Actions in Hastings and Twyford Down Herald New Wave of Anti-Road Protests

September 25, 2012 by combehavendefenders

Image: Kate Evans. http://www.cartoonkate.co.uk

Press release
25 September
Combe Haven Defenders [1]

Actions in Hastings and Twyford Down Herald New Wave of Anti-Road Protests
Activists preparing for peaceful resistance to ‘hundreds of new roads’

29-30 September: Campaigners are hoping to kick-start opposition to ‘hundreds of new roads’ with actions in Twyford Down and Hastings this weekend.

Twenty years ago, in 1992, protests at Twyford Down helped light the fuse of the modern environmental direct action protest movement, and hundreds of campaigners – old and new – will be gathering there this Saturday (29 September) to protest against the new schemes [2].

Activists in East Sussex will also be staging a two-day Camp and Rally this weekend in the Combe Haven Valley outside Hastings, threatened by a £100m road, work on which is planned to start in the new year [3]. The Camp will include a direct action training and renowned transport campaigner John Stewart will lead a workshop on ‘How to stop a road’. [4]

Government and local councils are planning to spend billions of pounds on dozens of new roads over the next few years, and new ‘growth’ funds and devolved spending powers for local councils threaten to add hundreds more disastrous projects to this list [5]. Of the 45 transport schemes approved in the budget by the Department of Transport, the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road (BHLR) is the worst in terms of carbon emissions [6].

A major conference of local anti-road groups is due to take place in Birmingham in November [7]

Abby Nicol, a spokesperson for the Combe Haven Defenders, who are organising the Camp near Hastings, said: ‘Run-away climate change is one of the greatest threats we face. Yet the government are sponsoring a new wave of road-building across the country, using money that would be much better spent on improving public transport. We urge people to join us this weekend to see the amazing area that will be destroyed unless we take action to stop it, and to learn about practical ways in which we can all peacefully and effectively resist the construction of this road.’

NOTES
[1] www.combehavendefenders.org.uk
[2] http://bettertransport.org.uk/blogs/roads/100912-twyford-20
[3] For details of the Camp see www.combehavendefenders.org.uk
For more info on the Bexhill-Hastings “link” road see http://tinyurl.com/linkroad
[4] Stewart was named “Britain’s most effective radical green activist” in the first comprehensive list of the country’s most effective greens, compiled by The Independent on Sunday – in part for his role in “co-ordinat[ing] protests that brought Tory plans for ‘the greatest road-building programme since the Romans’ to a screeching halt in the 1990s.” See www.airportwatch.org.uk/?p=2244
[5] See  www.bettertransport.org.uk/campaigns/roads-to-nowhere
[6] http://hastingsalliance.com/2012/06/19/secretary-of-state-lobbied-as-rio20-approaches/
[7] http://roadconference2012.eventbrite.com/