Time running out for you to have your say on Local Plan changes. DEADLINE by this Friday lunchtime (12 JUNE) .

Some tips and practical information on sending in your comments to EDDC, at this link:  http://saveoursidmouth.com/2015/06/09/urgent-reminder-public-consultation-thats-for-you-ends-this-friday-midday-12-june/

Great Gathering for Voting Reform! 25 June, Parliament Square, London

http://www.unlockdemocracy.org/events/2015/6/25/great-gathering-for-voting-reform

Owl – these are both big events to East Devon – have your say.

Appeal_Flyer1a

From John Barbara, Co-Chair OMLRA & Chris Booker, Member OMLRA

Please see the attached flyer which sets out the details of the case and the arrangements for the Appeal Hearing.
It is being circulated just in case you are not fully aware that the first application for the original 48 acre solar site surrounding Walnut Tree Cottages has gone to appeal. The application was rejected by East Devon planners so they have to defend this decision. This does NOT concern the revised application for a much smaller site at the same location.
OMLRA has filed a detailed and policy-based submission which makes our case brilliantly. However, we need to demonstrate a high level of individual local objection to the solar site. To this end, would you be able to come along for a time on Tuesday (It starts at 10am) ? Even an hour would help to show that local residents are firmly against the use of high grade farmland (surrounded by four listed heritage properties) for solar.
Please do come and support this. We have a very strong case already but we need a personal presence from genuine residents from Oil Mill Lane to help tip the balance by showing our strength of feeling.
We look forward to seeing you next week.
Best wishes
John Barbara, Co-Chair OMLRAChris Booker, Member OMLRA

OWL – from our western fringe – still East Devon under threat.

Peter Nasmyth
LITERATURE AND LANDSCAPE IN EAST DEVON
160pp. MTA Publications. Paperback, £15.99

Visiting Sidmouth for the BBC in 1949 John Betjeman remarked, “A silver mist hung over Sidmouth when I came into it. A silver mist was over it when I went away”. Peter Nasmyth’s Literature and Landscape in East Devon is thick with Devon’s silver mist. Produced in association with East Devon Alliance, the book, as befits its subject, is large, eccentric, utterly beautiful… It’s as though the pages are alive with Devon pixies, dashing among the shadows and flashing their eyes.
Nasmyth writes the kind of delightful, delighting prose that one associates with another era – glad and gleeful prose which occasionally throws up the most extraordinary insights. Writing about Coleridge’s childhood in Devon, for example, Nasmyth writes about the ways in which the River Otter “cut a profound psychological mark into his character”. The cutting of the river into Coleridge’s consciousness captures exactly the outrageous edge of his vast Devonian imagination. “Looking out across East Devon’s undulating green hills and open fields that lead to a sparkling expanse of sea”, Nasmyth writes, “is a feeling in itself” – and indeed it is.
The book is a treasury of just such remarks and information…We see, too, how Sidmouth is paraded and disguised in literature: it is, variously, apparently, Thackeray’s Baymouth, Beatrix Potter’s Stymouth, William Trevor’s Dynmouth, Thomas Hardy’s Idmouth, and Jane Austen’s Sanditon.
Nasmyth’s most unexpected discovery in the book, however, is John Fowles’s home on the Undercliff, that strange area of landslip on the Dorset-Devon border, where Fowles famously wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Peering inside his writing shed, Nasmyth discovers fresh signs of slippage and subsidence: “the large, plate-glass window had just, a couple of days earlier, received a long crack, from one side to the other”. Even Jurassic East Devon, it seems, is always in the process of change… Visit now, before it is too late.

IAN SAMSON , The Times Literary Supplement 27 May 2015

Will new EDDC Chair be ‘too busy” for the role?

Stuart Hughes, who has been appointed as EDDC Chair, is also a County Councillor. What, then, has changed since Cllr Hughes was sacked from Chairing the Scrutiny Committee after setting up an ‘in-depth study’ into EDDC’s links with the group then known as the East Devon Business Forum?

https://sidmouthindependentnews.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/which-councillor-is-too-busy/

 Note from OWL: As EDWatchers well know, the so-called Business TAFF,  never completed its original task, despite plucky efforts by  Cllr Graham Troman (Con) ( who lost his Sidmouth seat this May).

