According to the Yorkshire Post, on Tuesday the planning committee of Doncaster Council will consider an application to lift restrictions on night flights and loud aircraft at the Robin Hood Airport near Finningley.
It shows the value of the work being done by local people to resist plans to establish a commercial airport at Elvington airfield near York. As can be seen from the case of Doncaster, this can very often be the thin end of the wedge for more extensive operations later on. But disturbance to residents isn't the only issue about airport expansion.
As this FoE report discusses, the obsession with regional airport expansion actually drains money away from regional economies: as people go on cheap flights to the sun, they spend more money abroad than visitors from overseas to the UK - £26 billion a year as opposed to £11 billion, in fact. This £15 billion is helping to contribute to Britain's yawning trade deficit; the only region with a small net positive balance as a result of tourism is London. Alarmingly, the situation is deteriorating further - the number of visitors to Britain is increasing by 1.8% a year, whilst the number of people travelling abroad is increasing by 5.0% a year.
And of course the elephant in the room here is climate change - there is no realistic prospect of cutting our emissions by the 80% minimum required if air travel - the most environmentally damaging form of transport - is allowed to grow without restriction. Evidence also shows that the Yorkshire and the Humber region is already more than adequately served by airports - so the additional capacity is "pump-priming" for yet more low cost flights. It may be one thing for politicians to try and tell people they're not allowed to go on holiday abroad, but it is another entirely to subisidize them.
The Green Party is the only party to take a strong and consistent stance nationally against airport expansion. Once again, the Greens are not only leading the pack on environmental issues, but economic ones as well.
Let's hope that Doncaster Council have the courage to throw out these plans at their meeting next week.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Lib Dems get lost?
York's Bootham Ward council by-election in the year 2000 will not be remembered by many as a seminal moment in the history of British politics. It was, however, notable for the strategy of Eddie Vee, the Monster Raving Loony Party candidate (whose policies included "finish building the bar walls") for one reason: he decide to put half his leaflets out in the neighbouring ward of Clifton.
Ten years on and where some lead, others follow. A friend of mine who lives in the Wellington Street area reported receiving a publication entitled "York News" through his door, which on closer inspection turned out to be a leaflet promoting Madeleine Kirk, the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for York Outer. The problem? He doesn't live in York Outer, but instead in Fishergate Ward, which is part of the neighbouring York Central constituency.
Is this a repeat of Eddie's brilliant strategy from ten years ago? Is Madeleine Kirk now standing in both seats? Or is York Outer attempting a hostile takeover bid for York Central? I think we should be told.
Eddie Vee, pioneer of 21st Century campaigning, we salute you!
Ten years on and where some lead, others follow. A friend of mine who lives in the Wellington Street area reported receiving a publication entitled "York News" through his door, which on closer inspection turned out to be a leaflet promoting Madeleine Kirk, the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for York Outer. The problem? He doesn't live in York Outer, but instead in Fishergate Ward, which is part of the neighbouring York Central constituency.
Is this a repeat of Eddie's brilliant strategy from ten years ago? Is Madeleine Kirk now standing in both seats? Or is York Outer attempting a hostile takeover bid for York Central? I think we should be told.
Eddie Vee, pioneer of 21st Century campaigning, we salute you!
New blog on the York Central campaign
I found this website today which states it is a "non-partisan blog detailing the candidates standing for the York Central Constituency in the 2010 general election." Certainly as far as I'm concerned the coverage seems to be pretty fair. I'm also quite happy that the author has picked on a couple of my more radical ideas such as congestion charging. My view is that we have to grasp this nettle at some stage unless we want permanent gridlock in the city.
I was particularly interested in this article which notes that the BNP are attempting to exploit fears over paedophiles at the Southview Bail Hostel in Poppleton Road. It notes that the address on the "York Community Voice" blog, which claims to be an "independent group supporting the British National Party" is the same as the contact PO Box number used on the BNP's leaflets!
Anyway, I trust that the author of the blog will be "keeping us honest" until the date of the election!
I was particularly interested in this article which notes that the BNP are attempting to exploit fears over paedophiles at the Southview Bail Hostel in Poppleton Road. It notes that the address on the "York Community Voice" blog, which claims to be an "independent group supporting the British National Party" is the same as the contact PO Box number used on the BNP's leaflets!
