Talking politics

Joan Plimmer Green Party Candidate for Macclesfield

NO sooner has Cheshire East Council agreed to go ahead with one ‘Road to Nowhere’, but they start a consultation on another one.

The ink is hardly dry from rubber- stamping the A6-Manchester Airport link road – to be bulldozed through ancient woodland between Hazel Grove and Poynton; now the council wants to spawn an offshoot, to join it to the A523 at Adlington.

As the purpose of the original SEMMMS is both to encourage more traffic on to the roads and more planes into the air, as well as relocating jobs from Poynton, Stockport, Disley and the High Peak to George Osborne’s ‘Airport City, so ‘son of SEMMMS’ will see even more cars clogging up the roads of Macclesfield, while Maxonians find they have to travel the length of the new road to get to work.

Like SEMMMS, this new road will tear through open green spaces, decimating the resident wildlife; the former BAE Woodford site, as well as adjacent farmland, provides a haven for creatures such as weasels, foxes, voles, shrews, buzzards, lapwings, golden plovers, curlews, skylarks, oystercatchers and pond-life such as frogs, toads and dragonflies.

Many of these species do not thrive in noisy, busy, polluted environments, and would not be likely to remain near a major highway; others would face death under the wheels whenever they tried to follow their habitual routes around their territory.

Cheshire East Council seems to be fixated on roadbuilding – it also wants to drive major highways through Danes Moss south of Macclesfield and the Dane Valley north of Congleton.

Progress is not measured by the acreage of countryside tarmacked over, but by the health and wellbeing of people, together with the rest of the ecology – in other words the world we all live in.