Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Precious rural areas treated like a nightclub
The illegal rave season has started, Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary Steve Barclay – but rural families should not be subjected to the chaos such unauthorised events usually cause
DEAR Steve, No sooner have we had the first bank holiday of the year than the ravers have been heading for the countryside to shatter the relative peace and tranquility.
We had to suffer a couple of such events on my patch over Easter with the inevitable inconvenience (and worse) inflicted on local families.
There was the traffic congestion caused by hundreds of carelessly parked cars. There was the noise from supercharged sound systems. And possibly worst of all there was the appalling aftermath of rubbish of all kinds deposited in fields, woods and along verges and which, apparently, it is the duty and responsibility of residents and the local authority to clear up.
I simply cannot begin to tell you how furious it makes me to see areas of one of our most cherished and fragile national parks treated like a cross between a nightclub and a public lavatory.
Why should local people who live in this area purely because they enjoy the peace and quiet – and for which, I might add, they are generally happy to dig into their pockets to pay the fabled rural premium – have their lives turned upside down and their way of life totally and thoughtlessly disrupted?
Why should they be left contemplating fouled fields? Why should they be forced to clear away rubbish. – particularly when if they themselves had been caught depositing it they would have been prosecuted and fined?
Why have they come to expect no more than a token, half-hearted response from the police to such occasions? The general attitude of the authorities appears to be that it’s only the countryside and if a few hundred of the great unwashed wish to congregate there and play loud music while consuming exotic substances of various kinds, well, it’s better they do it there rather than in an urban area where a lot more people are going to be inconvenienced.
That because there are many times more celebrants than available police manpower then there’s really not much point in taking it too seriously and trying to halt the event and clear the illegally occupied land. Yet another example, sadly, Steve, of rural areas receiving a fifth-rate service from the police despite paying exactly the same precept as those in towns and cities.
Of course, there is no point in wishing for more robust intervention from the police unless they have the full power of the law behind them – a law which in this case needs considerable
strengthening to deal with the growing scale of these events and the complexity of offences happening during them.
But since it’s only the countryside we are talking about and since proportionately it’s only a small number of people who are being inconvenienced I really cannot see anyone being inclined or motivated to take the issue forward.
Or am I being unduly pessimistic?
Yours ever, Ian