Planet and PEOPLE

Let’s get rid of the Highland Council.   The Highland Council is so utterly awful it is now hard to see any redeeming qualities at all.  

It is not local at all, covering a third of mainland Scotland, an area the size of the whole of Wales.  It is an urban city council for Inverness and its commuter belt.  Senior managers have a completely urban mindset that fails to understand the rural highlands.  

This attitude is exactly the same as all the major political parties have.   The votes are to be won in urban areas.  The rural areas are just too wee, too poor, too stupid to matter. 

So the Highland Council, ruling Wester Ross from far-away Inverness, just de-fund us.   Councillors are neither seen or heard.   Basic services are withdrawn, centralised, the only investment is through limited ‘philanthropic’ funds communities are expected to bid into, trying to avoid making the same mistake as Oliver Twist.  We should just be grateful for these crumbs and accept our Council Tax and other charges just drain out of our economy and into the urban areas, or worse, the pockets of international corporations and their oligarch owners – our real rulers, who believe themselves to have the power of life and death over everyone and everything. 

In Wester Ross, our roads and our nerves are worn out and destroyed by volumes and types of traffic never conceived of here only a few years ago.   Drive-through, self-contained ‘safari park’ style tourism undermines our economy and our communities.   It is also complete madness to be promoting the driving of big diesel vehicles hundreds of miles  in a climate emergency.   There is almost no  investment in any form of sustainable tourism.   And it is all for the benefit of Inverness at our expense.   As it says on the litter bins, all facilities and investment are ‘For Visitor Use Only’.   They cannot see how insulting and abusive all this is.   But we are just ‘teuchters’ after all.  There are very few people actually living here now anyway, and the ‘rewilding’ agenda writes Gaelic cultural heritage out of history.

The Highlands has been a marginalised, rich man’s playground for over 250 years, a so-called ‘wild’ place created and sustained by violence and the greed of wealthy industrialists.   And it continues.  No wonder Scotland has proved such an easy place to divide and rule.    For the highlands,  we have faced the choice of oppressive rule from London or much the same from the Central Belt.  The creation of the Highland Council  has only reinforced this centralisation and disempowerment of communities.    Why should we put up with Green Lairds, Marine Protected Areas and other imposed policies and designations?   Why should we pay the highest prices in the UK for our own renewable electricity while our land is covered in huge pylons to export it to London?   Why should we tolerate a forest of 5G masts that serve no genuinely useful public purpose but destroy our privacy, health and biodiversity in the name of private power and profit?

At the last ‘local’ election, here in Poolewe we were offered various candidates, only one of whom we recognised at all – and she lives miles away across the mountains.   None of them visited Poolewe at all, and election leaflets demonstrated almost no understanding of or interest in this local area.   One of them didn’t even produce a leaflet – apart from party affiliation, we had no idea who he was or what he stood for.    And now it seems this person has been appointed by the group of Ward 5 councillors as ‘our’ representative!    None of them respond to complaints, or make any effort to meet residents to discuss issues.   We might as well just silently sink into the earth.  Since our Holyrood and Westminster constituencies are larger than some European countries there is nothing that could really be called ‘democracy’ here.

We have a serious, chronic housing shortage in Wester Ross, but the Highland Council build around Inverness – thousands of houses in endless, soul-less dormitory suburbs.  They make plenty of money for their volume house-builder friends, and bring in a good income in planning fees, but it forces people and jobs to move to Inverness, further depopulating the so-called ‘remote’ rural areas.   Remote to them perhaps but not to us!  

The only possible future for the rural highlands is to restore some genuinely local democracy.   Break up the Highland Council and give us a voice.   

I suggest that since Druim Alban -the spine running north-south down the island of Alba (Britain) is a natural cultural as well as a geographical feature, its time this was respected in a new arrangement.  The old county boundaries reflected the colonisation of the west from the eastern seaboard.    The creation of the Western Isles Council was a first step in the right direction.  We now need new councils to cover the Inner Hebrides and the western mainland that once looked towards the Lordship of the Isles.   Strathnaver (and its region) was once a province in its own right.   Lets re-create it and fund its re-population.   Re-create councils for Ullapool, Gairloch,  Lochalsh.  Skye is as big as Northumberland – surely it should have its own council?  Likewise Lochaber needs one.   On the east, Caithness needs its own council; Easter Ross and east Sutherland likewise.   Top-down governance, centralisation, these are the things that are still destroying what’s left of the highlands.

The urban-centric, car-based commuter culture of the 1980s is ending.   With new technology we no longer need ‘cities’ or commuting lifestyles. We can develop local production on demand to replace mass production and transport from the other side of the world; and build a healthy network of interdependent circular local economies. We need more people in the countryside working productively in and with nature, and fewer in the cities where ‘re-wilding’ really is needed. The concrete jungle is not a healthy or happy place for humans. Let’s reimagine a diverse, decentralised Scotland that  empowers communities and encourages innovation, creativity and hope. And surely the first step is to re-create some empowered, genuinely local authorities that understand and are responsive to local needs and will stand up to colonial attitudes and exploitation when needed.

But of course these days the Highland Council is simply an agency of central government:  local democracy is a myth. The Scottish Government’s disastrous, completely urban-centric Planning Policy Framework sees Scotland in terms of ‘City Regions”. Beyond the ‘accessible rural’ areas ( i.e. the commuter belts), it seems, are just ‘remote rural’ areas, ‘wild’ land, a playground to ‘escape’ to when urban or suburban life gets tough. A depopulated but romantic place to go on safari in your motorhome – keeping the windows shut because here there be, not dragons but midges.

If Scotland is, as many assert, England’s colony, the Highlands are to Scotland as Wales is to England. Where I live was part of the Kingdom of Norway until 1266, and the effectively independent Lordship of the Isles until 1493. If rule by Edinburgh is little better than rule by London, perhaps we should turn the clock back.