not the killer’s perspective. And like it or not, the man who kills in the slaughterhouse is only a proxy.
A minority expect a majority to accept the legitimacy of killing from a religious perspective. If my axiom is sound, then the council should work to persuade the majority that religious, ritual killing is as painless as secular killing.
The only problem for the former form of killing might be the empirical evidence. But they could start by organising open days showing the public round a slaughterhouse, or at least finance a film, possibly entitled: It’s a Wonderful Death!