JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: We should ALL be up in arms at this grotesque green ... trends now
The city dwellers among us may be slow to notice it. We’re better at noticing things like potholes and hollowed-out high streets and food delivery riders taking over our pavements.
But rural Scotland is in revolt. It is of an order well beyond the impatience or irritation I experience in my daily interaction with my urban environment. This is rage.
This is a visceral emotion with a physical dimension – shooting up the arms and into the hands and fingers and turning them into fists. Realising that you have been grievously wronged and the transgressor is impassive does that to a person.
In the past couple of weeks I have spoken to people who admit to being able to think of little else but the harm that has been done to them.
Their personal lives are suffering. The battle for what is right threatens to consume them. A cloud of wretchedness has obscured their rural idyll and they fear it will never shift.
We tend to associate the countryside with lower levels of stress. People move there to put green fields between them and the rat race.
Nothing exemplifies the callous disregard for rural Scotland as shamefully as ministers’ blithe assertion that our nation will be one of the world’s major exporters of wind energy
The pastoral vistas are reputed to soothe the soul. I burn to try it someday, but not in Scotland.
It has long been apparent that rural life lies beyond the horizon of Scottish Government understanding. It is observable in the lack of urgency to dual the A9, Scotland’s deadliest road, and in the anti-car agenda.
It was glaringly obvious in last year’s abortive attempt to hive off great chunks of West Coast fishing grounds as Highly Protected Marine Areas, threatening island economies and destroying a key export market.
You can see it in the ongoing ferries scandal. It is there in the rise of greenwashing – where prime agricultural land is sold off to companies atoning for their carbon sins by using forestry grants to plant trees where crops could be growing.
The perception from the countryside is of urbanite busybodies, lattes in hand, wreaking untold damage with their biros on ways of life which are alien to them and therefore expendable in the name of ideology.
To rural people, it is not they who are remote but the government in Edinburgh.
They bristle at the centralisation of decision making and point out that, even as the SNP fights to wrest power from London, so it withholds power from its own citizens.
Protest all you want about that planning application which fills you with horror.
Persuade your local authority to block it. If the Scottish Government wants it to happen, it will happen.
But nothing exemplifies the callous disregard for rural Scotland as shamefully as ministers’ blithe assertion that our nation will be one of the world’s major exporters of wind energy.
It has lately become a mantra alongside similarly idiotic phrases such as ‘unlocking Scotland’s green potential’.
The idea is we have discovered this precious natural resource – much as we discovered oil in the North Sea in 1970, only better – and now we must harness it and stake our economic future on it.
News flash: wind blows in other parts of the world too. It blows, for example, in England – the biggest customer earmarked in
