Over the past few days, there has understandably been much talk, sadness and some postings on email lists about Pete Taylor (of Greenbank) who died last week.

Well, I know that one isn't meant to speak ill of the dead, etc. but I'm sure that I can’t be the only person who is breathing a sigh of relief now that Pete Taylor is gone from us. Of course I don't like to think of anyone dying alone in an asthma attack, I'd rather he'd realised his various dreams/fantasies of moving to Ireland or Spain. But, in reading and hearing some of the (frankly nauseous glorifying) tributes to him, I wonder if we're talking about the same Pete Taylor (?)  And if we are, then I think that this genuinly  meant counter will perhaps be uncomfortable, but not out of place.

I certainly don't want to rid our community of difference, of mavericks, of 'characters', far from it, but Pete Taylor was a hateful (full of hatred) angry man who could be aggressive and  violent when he'd drunk too much or when he was psychotic. He was an entrenched misogynist and would also pick on disabled people in the area as objects of his hatred. There are people – adults and children who still bare the scars of his persistant episodes of terror against them, some are still here and others had their lives made such a misery that they felt forced to leave the area.

I think now, as I did while he lived, that he raised some difficult moral conundrums for us that we could hardly acknowledge - a tireless environmental campaigner who did have a 'love' for the planet, but who also had something of a deep-set hatred of those people who live on it (particularly those of a female gender and those physically weaker than him). Somehow the ‘environmentalist’ (representing much that is ‘good’) seemed to stop us seeing the bad bits.

Whilst I don’t want a community that holds resentments and grudges, I do question how forgiving the 'green' lobby and wider community were of this man - I wonder why they could somehow see no further than ‘Pete the local character’, ‘the maverick’ or 'Pete, the bolshy activist/campaigner' and sat by and watched, laughed off or took his tireless rudeness, aggression and even violence with little in the way of challenge. This was a man whose ‘green politics were more akin to the (‘right wing’ and ‘redneck’) early US Earth First movement than anything that I thought that most green lobbyists here (including UK EF offshoot movements) would sanction. A man who’s social politics were more BMP than ‘liberal’.

Yes, we may have lost something in Pete dying, but if the local community and worse, the green movement needs and makes a hero of someone like this, then I really do worry about our priorities.

I feel an overwhelming sense of relief and can’t but think that the area will be a better and safer place without him.

(Fashionably) Anonymous.