An ecologist says it will take 20 to 30 years for a stretch of River Lugg in Herefordshire to recover after being damaged by a local farmer.
John Price was jailed in 2023 for illegally removing tonnes of gravel from the riverbed to build a road and horse yard at his home and tearing out 71 trees.
He was ordered to pay £600,000 and to restore the damage he had done.
Why only £600,000? Surely replacing everything, the hours watching and monitoring, and whatever other work would need to be done to restore it as it was, on top of any fine for the destruction and vandalism that he had done, would amount to more than £600,000.
EDIT - It says here that he was fined over a million pounds. https://www.herefordtimes.com/news/26042822.new-photos-river-lugg-site-farmer-john-price-jailed/
I fucking hate the mainstream media constant use of minimizing language when it comes to the crimes of businesses and landowners. Calling this shit “vandalism” like it’s as harmful as someone scrawling their name on a bathroom stall is absurd.
I find it tiresome when people get on their high horse because they don’t understand what a quote is.
I find it tiresome when people act like the media have no choice in what to quote. Why quote it as ‘vandalism’ and not “riverside destruction”?
The media, which is owned and controlled by the ruling class, choose how to frame stories. They have reasons for their choices. You can pretend that the BBC is unbiased if you wish to remain ignorant, but my refusal to do so has nothing to do with a high horse and everything to do with my frustration with mainstream media relentlessly defending the interests of the ruling class and minimizing the harm they cause.
Interesting you bring up “riverside destruction”, as this is the headline linking to the story from the BBC News front page:
How a farmer caused ‘the worst case of riverside destruction’ in England
What’s that clop-clop sound?
I’m glad they changed it. I guess I wasn’t the only person to be frustrated.
The BBC is way, way worse for doing this around other topics, especially Israel’s genocide.
What’s that clop-clop sound?
Not sure what this is a reference too, maybe I’m too young
The real bullshit is calling scrawling your name on a bathroom stall “Vandalism”. The term comes from the Vandal people sacking the city of Rome for two weeks straight, plundering everything down to gilded roof tiles of Roman temples.
I don’t know quite where it started, but there’s definitely the Christian and legal concept of sin/crime as a qualitative offense rather than a quantitative one. You are a murderer if you kill one, two, or five people. At some point you become a mass murderer, but that’s the same whether you kill a thousand, or a hundred thousand. Likewise you’re a vandal whether you appropriate a bathroom stall by writing your name on it or you destroy a river. You’re polluting a river whether you chuck a bag of garbage in it or dumping industrial quantities of waste that kills dozens.
I don’t mean to be picky but the guy caused “wilful and malicious damage and destruction” which is exactly the current definition of what “vandalism” means, so, in that sense, the word usage is spot-on.
Yeah, this is how minimising language works - it’s technically correct, but it minimises the actual harm. I’m not saying that it doesn’t meet the definition of vandalism, but when someone says “vandalism”, absolutely nobody in the entire world thinks “oh, that’s when you destroy multiple ecosystems for your personal benefit to expand your farm”. It’s ridiculous.
No it fucking isn’t spot on. He did the damage to benefit himself, which is very different from most types of vandalism.
In the UK the “Criminal Damage Act 1971” is most often used to prosecute acts of vandalism.
You can get up to 10 years (or possibly more in extremely serious cases) prison time for vandalism under the law.
Why you committed the vandalism is also taken into account. For profit? Through ignorance? Drunkenness? Jealousy? etc.
Stealing the copper electrical cable, to sell as scrap, that feeds an entire hospital or rail line is vandalism. Stealing the lead off a church roof is vandalism.
Smashing a bus stop because you’re drunk and the last bus didn’t come is vandalism.
Scrawling “Bob Woz Yuh” on a public restroom wall is vandalism.
That’s just how English and Welsh law operates. The man was a vandal. That’s not an opinion, but a legalese fact - as I currently understand uk law. But I don’t currently practice.
