How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [48]
Into the breach, normal people, and sod the polar bears
Greetings from the bunker. As I write, the MP for Ipswich is running around the country calling through his beard for me to be sacked. And the English Collective of Prostitutes is out for blood as well.
But let’s be honest, shall we? There are more important things to worry about than what some balding and irrelevant middle-aged man might have said on a crappy BBC2 motoring show. Such as the war in Congo, the dramatic interest rate cut, the second coming in America and – most important of all – the gradual transformation of Scotland from a country full of deer and inventors into an enormous golf course.
Just last week an idiotic-looking American man whose hair is on back to front was given permission by cash-strapped Scottish politicians to build what sounds like the single most ghastly development the world has ever seen on top of what appears to be all of Aberdeenshire. Donald Trump, owner of the Miss World pageant and believed – by me – to be the world’s largest consumer of onyx, says it will be the greatest golf course in the world. Can you even begin to imagine the depths to which he will sink in pursuit of this billion-dollar goal? How many pillars will there be? How many giant stone dogs will guard the entrance? It’ll be McLexus Central.
And, really and truly, is it necessary? There are already, by my calculations, nearly 600 golf courses in Scotland. And since most of the residents live in Westminster these days, that works out at one for every two people. I simply cannot see why there’s any need for another.
As far as I’m concerned, a golf course, with its random splashes of unnatural emerald green and its Rupert Bear trimmings, is more of a blot on the landscape than a pig farm or a power station. Scotland is properly beautiful, but already – if you look at it on Google Earth – it appears to have been dribbled on by a radioactive dragon. When Trump has finished it’ll look even more stupid than his hair.
Unfortunately, if you wanted to try to stop Trump making things worse, you had to join forces with either the Rambling Association – which couldn’t concoct a sensible thought if you gave every member a typewriter and a million years – or the environmentalists, who seemed bothered about only the possible effect on the area’s sand dunes. Oh, and then the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds piped up and said the new course would damage a warbler, which seemed a bit far-fetched.
This, almost certainly, is why the hateful proposals have been passed. Because sensible people who recognize Trump as a man who probably has bath taps in the shape of swan’s wings couldn’t possibly side with Mr Porritt, Mr Oddie and a bunch of purse-lipped, ramble-crazed mental cases.
At the moment, as far as I can see, all commercial planning applications are considered on just two issues: the economic benefit versus the man in the dirty trousers who’s found a rare snail on the site and wants it to be protected. The Newbury bypass was a classic case in point. On the one hand you had the government, which wanted to free up the log jam of traffic, thus improving transport links between the Midlands and the south coast. And on the other you had that part-man, part-ape called Swampy who kept chaining himself to diggers and pointing at all the butterflies that were going to be squashed. You never heard from the people of Newbury who just thought: ‘Yes. Build the damn thing because then I’ll waste less of my life in a bloody traffic jam.’ In other words, you never heard from anyone who was not motivated by greed or rage.
We see this problem all over the world. The American election came down to a two-way choice: a white man or a black man. There are only two arguments on climate change: you think you’re to blame or you don’t. You think Jonathan Ross is brilliant. Or you think he should be sacked. No weight or platform is given to the silent majority, for whom the third way is rather more than some Blairite vision that existed only in a New Labour speechwriter’s wet dream.