Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Local elections

It is not generally known that second home owners are entitled to vote in local elections if they are registered at their second home. If, as we are lead to believe, their numbers are increasing they could influence who is elected to represent them by using their vote.
Posted by at

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The second home owners and their defenders in this thread all seem to have lost sight of what makes this area so special. It is the combination of the landscape and the people who have shaped it. If we want Purbeck to remain a beautiful and inviting place to live then we need to nuture both. Allowing a skewed market to drive out local young families will result in a sterile "theme park", devoid of character and empty of the life blood which sustains it. Do they want us all to live in Poole and be shuttled in to service their holiday/retirement village. Probably they do. After all we are the untidy, unsightly yokels with noisy children and unruly teenagers. If they could rid Swanage of us then their Council Tax could be reduced, their holiday rambles unspoiled by smelly quarry lorries and crawling tractors. Their political hegemony would remain unchallenged by upstart oiks. All the schools could be closed (except for Malthouse of course) and just think of all the property that would be available for even more of their friends to spend three lovely weekends a year in. We, the people of Purbeck, (all of us) deserve a stake in our future.
I'm not advocating an unchanging, time capsule Swanage. Change has shaped Swanage and Purbeck from the earliest stone-age hunter-gatherers, altering it's lanscape and character inexorably. Along side that process of change however, has been a continuity that we are really in danger of losing within a generation. Today I read a report of the falling school rolls in Purbeck. If this continues at the current rate then, in a very few years , there will be no one left warrant the services on which the majority of us rely. All the drivel about "nanny state", "ratepayers subsidising the poor", "envious locals" and so on, disguises the fact that second home ownership on the present scale (let alone on an increased scale) destroys communities. Retirement apartments and caravan parks and holiday cottages are not a community. The question is then, do we want a community?
Peverilpen

29/12/05 8:28 pm

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)