Alliance is a slap in the face to Hastings

It is inevitable in our free society that there will be objectors - but the Alliance has set out its incredibly narrow and muddled case for stopping the Link Road, forgetting almost entirely new jobs, new investment, new business opportunities.

Last week revealed just how naive the Hastings Alliance is on this issue – the only issue to them.

Too many of us are being conned into supporting this anti campaign without a clear view of the effects of their objections on the taxpayer, local and national.

Let us be totally clear. The Alliance is still relying on emotional blackmail - the ecology card - to force a stop to a very well reasoned project and the first substantial infrastructure investment for many years in the Hastings end of the county.

The cost reality is still there whatever the Alliance claims.

The drive for judicial review is unadulterated waste.

Conversely the Link Road investment will add to the council’s income stream once completed, not the reverse.

The astonishment is that such a despairing group should come together – without any obvious ratepayer, commercial or political support.

One individual – ‘an economical environmentalist’ - used the Alliance’s website to put a balancing view and was censored – one who has “over the years burnt many a full tank of petrol sitting in traffic along the A259.”

And yet the Alliance casually suggests this is of little consequence because we should all know that there are worse cases of congestion on the national scene!

The Alliance would get some pretty plummy responses if they sought support among the road users and local inhabitants involved in the A259 traffic queues.

Elsewhere around the country so many other key infrastructure developments have produced massive wins.

As soon as the flow of traffic resumes, confidence brings road and rail funding, drawing in new business.

So why should Hastings be so different and accept this slap-in-the-face Alliance penalty?

Richard Tilden Smith

Church Cottages

Mountfield