We've said, all along, that our goal is to dual the A303, bypass the beleaguered village of Winterbourne Stoke and improve the traffic situation on local roads, particularly those in and around Shrewton to our north. However, in achieving our goal, our second aim is to ensure the best possible environment for the whole of the World Heritage Site; much of which lies within our Parish boundaries - almost certainly making us the most visited village in England, on a per capita basis, as English Heritage's Stonehenge Visitor's Centre lies within our boundaries. Also lying within our perimeter lies what is arguably the most important feature of the World Heritage Site - not Stonehenge, which is something of a "Jonny Come Lately", but the Longbarrow which pre-dates even the earliest phase of Stonehenge by half a millennium.
Actually, only the left hand side of the Longbarrow lies within the parish of Winterbourne Stoke, the right hand (south eastern) side lies in the parish of Wilsford Cum Lake.
You'd have thought that there would be a common view, locally, to enhance this landscape. Not a bit of it, it seems. Though to be fair, no-one has yet, in recent times, sought the views of the locals in any consistent way. That said, there seem to be several favoured alternatives locally:
A - Any solution that gets rid of the traffic jams;
B - A tunnel of 2.9km;
C - An even longer tunnel;
D - Dualling along the existing route, but sinking it in a ditch;
E - Putting the road way to the north, across the southern edge of the Salisbury Plain training area - to the north of Larkhill;
F - Putting the road south of Amesbury on any one of half a dozen routes.
The first solution (A) is borne of desperation by those who live along the A303 - understandable, but it may not help preserve our heritage. (B) and (C) achieve the aims of dualling the A303 and taking the road out of the World Heritage Site. The longer the tunnel the better, in environmental and heritage terms, but it comes at a cost. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that it would enable ALL vehicles, including most of the coaches used by English Heritage and the risible Land Train, to be excluded from the environment. Of course, you would need to provide some mechanised transport for the disabled and elderly, but every other bugger could walk into the landscape from the Visitor's Centre, Larkhill, Amesbury, etc. The route of the A303 could be returned to a green Bridleway throughout the WHS
(E) is an interesting option. The Armed Forces would kick and scream, but even with the current re-basing exercise, it's hard to justify still needing as much space to exercise our much diminished Forces as we did at the height of WWI and WWII. It would be an inexpensive route, with few landowners to deal with and would remove the A303 from the WHS. Far too sensible an option to be considered.
(F) looks superficially promising, until you get stuck into the detail. There are way too many vested interests that would help kill it off. It may have been a viable option 50 years ago when the idea of improving things was first mooted, but the world has moved on - unlike many of the proponents of this schemes.
Finally, we have option (D). About the only positive thing that can be said about this option is that it is cheap and cheerful. It does nothing to enhance the environment of the World Heritage site - and here it is important to stress one thing - whether or not the landscape around Stonehenge remains as a World Heritage site is immaterial to the argument of how the area is crossed. It comes down to whether WE as a region, WE as a nation, want to leave something valuable to posterity - or simply want to bung in a cheap and nasty road and to hell with the consequences. Those that are pushing for this option are doing so on the basis of simple cost (certainly not cost in the broader sense, or else they would soon realise how utterly indefensible their position is).
So, do they have a point when it comes to pounds shillings and pence? Lets look at just a couple of hard facts. Even the 2.9 km tunnel is going to cost at least £2billion. Now that is a big number and I can't imagine what it would look like as a pile of fivers, but is it really excessive in the greater scheme of things? Well let's compare it with something else equally controversial.
Now I could choose the cost of membership of the EU as the comparator, but the booklet of facts on staying in the EU, or leaving, dropped through the door the other day and when I opened this piece of Tory propaganda, I found all the facts were missing from my copy - and the same was true in every other copy I've looked at, so that isn't going to be overly helpful. What else might be a good comparator? Something else that is expensive and controversial - like the UK's Foreign Aid budget.
In 2013, the UK spent 0.7% of GDP, £11.4bn on foreign aid - money spent that does not benefit the UK directly and some would argue is often misspent, maladministered and way to much. We can point the finger of blame at the Lib-Dems for pushing the 0.7% of GDP target in Parliament. The Tories and Labour seem happy with the spend, through the Greens would like to increase it to 1% of GDP. UKIP on the other hand, want to reduce the Foreign Aid budget to 0.2% of GDP and spend the rest within the UK. In a time of austerity, it's hard to justify spending anything not of direct benefit to UK citizens, but I digress...
Back to a fact or two. Back in 2014, we gave India £279 million in Foreign Aid and that was 40% down on 2011. India has its own space program, it has a planned mission to Mars, and the whole program costs £500 million to run per year. So, in bald terms, the money we put into the Indian economy was equivalent to more than 50% of the cost of their entire space program or could have funded 7-8 missions to Mars. We may have been funding it entirely prior to 2011.
Now DfID will argue that the money was targeted on things the Indian's wouldn't have spent their own money on anyway, but the bottom line was that India had a choice on how to spend its money and chose a space program over health and education. I'm sure a little digging would uncover even more egregious examples, but this one will do for the moment.
So, the 2.9 km Stonehenge tunnel option might cost £2bn at December 2014 prices, but over the 40 years (more like 50, but lets be conservative) that there has been talk of improving the A303, we've probably ploughed a demonstrably un-needed £11.6 billion into Indian Foreign Aid. During the same period, we've probably ploughed close to half a trillion pounds into Foreign Aid in total.
Well, there you have it. A one-off spend of £2bn on a tunnel for Stonehenge is peanuts in the greater scheme of things and can easily be afforded by cutting the Foreign Aid budget from those countries, like India, that can well-afford to look after their own population's interests, but choose to ignore them. Of course, digressing again, there are real emergencies and situations that call for Foreign Aid and I wouldn't want to stop that, but we need to spend more wisely.
We have those that walk amongst us who believe a £2 billion tunnel is an extravagance, whilst their political bed-fellows were responsible for the concept of blowing 0.7% of GDP on Foreign Aid without any clear demonstration of need. I would beg you to treat these people gently; their sanity is surely in question.
