THE NIREX TALE

1. It all kicked off before I moved here, but was the reason I did. House prices dropped through the floor, in fact houses just wouldn't sell at all for a while & the market took years to recover.

2. The house I bought had stood empty for 6 years or more.

MOD land near to the village of Fulbeck was earmarked by the government as an appropriate site for the dumping of nuclear waste.

3. What the government didn't bank on was the extent of the yokels revolt. People around here still talk about it now.

All entrances to the MOD site were blocked by local residents & farmers, who took it in turn to blockade the access tracks.

4. The difficulty the government had was:
a) This is a Tory stronghold, and
b) The protesters were normies & a good many were 'middle class' Tory voters too.

5. So the government didn't quite know how to handle a peasants revolt, especially when the peasants were probably Tories.

They employed Angela Rippon to try & give a respectable face to NIREX, but it made no difference.

6. There wasn't some mighty battle at the end of it all, the government just went quiet, gave up & withered away. The adverse publicity of middle class ladies making cups of tea for the coppers & media meant there was no easy way for the govt. to continue.

7. So I managed to buy a house a few years after NIREX had gone, but prices were still low due to the fear of them returning one day.

A strange twist to the tale is the site was picked because the geologists considered it low in seismic activity, so safe to bury nuclear waste.

8. But about 12 years ago we had a big earthquake here which caused a lot of damage to properties.

9. So the moral of the tale is twofold:

a) Take what the experts assert with a generous pinch of salt, and

b) When the normies revolt, governments, even thatcher governments, don't know what to do - it really frightens them.