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Thank you again Alexander for your support and worthy comments.
For a democracy to work requires persons participating to be 'informed'. If they choose to dismiss the information as a waste of their time/ not of interest or against their beliefs/ideals and so on, that is their prerogative ... although this will inevitably lead to autocracy.
Further, it is easier, and cheaper, for the media to tell us what to think - they receive, by e-mail, nicely presented publicity material supporting various causes - such as the CGI proposed development of Western Heights and Farthingloe. The PR lists the attributes while avoids or dismisses anything seen as counter to their proposals. For the media, often under pressure and short of staff, it is easier for them to reiterate rather than question.
Albeit, the as far as we are concerned - the final recipients - it is up to us to question.
Some, like Lara and I, in the case of the CGI proposals, were already clued up on certain aspects and since have asked questions from this informed base ... Indeed, Lara has had a number of discussions with a representative of CGI while I have been going through documents, such as the Dover District Council's Local Development Framework (LDF) as mentioned above. From this, we have come to a conclusion.
We then had a choice, do we keep our informed decision and the criteria from which we drew our conclusion to ourselves or do we tell others?
To deliberately suppress information is a feature of an autocracy.
Therefore, not to pass on our reasoning would be as wrong as those in positions of power and influence who ARE taking that line - in other words, we would be as guilty as they of being autocratic.
Heady stuff for a Sunday morning, but important if we are going to save Western heights and Farthingloe from a development that with not only desecrate a National Monument, permanently reduce our Green Infrastructure but will add significantly to the town's loss of identity.
Lorraine