Anyway, I trust that the author of the blog will be "keeping us honest" until the date of the election!
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Conspiracy Central...
It struck me the other day that there are some remarkable parallels between 9/11 conspiracy theories and the argument that man-made global warming is a “hoax,” even to the point that some of the people advocating these ideas are the same. Both these propositions are liable to attract people from the extremes of the political spectrum – 9/11 conspiracies from both leftists and right-wing anti-government libertarians (such as radio talk-show host Alex Jones), global warming conspiracies from both libertarian and authoritarian right-wingers (such as UKIP and the BNP) and revolutionary communists such as “Great Global Warming Swindle” producer Martin Durkin.
Both theories rely on what Ben Goldacre has described as “zombie arguments,” that is to say they crop up time and time again, no matter how many times they are refuted. In the case of 9/11, there is the argument that the fall of the twin towers must have been due to controlled demolition – the main reason being that jet fuel will only burn at around 1000°C whereas steel only melts at 2700°C. This is perfectly true, but structural steel loses around 50% of its strength at 800°C and 90% at 1000°C so that hardly proves that the building (consisting of hundreds of tons of masonry) couldn’t have collapsed under its own weight. Quite apart from this, there is the incredible ingenuity that would have been needed to smuggle some unspecified number of explosives experts into the building and to allow them to rig a perfectly controlled demolition, all of which would presumably have had to be done without the security staff or anyone else in the building noticing anything untoward. There’s also the fact that the building collapsed from above the level of the aircraft impact first – exactly as you would expect if it fell under its own weight. This could have been reproduced under the conditions of controlled demolition, but for it to work the engineers would have had to have extraordinarily accurate knowledge about where the aeroplane was going to hit - and so on. Some conspiracy theorists maintain that the planes were not passenger aircraft, but instead military fuel carriers and that they had “no windows” – despite the fact that windows can clearly be seen in sections of the fuselage recovered from the wreckage.
In like manner, there are theories about the eventual fate of the passengers on flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. There is numerous evidence, from “black box” recordings, radio communications and mobile ‘phone conversations indicating that the plane fell to the ground whilst passengers were attempting to overpower the hijackers. However, some persist in believing that the flight was taken over by CIA operatives who landed safely and then abducted or murdered all their fellow travellers. And some say that a missile hit the Pentagon, not an aeroplane, despite numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary.
Now, it’s true that global warming scepticism uses its fair share of “zombie” arguments as well – not least that granddaddy of them all “scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s.” Many of these canards have been repeatedly debunked on the Internet, but are then wheeled out again by sceptics in different forums – for example, Ian Plimer has claimed on several occasions that volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans, despite being corrected again and again. He has also repeatedly stated that the US Geological Survey figures that contradict his argument don’t include submarine volcanoes, even though he has been put right on this more than once.
However, I’m going to look here not at the tactics used by sceptics in general, but rather the subset of them that seriously believe that global warming is an elaborate “hoax.” The recent hack of e-mails at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has of course provided grist to this particular mill. The claim is that the vast majority of climate scientists, nearly all governments around the world, and various combinations of George Soros/ Al Gore/ Arnold Schwarzenegger/ Prince Charles and George Monbiot (please delete as appropriate) are involved in a gigantic conspiracy to falsify temperature records to show that the earth is warming when it isn’t, and/ or to spuriously allege that CO2 is responsible. This conspiracy is generally held to have the following objectives:
(1) To gain additional research funding for climate science (presumably to personally enrich those involved)
(2) To provide a pretext for governments to increase taxes
(3) To establish some form of “world government” (generally held to be a bad thing), or “eco-fascist dictatorship,” and/ or to transfer money to the developing world (for reasons that are not ostensibly clear)
(4) To make money from carbon trading
This has a number of points in common with the ideas of 9/11 conspiracy wonks. To make either of these theories work, the number of participants has to be genuinely vast. Let’s be clear: the main difference between this stuff and the idea that Elvis is alive is that the latter is considerably more plausible. You can imagine that if Elvis had wanted to stage his own death, he would have needed the help of perhaps a couple of dozen people or less – immediate family, undertakers, doctors and so on, who could have been handsomely paid off. That these same people would have kept quiet for years about it is just about plausible. That doesn’t, of course, mean that there is the slightest shred of evidence that such a thing occurred, merely that it’s just about at the far end of possibility that it could have.
