Labour Sheffield City Council Employs Army of Spy's to Track Down Tree Campaigners / Felling's Watchers

By: N_Walayat

The Labour controlled Sheffield city council has adopted extreme measures in an attempt at silencing dissent or disruption of it's programme to fell 6000 street trees by the end of this year out of a stock of about 30,000 mature street trees. The strategy being deployed amounts to one of intimidation of anyone who disagrees with the tree felling's programme, where even standing and watching a tree felling in progress is likely to prompt the Labour council's ever expanding army of intelligence gathers (spy's) to add watchers on to a growing list of persons of interest, regardless of whether they have actually interfered in anyway in the Labour councils tree felling's programme, as an army of evidence gathers (spy's, with cameras at hand can be found recording anyone and everyone, even those who just stop to look at the felling's underway across Sheffield's streets.

The response from peaceful tree campaigners and members of the wider public has been to take out their own smart phone cameras to return the surveillance favour.

However, now there is a dark twist to this comic tale of the Labour council turning Sheffield into a international laughing stock due to being hell bent on removing the big tree lungs of the city from Sheffield's streets at a time when the national press is reporting on the explosion in street vehicle pollution related health crisis, with 50,000 deaths last year attributed to air pollution. And that dark twist is that the Labour council has employed private investigators to track down campaigners / tree felling's watchers, seeking to intimidate them by following them to their homes!

Furthermore, any tree campaigner who at anytime has found themselves behind a street barrier whether by accident or design could soon find themselves being threatened with imprisonment as the following post from the Sheffield Tree Action Facebook Group illustrates:

"We now have a third person in court next Friday. That campaigner may or may not identify themselves before then. However evidence has been gathered over a period of time and the person (previously unknown) has been traced by private detectives following them, online spying, piecing together information from photographs etc. Please be aware of all this, but most of all come out and peacefully protest in whatever form you feel able tomorrow."

This dark twist in the behaviour of the labour controlled city council is clearly wasting tens of thousands of pounds of tax payers money hunting down all those who disagree with the mass fellings of thousands of Sheffield's biggest and best trees is reminisce of what the likes of the Stazi engaged in, in the former East Germany and today's Putin regime in Russia, despite such behaviour being totally unacceptable in a democracy!

Council tax payers money is being used to silence peaceful protest against the tree felling's, so as to mask the incompetence of the Labour controlled city council that signed a 25 year £2.2 billion PFI contract clearly without fully understanding the ramifications of in terms of the impact on Sheffield's Streets.

The following video illustrates what is happening across the city to Sheffield's streets that are literally being stripped of all of their big trees that had been soaking up vehicle pollution and releasing oxygen into the streets. Despite the fact that the reason why these trees were planted in the first place typically over a 100 years ago was to help clean up Sheffield's toxic air environment of the time, which given the volume of today's road traffic remains just as toxic now as they were then but now without any street lungs to soak up the human health destroying toxins.

Whilst this video illustrates that most of the trees being felled labeled as diseased are clearly healthy trees.

At the end of the day each street tree that has taken 100 years to grow has an average capital value of £50,000. Therefore 10 trees felled off a single street implies that the street has lost £1/2 million in value which on many streets converts into a house prices value loss of 10% to 20%. Therefore the Labour city council's contractor Amey is felling Sheffield's house prices.

By Nadeem Walayat

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Nadeem Walayat has over 25 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis focuses on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and housing market. He is the author of five ebook's in the The Inflation Mega-Trend and Stocks Stealth Bull Market series that can be downloaded for Free.

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