From Charles Beauchamp, Carisbrooke:

To be honest, if it were not so true and so painfully apt the recent “Milton Keynes by the sea” quote would actually be funny (CP, letters 21-09-18).

None can deny the level of urban sprawl and commercial unit developments in the past 20 years or so have been utterly ridiculous for an Island of this size.

I would suggest the Isle of Wight twinning committee (if we have one) get on the case and give the Milton Keynes new town council, whatever it’s called now, an urgent shout.

There is of course, in all seriousness, a huge difference in our situations in terms of planning credibility.

Milton Keynes was a proper government-approved planned situation which destroyed vast tracts of grade-one farmland. Engulfed Bletchley (actually I recall a pleasant little town) and wiped off the map some charming villages.

Our development on the other hand has been against public opinion, piecemeal, opportunistic by landowners and developers and wholly without any logic. Bearing in mind all factors, such as jobs, immigration levels, available services and infrastructure and at the end of it all the overriding import to the Island of the tourist sector and its pound.

Of course, the concept of green lung preservation, wildlife, quality of life for existing residents or even the political word conservation, all flew out of the window in the face of clear planning ineptitude and financial greed.

Because we have nothing to fight these pockets of development, we are indeed now faced with that awful Milton Keynes twinning prospect... it isn’t a joke. As if that were bad enough what do I see in the same issue as Mr Challoner’s letter? Details of yet another failed fight by residents in Ryde where you report 140 more rabbit-hutch houses may well get nodded through approval. What an outrage against any logic of democracy with the same number of formal objections lodged, binned and ignored.

I am incredulous at the CP headline ‘Tunnel vision’ (21-09-18). Surely that should be Tunnel threat renewed? We, the Island people voted in a referendum that we most emphatically did not want a fixed link…remember that? Therefore, there should be no further ongoing consideration of such a disastrous idea. No more consortiums with finance, no more IW Council co-operation (or connivance) with even discussions about such a disaster. “No fixed link!” The decision was made we stay an Island and that should be the end of it.

If democracy has failed to stop the massive urban sprawl then it must exert itself please to stop a tunnel in its tracks now.