On the other hand, the kind of conspiracy needed to explain 9/11 or global warming theory would be on a truly monumental scale. Imagine the number of operatives required to arrange three aircraft collisions, to fake the crash of another one, to rig up an entire building with explosives without anyone noticing anything odd, to position those explosives perfectly so as to mimic the effect on the building of the upper floors collapsing, &c, &c. Dozens, and possibly hundreds of people would need to have been involved – all of whom would have had to keep quiet for years, without spilling the beans. Numerous eyewitness accounts would also have had to be faked.
Likewise, in the case of global warming, the “conspiracy” – and remember, according to these people, “fraud” is what we are talking about – would have to involve hundreds of scientists across a dozen or more scientific fields. Many thousands of data points would have had to be manufactured, and all to be broadly consistent with each other. For example, the computer code and raw data for GISTEMP, one of the most important global temperature series, is published on the Internet and you can bet that the sceptics will have combed every last data point for evidence of “manipulation.” That they have found nothing surely means that the “fraud” would have to relate to the weather station data itself from countries around the world – involving yet more people in the “conspiracy.”
One of the commonly advanced arguments to support this kind of nonsense is that scientists would lose research grants if climate change were shown not to be a threat. Now, it is perfectly true that it might be in the collective self-interest of scientists to claim that there’s a problem when there isn’t; but that doesn’t mean it’s in their individual self-interest. Anyone who came up with compelling evidence genuinely undermining the whole case for anthropogenic global warming would become world famous, would almost certainly become individually very wealthy and would (entirely deservedly) be in line for a Nobel prize. So it seems remarkable that of such a large number of climate scientists, not one of them would be prepared to squeak. Perhaps we can only assume that the mafia are involved too! That’s quite apart from the alleged involvement of world governments, who after the financial crisis surely have enough to do without inventing spurious “crises” to tackle and in doing so making themselves even more unpopular with their own electorates.
So one sees that one of the Achilles heels of both arguments is the sheer number of people who would have to be involved in either case, along with a somewhat convoluted and only superficially plausible set of motives. That hundreds of people could be kept quiet for eight years (in the case of 9/11) or twenty to thirty years (in the case of global warming) is quite incredible – no blabbing, no stories in the press, not even any deathbed confessions.
One other similarity is that the objectors to both global warming and the accepted story of 9/11 are a fairly disparate bunch, who lack any convincing alternative narrative but simply pick away at points, sometimes of a minor and relatively tangential nature, in the “official version.” Very often, the arguments and positions of some of the objectors contradict each other – for example, there are two schools of thought on the 9/11 attacks. Some claim that the whole thing was organized and planned by the CIA, others that it was the work of Al-Qaeda but that the CIA knew about it in advance and deliberately allowed it to happen.
Likewise, the views of global warming contrarians vary, often seamlessly, between the following arguments:
(1) Global warming isn’t happening at all
(2) Global warming is happening, but human activity is not the cause
(3) Global warming is happening and is caused by humans, but the effects will be beneficial, as increased CO2 will lead to greater plant growth
(4) If all else fails, ignore the main arguments and focus on tangential matters (such as the “hockey stick” – the graph that shows that late 20th Century temperatures are the warmest in over 100,000 years. Even if, as sceptics claim, it was warmer in mediaeval times, this doesn’t per se contradict the notion that CO2 is causing warming).
(5) Failing all of (1) to (4), ignore the issue and instead focus on straw man/ personal attacks of peripheral relevance (e.g. Al Gore is a hypocrite)
Finally, there are a couple more things that these theories have in common. One is that, in both cases, the “conspiracy” nonsense did not begin to circulate until some time long after the event. In the case of 9/11, most of the esoteric facts scarcely came to light until some years after the fall of the twin towers; meanwhile, global warming conspiracy theory is also a relatively recent phenomenon. The original idea of the “greenhouse effect” (something of a misnomer, by the way, since the mechanism that warms a greenhouse is actually rather different) was first propounded in outline by Joseph Fourier in the 1830s. John Tyndall in the 1850s showed the heat-trapping properties of CO2 and water vapour. Svante Arrhenius in 1896 made a first attempt at calculating the likely effects of increasing CO2 concentration on temperature, though his first attempt assumed a somewhat higher climate sensitivity for CO2 than would generally be accepted today. Guy Callendar did much additional work on the theory in the 1930s (the effect of greenhouse gases is officially known as the “Callendar effect” in scientific circles) and his work has been built on from the 1950s to the present day. Contrary to the impression promulgated by some sceptics, in the 1970s a large majority of peer-reviewed scientific papers (though not a consensus) suggested that further warming was likely. Yet only in the past few years has anyone been heard to seriously opine that the whole thing (going back how far, exactly) is a “fraud.”
