WHO WOULDN’T WANT A major employer creating thousands of well paid jobs in their community?

A golden cascade of job opportunities and wealth creation spreading out across the region.

With unemployment racing towards three million in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, who could be so foolish as to snub such a gilt-edged offer?

Your local council. That’s who.

ABP, the company that owns Southampton docks, has faced opposition from astonishing corners to its plan for a new container terminal on reclaimed land at Dibden Bay.

Bosses have been forced into battle for the key project on no fewer than five separate occasions.

The score is 4-1 to ABP, with the taxpayer left counting the cost and lawyers the only real winners.

Unfortunately, the loss was the one that mattered: The big one, the public enquiry that went right down to the wire before Whitehall backed the birds over jobs in 2002.

Whatever the outcome, on almost every occasion the most vehement opponents have been local authorities charged with the wellbeing of their communities.

Let’s remember these £600m plans are estimated to create 3,000 jobs and ultimately double the capacity of the container port, which supports thousands more.

And yet, since the birds kicked Dibden out of the nest, local mandarins have not sat idle in their bid to banish the plans to the history books.

Like an assassin in the night, their attacks come subtle out of the shadows.

First they tried and failed to rule it out by including it in the boundary of the national park.

Second, the Countyside Agency tried to create public rights of way across it.

Then, Hampshire, Portsmouth and Southampton councils teamed up with the New Forest Park National Authority and sneakily left the site out of an obscure minerals and waste plan. ABP challenged the decision in the High Court and won a thumping victory at a cost to the taxpayer that’s still to be determined but looks likely to run to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

And now there’s this latest bid (see page opposite) by New Forest District Council to “design out” the containers until 2030 by craftily omitting the idea from its snappily titled Local Development Framework Core Strategy. Not so crafty as it turns out, after they were forced into a humiliating climb-down, proposing new wording through gritted teeth grudgingly recognising the site’s strategic importance.

It’s mind boggling.

If this were the heart of the New Forest, I’d understand such vehement opposition but it’s on a few miles of coast already boasting a Military port, a power station and the biggest oil refinery in Europe.

It’s an industrial landscape and the site has been marked out for port development for decades.

What’s the problem?

In truth it’s the wealthy denizens of the Waterside’s lush towns and villages. Many of them are elderly and looking only for a quiet life on the waterfront. For them, jobs and business are other people’s problem as they while away their pensions.

Now ABP has put its cards on the table and confirmed it intends to return to the Bay, it is up to us, those of us who are years from the simple pleasures of retirement, to convince our politicians to support jobs and investment rather than birds and the nimbys.