Coatham Protest

Today it was announced that the High Court of Appeal had ruled in the councils favour over the the village green issue. They have upheld the councils argument, despite members of the Golf club stating that this wasn't the case themselves, that members of the public deferred to golfers? There has been no case in law before now, which has tested this and the three high court of appeal judges based their decision on laws and previous cases that were a 150 years old and which had never been about deferment to anyone playing golf. The decision should be taken to the house of Lords for the law to be defined, indeed, after the appeal court hearing, the councils barrister George Lawrence said that if the decision went against the council then he would be taking it to the Lords because the issue of deferment to golfers hadn't been tested in court before and as such, the judges had nothing to base their decision on.

In the news article regarding this today Cllr Mark Hannon said this ""This is excellent news and a major step forward to delivering the swimming pool, leisure facilities and new homes within the Coatham regeneration project".

Note there are no mentions of a visitor centre including a dance floor because as he has already stated in his reply to me, the visitors centre was only ever an aspiration and the site for it is now earmarked for a youth and drugs counselling centre. There is no mention of an extreme sports centre because that hasn't attracted any funding, no mention of a bingo hall or pub or shops or bowling alley either, just a pool and leisure centre which despite the councils statements refuting this when we first started campaigning and taking the truth out to people in 2004, IS BEING PAID FOR BY MILLIONS OF POUNDS OF THAT THE COUNCIL ARE GOING TO BORROW AND YOU WILL PAY BACK THROUGH YOUR COUNCIL TAX.

There is no Coatham leisure development, just a housing development with a new, prudentially borrowed, leisure centre.

It has all been one great big con and one great big lie and the council have done this until they had connived and lied their way into the position that they are in now, whereby they have nothing left before them to stop them.

Or so they think.

As the councils barrister was prepared to take this issue all the way to the House of Lords because there is no law defining this issue, then so are we. I said on this site, shortly after the appeal court hearing, that this case looked set to go all the way to the House of Lords and that is our intention. The three High Court Judges have erred on the side of caution because there is no law regarding this issue. It is time that the law was defined.

We will take this all the way and we intend to petition the House of Lords in order to stop this housing development. A development that has been described as tainted, botched and a disaster, by those same people who are now telling us in the press, how great it's going to be? These are the same people who said that they had known all along that the Coatham Planning Process was unlawful, but who did nothing to have it called in, or stopped and actively defended it against Judicial Review. Even when the appeal court for some reason deemed that it wasn't unlawful, these same people who had already admitted that they knew how unlawful it all was, were silent?

We will do everything that we can in order to stop this disaster, this tainted, botched disaster to quote George Dunning and Vera Baird, from being inflicted upon this town.

The fight for our town and our open space instead of a housing estate, goes on