Finally, one has to note that in both cases, there seems to be a small lunatic fringe of conspiracists who will intimidate people they believe (no doubt genuinely) to be part of the “evil empire.” Some eyewitnesses to the events of 9/11 whose testimony contradicts the alternative accounts have received threatening ‘phone calls – and so have some climate scientists, especially since “Climategate.” But there is one fact that runs through all of this – the conspiracy theorists are a diverse, disorganized and disparate group with no alternatives to offer, who are united by nothing other than a desperate desire for their own preconceived opinions to be shown to be true. It’s a lesson that, whatever walk of life we find ourselves in, we should always be willing to reflect on our own motivations and beliefs, and check that we’re not bending the facts to accommodate the self-image we wish to create for ourselves.
And of course, with Britain in the grip of its coldest winter since 1981, we’ve also had the old favourite “global warming isn’t happening because there’s snow outside my window” arguments. In that case, could I advise people to take a winter break in Africa, South America, Canada or the eastern seaboard of the US, southern Europe, Australia or South Asia, all of which experienced unusually warm weather in December.
Anyway, enough for now – time to go out and clear some of the snow on the path outside the house…
Both theories rely on what Ben Goldacre has described as “zombie arguments,” that is to say they crop up time and time again, no matter how many times they are refuted. In the case of 9/11, there is the argument that the fall of the twin towers must have been due to controlled demolition – the main reason being that jet fuel will only burn at around 1000°C whereas steel only melts at 2700°C. This is perfectly true, but structural steel loses around 50% of its strength at 800°C and 90% at 1000°C so that hardly proves that the building (consisting of hundreds of tons of masonry) couldn’t have collapsed under its own weight. Quite apart from this, there is the incredible ingenuity that would have been needed to smuggle some unspecified number of explosives experts into the building and to allow them to rig a perfectly controlled demolition, all of which would presumably have had to be done without the security staff or anyone else in the building noticing anything untoward. There’s also the fact that the building collapsed from above the level of the aircraft impact first – exactly as you would expect if it fell under its own weight. This could have been reproduced under the conditions of controlled demolition, but for it to work the engineers would have had to have extraordinarily accurate knowledge about where the aeroplane was going to hit - and so on. Some conspiracy theorists maintain that the planes were not passenger aircraft, but instead military fuel carriers and that they had “no windows” – despite the fact that windows can clearly be seen in sections of the fuselage recovered from the wreckage.
In like manner, there are theories about the eventual fate of the passengers on flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. There is numerous evidence, from “black box” recordings, radio communications and mobile ‘phone conversations indicating that the plane fell to the ground whilst passengers were attempting to overpower the hijackers. However, some persist in believing that the flight was taken over by CIA operatives who landed safely and then abducted or murdered all their fellow travellers. And some say that a missile hit the Pentagon, not an aeroplane, despite numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary.
Now, it’s true that global warming scepticism uses its fair share of “zombie” arguments as well – not least that granddaddy of them all “scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s.” Many of these canards have been repeatedly debunked on the Internet, but are then wheeled out again by sceptics in different forums – for example, Ian Plimer has claimed on several occasions that volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans, despite being corrected again and again. He has also repeatedly stated that the US Geological Survey figures that contradict his argument don’t include submarine volcanoes, even though he has been put right on this more than once.
