Mark Andrews on Saturday – Peaky Blinders, green belt and trams

THE latest series of Peaky Blinders ended pretty much as it began, with a violent bloodbath. And two very important questions.

One, given that security at the Oswald Mosley rally was being handled by one of Scotland's most feared and ruthless gangs, did it never cross anyone's mind to check if there was a sniper in the lighting gantry?

Secondly, and equally importantly, didn't Oswald Mosley look and sound like Adam Chance out of Crossroads?

NEW name, same old principle. The Black Country Plan, formerly the Black Country Core Strategy, is "a plan for the area's future development needs and ensure the necessary services are in place to meet these local needs, along with making sure that the necessary level of investment is attracted to create jobs and wealth in the Black Country."

Or, people more cynical than myself might suggest, it is a vehicle enabling councils and developers to put their most toxic plans in a document so long-winded and boring that nobody will actually read it.

Put it this way, the old Black Country Core Strategy put the final nail in the coffin of Dudley town centre by declaring the Merry Hill shopping centre to be the 'strategic town centre' for Dudley – even though it patently isn't – and therefore the preferred site for major retail development.

And so it is with the shiny new Black Country Plan, which could open the door to hundreds of new houses on the Seven Cornfields, the area of green belt around Sedgley and Penn which serves as a buffer between Wolverhampton and Dudley. There are also proposals for 500 homes on Pedmore Common in Stourbridge, and 1,450 homes for farmland in Aldridge.

Anyhow, next year you will get the chance to have your say when it opens for 'consultation', a word which it is fair to say has fallen into disrepute over the past decade or so.

Experience tells me what will probably happen is that, once people have vented their spleen about the sheer scale of these developments, the numbers will be reduced. The local councils and developers will say they have listened to concerns, and cut the 1,300 homes to 600, the 1,450 to 700, and hope that it will be enough to placate everybody.

Something tells me that this time, it won't.

MEANWHILE, local government's obsession with trams continues unabated.

While we are constantly told about the desperate need to increase capacity on our railways – hence the £88 billion for HS2 – the West Midlands Combined Authority is quite happy to block the future reopening of an important railway route through the Black Country for the sake of a few miles of tramline.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the old railway line from Derby to Worcester was split into two by The Beeching cuts of the 1960s, which saw the stretch from Walsall to Stourbridge via Dudley was closed to passengers. The route was kept open, and much of the track remains, with regular talk about reopening the line.

This will be impossible, though, once the West Midlands Combined Authority goes ahead with its plan to run trams on a seven-mile stretch of the line from Wednesbury to Brierley Hill. This will permanently cut the area off from the national rail network and rule out the return of trains running from Derby to Worcester.

Still, the authority's transport chiefs have another trick up their sleeves. Called the Sprint Bus, it is essentially a bus with a sloping windscreen and spats over the wheels to make it look like a tram.

Transport crisis sorted, then.