Beyond Account

According to notices stuck up and emails received recently SWT will shortly be holding 'public engagement' events about Blacka.  Anyone who thinks these will give local people any meaningful say in what happens at Blacka is recommended to seek immediate mental health advice. The fact that these events are not called a consultation is significant and so is the fact that they are not part of the Reserve Advisory Group meeting process which has presumably been abandoned despite all that has been said. That again is no surprise. Why pretend that serial misleading of the public may be about to cease when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Consultations have been shown to be phony, the RAG to be fraudulent and there have been more broken promises than cowpats on the footpaths. And that is saying something.

The only positive thing about this is that the ditching of previous commitments and processes demonstrates an acknowledgement that they were dishonest all along. It's not much to cling to but those of us who have been saying that we were being misled have been shown to be right.

The whole conservation cabal is about as anti-democratic and impenetrable as it gets and it's of course about money, touched on at the end of the previous post.

Having had trouble getting RAG members and regular users to accept their obviously mercenary and cockeyed plans they seized on the Sheffield Moors Partnership as a lifeline that released them from a commitment to be guided by the views of local people. That Partnership listens to each other and doesn't give two figs for what the public say and especially resents  those who are well informed and know what they are up to. The exception, of course, and there's always an exception, is with Ride Sheffield and the mountain bikers generally. These bikers are favoured stakeholders - that word again - and SWT's managers are very fond of them. The bikers are allowed to set their own agenda. In fact key SWT employees are enthusiastic bikers themselves, obsessives for whom the activity is one of their main interests in life rather than occasional participants who keep it in perspective. They would probably like to turn the whole site into a mega mountain biking facility.

If you speak to conservation managers about the lack of accountability they will deny it because they  claim they are responsive to their stakeholders. But they chose the stakeholders, some of whom they could not ignore being determined vested interests. What is lacking is a genuine public accountability. Instead there's a funny mix of self-appointed and pushy single-interest groups and vested interests who get to have a say alongside some tame individuals who will accept whatever the managers say, the linear descendants of the forelock-tuggers from the days of the Duke of Norfolk and his gamekeepers. The broader public including those of us who know the sites and use them more are not even allowed to know what these other lobbyists are saying!!

The decision makers among councillors and officers in Sheffield and elsewhere have still not cottoned on to what is happening here. And the reason for this is these people themselves are not transparent in their processes so do not hear alarms being sounded from the general populace. We can only raise concerns about what is happening if we know early enough to make an impression. That is the main story in the saga of local council inefficiency: it's masked by failures in transparency and hence the defeatism of once conscientious citizens. Democracy should be a partnership with citizens, not a flawed representative setup whereby those elected get on with what they want to do until the next election, as we have now.