MALCOLM BURNS reviews the latest goings-on north of the border.
Wind blows up a storm
POLITICS is an emotional game. People get really exercised about issues and conflicts and rightly so.
Why would anyone be anything less than passionate about issues of life and death, such as the Iraq war and nuclear weapons or poverty and hunger in developing nations?
Sometimes, though, passions are inflamed over issues which are less immediately vital.
A ministerial decision on the proposal to build Europe's largest windfarm in the Western Isles is expected imminently.
There are good reasons why a large part of the island of Lewis should be turned into a windfarm.
Clearly, as a species, we need to cut our carbon emissions and develop renewable, sustainable sources of energy. The island has a plentiful supply of wind and the technology to harvest energy from that source exists now. Windfarms are appearing all over Scotland, but nothing on this scale.
Generating enough electricity from this huge windfarm would go a long way towards justifying the massive public investment needed to link the Western Isles to the national grid and provide an outlet for wind and possibly wave power to be exported south and sold to consumers mainly in English cities.
The development would create construction jobs and bring a smaller long-term revenue stream - trickling down from the private developer's envisaged profits - to an area which has for a long time suffered depopulation. The local council, in particular, has been desperate for the development as a keystone for future economic prosperity, even survival.
On the other hand, a large-scale development of nearly 200 massive windmills would be a dominating presence on the island.
It would completely transform an apparently timeless moorland which presently has its own bleak and empty grandeur. This would permanently destroy one of Europe's few remaining wildernesses, the critics say, and damage important natural habitats for flora and fauna including birds.
The 100-metre-high towers for the turbines of the "wind factory" would need thousands of tonnes of concrete foundation poured into the moor and miles of access roads built over it.
They would blight the potential for tourism and totally change a landscape which is closely bound in with the local culture, it is argued by the anti-windfarm campaign called Moorlands Without Turbine.
In short, one side firmly believes the island is doomed unless the project goes ahead. The other side is convinced that the island is doomed unless the project is stopped. Private Fraser in Dad's Army springs to mind. Personally, I doubt if the windfarm would be either as apocalyptically good or bad as either side believe.
The plan has riven public opinion and led to bitter disruptions in families and communities.
The SNP gained the Western Isles from Labour in the Westminster and Holyrood elections in 2005 and 2007 at least partly because their candidates aligned themselves against the wind farm, whereas the Labour incumbents were pro-development. Meanwhile, in 2007 a majority of pro-windfarm councillors were elected.
There are issues of competence and judgement too.
The new SNP MSP promised a "referendum" on the issue during his election campaign which it was always clear was not legally possible under the planning framework.
Then the council agreed the plan and it was sent to Edinburgh for approval. But the word a few weeks ago was that ministers were "minded" to refuse the application as it clearly breached environmental designations under European Union conservation regulations to which the council itself had agreed only a few years ago, even while the windfarm plan was being discussed.
No-one now expects the plan to gain approval in its current form.
You might wonder how such an important and hugely disputed proposal on which both sides agree virtually everything is riding could have been so simply and apparently fatally flawed. Me too.
Doubtless, a smaller proposal will come forward which sidesteps the EU designation problem. However, it is hard to see the division becoming any less bitter.
It's all a question of community
THE windfarm question, as always with political and economic developments, is tied up in issues of ownership and control.
The land on which the Lewis Wind Power development is planned is mainly in community ownership. Part of it is on the Galson estate, one of the latest in a growing number of successful recent community land buyouts. These have been made possible under legislation which is among the Westminster Labour government's most progressive and least credited.
Ironies and contradictions abound. The developer Lewis Wind Power (LWP) is owned by Amec, a company which also makes nuclear power stations. During the complex Galson land buyout, LWP negotiated a deal to secure energy exploitation rights for the windfarm project. One of the key proponents of the windfarm is my old comrade Brian Wilson.
A former Labour energy minister in the Blair government and a supporter of both the Iraq war and Fidel Castro - you work that one out - he was also responsible for the excellent community land buyout legislation when he was minister at the Scottish Office in the late '90s.
My old friend has close links with Amec and he is passionately in favour of the windfarm. However, I think that it's safe to say that, if the community which now own the Galson Estate as a direct and welcome result of his law had to vote on it today, they would be overwhelmingly against the development.
Not so much a conversation as a racist rant
THE latest pronouncement of Scotland Office Minister and former priest David Cairns on matters constitutional took a swipe at the SNP government's National Conversation website, which he said had become a forum for "swivel-eyed, bigoted, anti-English" sentiment.
Cairns has previously claimed that constitutional proposals for strengthening devolution in the light of the historic SNP defeat of Labour in Scotland was only of interest to the "McChattering classes."
If Cairns ever thought about the Morning Star, doubtless he would consider it an irrelevance and me a member of the McChattering clan. But it's hard not to agree with his view of the National Conversation website.
The SNP always used to have a letter-writing crew which did a strong line in puerile sub-racist anti-English bile on the pages of the local and occasionally the national press. It seems that, in the blogging era, they've all gone online, much to the despair of anyone who would like some reasoned debate on any web forum, never mind the SNP government's own website.
Oh well. The last time I looked at davidcairns.com, the website forum was disabled, apparently undergoing maintenance. There's to be nae chattering there anway. The blessed Cairns himself is stranded on the hard shoulder of the information superhighway.
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