However, I’m going to look here not at the tactics used by sceptics in general, but rather the subset of them that seriously believe that global warming is an elaborate “hoax.” The recent hack of e-mails at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has of course provided grist to this particular mill. The claim is that the vast majority of climate scientists, nearly all governments around the world, and various combinations of George Soros/ Al Gore/ Arnold Schwarzenegger/ Prince Charles and George Monbiot (please delete as appropriate) are involved in a gigantic conspiracy to falsify temperature records to show that the earth is warming when it isn’t, and/ or to spuriously allege that CO2 is responsible. This conspiracy is generally held to have the following objectives:
(1) To gain additional research funding for climate science (presumably to personally enrich those involved)
(2) To provide a pretext for governments to increase taxes
(3) To establish some form of “world government” (generally held to be a bad thing), or “eco-fascist dictatorship,” and/ or to transfer money to the developing world (for reasons that are not ostensibly clear)
(4) To make money from carbon trading
This has a number of points in common with the ideas of 9/11 conspiracy wonks. To make either of these theories work, the number of participants has to be genuinely vast. Let’s be clear: the main difference between this stuff and the idea that Elvis is alive is that the latter is considerably more plausible. You can imagine that if Elvis had wanted to stage his own death, he would have needed the help of perhaps a couple of dozen people or less – immediate family, undertakers, doctors and so on, who could have been handsomely paid off. That these same people would have kept quiet for years about it is just about plausible. That doesn’t, of course, mean that there is the slightest shred of evidence that such a thing occurred, merely that it’s just about at the far end of possibility that it could have.
On the other hand, the kind of conspiracy needed to explain 9/11 or global warming theory would be on a truly monumental scale. Imagine the number of operatives required to arrange three aircraft collisions, to fake the crash of another one, to rig up an entire building with explosives without anyone noticing anything odd, to position those explosives perfectly so as to mimic the effect on the building of the upper floors collapsing, &c, &c. Dozens, and possibly hundreds of people would need to have been involved – all of whom would have had to keep quiet for years, without spilling the beans. Numerous eyewitness accounts would also have had to be faked.
Likewise, in the case of global warming, the “conspiracy” – and remember, according to these people, “fraud” is what we are talking about – would have to involve hundreds of scientists across a dozen or more scientific fields. Many thousands of data points would have had to be manufactured, and all to be broadly consistent with each other. For example, the computer code and raw data for GISTEMP, one of the most important global temperature series, is published on the Internet and you can bet that the sceptics will have combed every last data point for evidence of “manipulation.” That they have found nothing surely means that the “fraud” would have to relate to the weather station data itself from countries around the world – involving yet more people in the “conspiracy.”
One of the commonly advanced arguments to support this kind of nonsense is that scientists would lose research grants if climate change were shown not to be a threat. Now, it is perfectly true that it might be in the collective self-interest of scientists to claim that there’s a problem when there isn’t; but that doesn’t mean it’s in their individual self-interest. Anyone who came up with compelling evidence genuinely undermining the whole case for anthropogenic global warming would become world famous, would almost certainly become individually very wealthy and would (entirely deservedly) be in line for a Nobel prize. So it seems remarkable that of such a large number of climate scientists, not one of them would be prepared to squeak. Perhaps we can only assume that the mafia are involved too! That’s quite apart from the alleged involvement of world governments, who after the financial crisis surely have enough to do without inventing spurious “crises” to tackle and in doing so making themselves even more unpopular with their own electorates.
So one sees that one of the Achilles heels of both arguments is the sheer number of people who would have to be involved in either case, along with a somewhat convoluted and only superficially plausible set of motives. That hundreds of people could be kept quiet for eight years (in the case of 9/11) or twenty to thirty years (in the case of global warming) is quite incredible – no blabbing, no stories in the press, not even any deathbed confessions.
One other similarity is that the objectors to both global warming and the accepted story of 9/11 are a fairly disparate bunch, who lack any convincing alternative narrative but simply pick away at points, sometimes of a minor and relatively tangential nature, in the “official version.” Very often, the arguments and positions of some of the objectors contradict each other – for example, there are two schools of thought on the 9/11 attacks. Some claim that the whole thing was organized and planned by the CIA, others that it was the work of Al-Qaeda but that the CIA knew about it in advance and deliberately allowed it to happen.
Likewise, the views of global warming contrarians vary, often seamlessly, between the following arguments:
(1) Global warming isn’t happening at all
(2) Global warming is happening, but human activity is not the cause
(3) Global warming is happening and is caused by humans, but the effects will be beneficial, as increased CO2 will lead to greater plant growth
(4) If all else fails, ignore the main arguments and focus on tangential matters (such as the “hockey stick” – the graph that shows that late 20th Century temperatures are the warmest in over 100,000 years. Even if, as sceptics claim, it was warmer in mediaeval times, this doesn’t per se contradict the notion that CO2 is causing warming).
