"To assert that people near Brize have had 8 years to move away is complete tosh! This move
may have been cancelled at any time over that period!"
Indeed Brian.
"May" being the operative word. But it wasnt, was it?
If thats how you're meant to plan the one most important purchase of your life, not taking into account all the known local variables - hoping that something that is planned to happen may not happen - be it the Brize move, building on local flood plains, etc etc - and how they might impact on you, then on you go, thats how situations like this happen.
You see whats going to happen, you ask yourself how could this affect me and mine, can I put up with it? If yes, how to minimise the impact? If no, and the odds on are that you cant stand it, then how to get away? Or, if you're really lucky and you're all organised locally, how do we go about trying to stop "it" from happening, if we can?
Eitherway, 8 years is a long enough time to see which way the wind is blowing, economically and in this case politically and militarily. More than enough.
At least the locals are likely to see a lot of other tangible benefits - a possible increase in local employment opportunities, keeping a few more of the otherwise local unemployables off the dole, plus the usual opportunities for local entrepreneurs - takeaways, minicab firms, cleaning firms and all the other attendant small businesses you usually find in reasonably close proximity to an RAF unit of any kind - in return for paying the price of having a busy airfield carrying out
some night ground runs during this period of busy military activity whilst there are conflicts going on around the world that British forces are involved in.
Then think about the bloody rest of us 30 miles east of you, along the prospective route of that blasted £20bn+ HS2 vanity project, which is likely to carry on all day and night whether theres a war on or not, where we along the route will see sod all in the way of benefits of any kind, let alone any tangible ones, for having a high speed railway line that nobody wants, on an embankment running within 800 metres of your front door.
Try the prospect of sleeping between 12 hour nightshifts with that going on added to a 100 mile commute every day to get to and from work and then tell me you're hard done by, in comparison.
Like them, using the above example, going forward, I have to make a judgement call. What is the potential impact on me and my family and my sanity and my work, should the project go ahead. Can I put up with it, or do I have to sell the house, quite possibly at a loss, and move somewhere else? And the answer is at the moment, I'm not sure.
I do know one thing for a fact though.
If I sit on my khyber for the next 7 or 8 years, hoping it'll go away and the damn thing gets built anyway and I've done nothing, then the only person I'll be able to blame for the end results is myself.