From the SIN blog archives:  https://sidmouthindependentnews.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/planning-planted-firmly-on-the-business-taff-agenda/

https://sidmouthindependentnews.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/why-mr-williams-should-go/

“Ms Wright is the Conservative minister’s best-placed challenger, the bookies say, with Ladbrokes giving her 5-1 odds to win, better than Ukip (14/1), the Liberal Democrats (66/1) and Labour (100/1). Her odds, originally quoted at 66/1 by William Hill, have improved and now stand at 9/2. Hugo Swire’s odds, however, have deteriorated, slipping from 1/12 in late February to 1/6. So who is this independent threatening Hugo Swire’s seat?

Claire Wright, an independent councillor representing the town of Ottery in East Devon, stood for Parliament because she was “angry about the way central government treats its citizens”. A local campaigner, the 39 year old worked in the NHS from 2001, in a public relations role, starting numerous health campaigns. She also worked for Devon County Council before becoming a freelance in 2008, serving on Ottery Town Council from 2009 to 2013 and then East Devon District Council.

In May 2013, Claire was elected to the Devon County Council after securing 2,974 votes which represented 74 per cent of the total vote, making it the biggest share in the South West. She is the leader of the non-aligned group of three Independents on the council and one Green councillor. On the council, she has focussed on two issues: transparency and working to “save the district from the very real threat of over-development”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11570165/Meet-the-Ottery-independent-candidate-who-could-take-one-of-the-Tories-safest-seats.html#disqus_thread

..but she’s been in the job for 4 years! See article here, from the latest edition of Marshwood Vale magazine  (Click to enlarge)

With thanks to Private Eye:

Organised by Vision Group for Sidmouth. Reminder of details, from the VgS website:

When: 7:30 PM 28th April

Who: Andrew Chapman, Stuart Mole, Steve Race, Rt Hon Hugo Swire MP, Claire Wright

A copy of the letter sent out to declared candidates:

Dear Candidate

Many thanks for accepting the invitation (subject to any other emergent diary demands) to the Vision Group for Sidmouth (VGS) 2015 Hustings. So far the panel will be made up of the following Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPCs)s :-

Conservative Hugo Swire
Independent Claire Wright
Labour Steve Race
Liberal Democrat Stuart Mole
UKIP Andrew Chapman

The Hustings for the General Election will be on Apr 28th at St Francis Hall

The event will be styled on the BBC Radio 4 programme “Any Questions”.

The PPCs will make up the panel to take questions from representative groups and members of the public.

The evening will commence at 7.30pm with refreshments.
The panel will gather at 7.50pm; the session will consist of pre-prepared questions being fielded through the chair to the PPCs from the audience – namely from those organisations and individuals who have sent in questions.
The panellists will not be aware of the exact wording of the questions beforehand; they will not be subject to follow-up questions from the audience, although the chair might chose to ask for clarification.
The question-and-answer session will end at 8.50pm with further refreshments.
The evening should finish at about 9.15pm.

The event will be moderated by the Chair. Microphones will be available for both panellists and members of the audience fielding questions. Refreshments will be provided by the VGS.

I will provide a further update nearer the time.

Best regards,

Dave Bramley
Chair
Vision Group for Sidmouth

http://www.visionforsidmouth.org

Thanks to comedienne Jennifer Saunders Facebook page for this:

Cheerful letter in this week’s Sidmouth Herald (17th April 2015):

‘The sudden appearance in our fields and hedgerows, gardens and window boxes, of a variety of colourful election posters must gladden every heart in East Devon this Spring-time.

It is probably wise simply to enjoy them as a symbol of hope and renewal. But sometimes I wonder if they have some deeper meaning.

Perhaps the posters in windows and gardens indicate that the people who live there intend to vote for the named candidate (or party). But what are we to make of the ones on gates and fields inhabited only by sheep and donkeys?

And the ones planted on the margins of our public roads? What are they for? It’s not as if Devon East is a marginal constituency.

Or is it?

Robert Crick, Sidmouth