When it comes to voting there's nothing like a good change.org petition to get everyone out in force and that's exactly what we've seen in the last few days where nearly 14,000 people have now voted against the decision of Glenfaba and Peel candidate Geoffrey Boot's department to approve planning for the removal of twenty-five 100 year old Elm Trees in St Marks. Just to provide a voting comparison that's almost ten times the 1,805 people who actually voted for Mr Boot at the last General Election [and equally almost ten times the 1,767 Garff residents who voted for IOM Planning Committee Chairman Martyn Perkins in 2016].
So just when it was looking tricky enough for Boot in Glenfaba and Peel anyway we see that it is still possible to bypass the usual Manx inertia and get people out to register their protest at bad decisions made by our government even if they won't get off their bums on election day and traipse down to a polling station. But from the results of this petition it seems that most IOM residents agree with Geoffrey Boot lookalike and famous Manx expatriate Sir Barry Alan Crompton Gibb who expressed in 1979 that - when you lose control and you've no soul its tragedy.
Manx Radio report:
Pictured: Glenfaba and Peel candidate Geoffrey Boot
Its that bad even Cregeen gets it.
The planning processes and some of the decisions made around this by Mr Boots Department for Environment, Food and Agriculture seem to be somewhat mysterious to say the least and let's not forget a good subsidiary point made by Graham Cregeen MHK [one of the few valid points he has ever publicly made in fact] in relation to the placing of hidden planning notices in these situations.
IOM Newspapers reports on hidden planning notices:
So we ask Mr Boot. When standing in Glenfaba and Peel will you be putting a Vote Boot poster up on a road in a completely unrestricted speed zone which has no pavement within a mile of it and which is pinned to a tree shrouded by foliage - that hardly anybody at all will have any chance of spotting let alone reading? We thought not. Although after this maybe you might as well do just that?
Pictured: Graham Cregeen points at a tree
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