RAG

Twice or three times a year SWT hold RAG meetings. RAG stands for Reserve Advisory Group but anyone can attend (although this is conditional –see below). The meetings are usually indoors at a church hall in Totley but occasionally are held ‘on-site’. The agendas for these meetings are controlled by SWT but it has been the practice for members of the public to put forward items though this is nowhere near as welcome as it once was. At one time in fact it seemed as if the RAG was able to influence decisions about management but this has now largely been abandoned to be just a piece of window dressing, useful for SWT to be able to claim to the council or to providers of grant funding that they consult the public. Those who have been involved now acknowledge this to be a fiction and the Icarus Process made this clear in 2006. But to those not involved or newcomers SWT like to maintain a pretence that they listen to the public. In truth anyone who has an independent view is either ignored in the hope they will not bother to attend again or excluded from meetings via a crude exercise in defamation.

This coming Thursday 12th June a RAG meeting is scheduled for 6:30 pm. It is on-site at Stony Ridge car park. An interesting feature of this meeting is that it is the first meeting at which the Friends of Blacka Moor are allowed to attend since they were excluded a year ago for asking awkward questions. At least they will have to promise in writing beforehand to behave reasonably. I am fairly sure none of them is likely to do this as it would be a tacit admission that they had behaved badly before. I and other witnesses know that this did not happen. But anyway it is very doubtful that any one from FoBM will turn up since the whole exercise is sterile and only serves SWT’s manipulative purposes. So many other local people over several years have tried attending only to give up having decided that SWT do not listen. In fact it is quite common for them to appear to accept a certain view and then to go away and do something altogether different.

SWT claim that the RAG is much better than what happened before they took over because the council held no consultations. But in fact it’s worse - a consultation that is skewed in this way is worse than none at all because its cynicism leads to disillusion and a total lack of trust. As it happens there is another group that SWT is more likely to listen to called the Steering Group the members of which are largely cronies of SWT and are unaccountable officers in various conservation organisations - the very people (such as the city ecology officer and officers of Natural England and PDNPA) who helped to engineer the high jacking of Blacka Moor in the first place. These people all sing from the same conservation hymn sheet and put their own interests before those of the wider public and whose job only exists if they put forward plans to control nature. It’s a bit ironical that in much privately owned countryside they want farmers to intervene less intensively but here where nature has for a long time gone its own delightful way, they want to intervene to control it. Either way the job of the person who decides this is pretty secure.