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Comments
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Written by Andrew Warmington
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Saturday, 10 November 2012 13:06 |
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Is it all water under the bridge? Debatable. A lot of feuds have started in this town due to the OOTS controversy. And, as we can probably all agree, it is not likely that Sainsbury's have gone for good. They may well be back within a year.
Why did I bother going to Hereford to count names on petitions and cards? I'm indeed quite happy to tell you why.
In the first instance, it was prompted by claims in a letter to the Ledbury Reporter on 21 September, apparently based on LESS supporters having inspected the petition at some point. This stated unequivocally that fewer than 1,000 people from the whole of Herefordshire signed the LOTS petition. I was sure that couldn't be right but couldn't prove it. Now I can.
This was also the reason for my initial focus on the LOTS petition. That was nothing to do with my own bias and everything to do with the fact that its numbers had been questioned. I had to use up one of my days of annual leave to do this exercise, this part of it took all morning and it wasn't, in all honesty, the most interesting morning of my life, though there was some satisfaction in finding more or less what I expected to find.
At that point, there wasn't time for a full analysis of the rest of the evidence, hence sampling rather than counting. However, this is likely to have produced a reasonably accurate result and I have given the LESS petition and the cards no less weight in the final reckoning.
I have also given my reason for not adding the letters and emails into the analysis; they would, if added in, tilt the count slightly further on the anti side, though it really makes very little real difference in raw numbers.
In a slightly wider context, I went because I also wanted to see if there was compelling evidence as to what the majority view is. Obviously I believe - and want to believe - that most of the people of Ledbury are against Sainsbury's but at times, my confidence in being in the majority has been shaken, most obviously when LESS got their petition going. LOTS do need to take on board the fact that a large number - still a minority, IMHO, but a large one - of local people would like there to be a better supermarket in town.
Why was there no second petition against Sainsbury's? I wasn't privy to the decision but I agreed with it. Basically it was because there was simply no appetite for doing it all again; instead, we decided to get the response cards printed up and ask supporters to fill them out and post them. LESS got wind of that and did the same in addition to their petition.
As for the fact of a petition that was originally anti-Tesco (because Tesco was the only OOTS on offer at the time) being used in the Sainsbury's campaign, it is indeed a matter of opinion. On the one hand, you can say it should not be admitted because it was not about Sainsbury's; on the other, you can point to the wording that people who signed it said they agreed with, which was about the damage that would be done to Ledbury by a store of that size and in that position.
Planning presumably took the view that the vast majority of the people who believed that would also believe it of an even larger store with a different name on it over the road. Some did not, as I have faithfully documented. If you think there are legal issues over that, go and discuss it with a solicitor. As for this 'moral fibre' schtick, I am not taking any lectures on that from you, Mr Lever.
This idea that LOTS claims to speak for the whole of Ledbury is risible too. It is a campaigning group putting forward one side of an argument. Quite obviously some people wanted an OOTS (or just any better supermarket than the ones we have) and that has never been denied. LESS stands for Ledbury Supports Sainsbury's by the way. Are we angry at them for implying that everyone in Ledbury supports Sainsbury's? Of course not.
Where you also go badly wrong is in the implied assumption that this petition played a significant role in the Sainsbury's application being turned down. Public opinion is only one issue in council planning votes and a minor one at that. Only the county councillors can say why they voted as they did, but seven of the 12 who voted against did say why. None mentioned any belief that there was a majority opinion against the proposal or cited this petition. The general view at the time was that the town was split evenly.
Actually, the two petitions put together aren't even very good evidence for the anti side. On the contrary, although the LOTS petition has more names on it, fewer are from Ledbury/HR8, as I have documented, than those on LESS petition.
This isn't surprising, since they were collected in different ways: LOTS by leaving it in shops, LESS by pounding the streets and targeting residents. LOTS made a mistake in not going door to door and this enabled LESS to create the impression - which they believe entirely sincerely - that the majority view is on their side.
The really strong evidence that the majority view is anti, among those who have expressed a view at all, comes from the response cards. They are both entirely about Sainsbury's, they were done at the same time and are directly comparable. Whether or not you allow those received late and Sainsbury's own cards, there is a very strong anti majority.
(It's definitely wrong, though, to assume that this is all just a battle of tiny minorities with an apathetic majority in the middle. Even if the overlap between petition signatories and card senders is total, which is statistically near to impossible, at least 4,000 people in Ledbury/HR8 have expressed a view one way or another. Probably it is far more than that, maybe even over 6,000. The total population of Ledbury is about 9,200.)
Most LESS supporters will probably disagree with my conclusions. They are entitled to. Nor should they stop wanting an OOTS even if they do accept that they are the minority, any more than I would have stopped if the evidence suggested we were.
This whole campaign was bruising and often nasty but that's how democracy works and it shows, if nothing else, that Ledbury is the kind of place that provokes passionate discussion. Hopefully some of that passion will now be used more productively in other ways, not least in putting together the Town Plan.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 04 December 2012 15:03 |
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"Tesco for Terrorists" (0)
