In the email today comes a note from the Barton Moss Community Liaison Group describing its first meeting. Its seems that many residents of the area are mightily fed up, and chiefly with the environmentalist "saviours":
The CLG heard from people whose businesses are being disrupted, with customers, suppliers, staff and family life being affected, with the inevitable consequences of lost orders, cancelled or late deliveries, loss of productivity and employees unable to arrive to work on time to earn their living.
Several residents on Barton Moss Road and nearby feel like prisoners in their own homes, with regular iGas convoys of HGV's moving back and forth almost every day and some protesters disrupting residents and verbally abusing them or their customers for simply wanting to go about their daily lives. There has been damage to private cars and to company vehicles from having to manoeuvre past obstacles, protesters, the protest camp itself and police vehicles parked along hedgerows. There were other accounts given of threatening behaviour and targeted disruption of every-day business activities by some of those people who say they are peaceful protesters, protesting in our communities name and with our blessing.
The CLG represented by its Chairman, Chris Williams, thinks that (with the escalation of the protest, and the subsequent impact it is having on the Barton Moss community as a whole, far outside of iGas) we need to ask the protesters to show more consideration to their neighbours or leave the neighbourhood.
I wonder how the greens are going to talk their way out of this one.