(5) Failing all of (1) to (4), ignore the issue and instead focus on straw man/ personal attacks of peripheral relevance (e.g. Al Gore is a hypocrite)
Finally, there are a couple more things that these theories have in common. One is that, in both cases, the “conspiracy” nonsense did not begin to circulate until some time long after the event. In the case of 9/11, most of the esoteric facts scarcely came to light until some years after the fall of the twin towers; meanwhile, global warming conspiracy theory is also a relatively recent phenomenon. The original idea of the “greenhouse effect” (something of a misnomer, by the way, since the mechanism that warms a greenhouse is actually rather different) was first propounded in outline by Joseph Fourier in the 1830s. John Tyndall in the 1850s showed the heat-trapping properties of CO2 and water vapour. Svante Arrhenius in 1896 made a first attempt at calculating the likely effects of increasing CO2 concentration on temperature, though his first attempt assumed a somewhat higher climate sensitivity for CO2 than would generally be accepted today. Guy Callendar did much additional work on the theory in the 1930s (the effect of greenhouse gases is officially known as the “Callendar effect” in scientific circles) and his work has been built on from the 1950s to the present day. Contrary to the impression promulgated by some sceptics, in the 1970s a large majority of peer-reviewed scientific papers (though not a consensus) suggested that further warming was likely. Yet only in the past few years has anyone been heard to seriously opine that the whole thing (going back how far, exactly) is a “fraud.”
Finally, one has to note that in both cases, there seems to be a small lunatic fringe of conspiracists who will intimidate people they believe (no doubt genuinely) to be part of the “evil empire.” Some eyewitnesses to the events of 9/11 whose testimony contradicts the alternative accounts have received threatening ‘phone calls – and so have some climate scientists, especially since “Climategate.” But there is one fact that runs through all of this – the conspiracy theorists are a diverse, disorganized and disparate group with no alternatives to offer, who are united by nothing other than a desperate desire for their own preconceived opinions to be shown to be true. It’s a lesson that, whatever walk of life we find ourselves in, we should always be willing to reflect on our own motivations and beliefs, and check that we’re not bending the facts to accommodate the self-image we wish to create for ourselves.
And of course, with Britain in the grip of its coldest winter since 1981, we’ve also had the old favourite “global warming isn’t happening because there’s snow outside my window” arguments. In that case, could I advise people to take a winter break in Africa, South America, Canada or the eastern seaboard of the US, southern Europe, Australia or South Asia, all of which experienced unusually warm weather in December.
Anyway, enough for now – time to go out and clear some of the snow on the path outside the house…
Friday, 1 January 2010
Without Borders
I'm not a big fan of national chain stores, but it is certainly with deep regret that I note the passing of York's Borders' bookstore. I went past a couple of days ago and noted that quite a lot of the interior fittings have already been stripped out. With the Central Library closed until April for conversion to a "learning centre," it seems that York has now lost both its public libraries. It must also be difficult for the staff to find themselves seeking jobs in the new year.
One wonders in the longer term where this leaves York's retail economy. The proposed Coppergate II development a few years ago was based on the assumption of an insatiable demand for new retail space and the need to attract large chain stores to the city centre. At present, the former Boots' store in Coney Street is in the process of being divided into smaller units because of the failure to let the larger shop, whilst the old Borders' store stands empty.
Anyway, we ust see what the new year brings, but it confirms the concern I had when I spoke against the Coppergate II proposal in 2003that there were limits to future growth in retail spending and what growth there is ay we be channelled towards the internet rather than shops.
One wonders in the longer term where this leaves York's retail economy. The proposed Coppergate II development a few years ago was based on the assumption of an insatiable demand for new retail space and the need to attract large chain stores to the city centre. At present, the former Boots' store in Coney Street is in the process of being divided into smaller units because of the failure to let the larger shop, whilst the old Borders' store stands empty.
Anyway, we ust see what the new year brings, but it confirms the concern I had when I spoke against the Coppergate II proposal in 2003that there were limits to future growth in retail spending and what growth there is ay we be channelled towards the internet rather than shops.
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