November 9, 2006
Letters
Letters
The wilful destruction of anything beautiful is always a cause for sadness, especially when sanctioned by those with direct responsibilities for safeguarding our inheritance.
Martin Laing’s perceptive piece (November 6) on the desecration and pollution of that glorious landscape viewed from Stirling Castle is a well-deserved critique of those responsible for so much that is wrong in Scotland and the UK as a whole.
He asks how those massive, disfiguring industrial wind turbines, set in idyllic countryside, ever came to be approved and constructed. The answer is simple, and is reflected in so many aspects of local and national government, north and south of the border. It requires only that councillors, MSPs and MPs have merely a passing interest in the question of environmental protection; retain a barely adequate knowledge of the technology of wind power; forfeit, by intellectual neglect or natural inadequacy, any pretence of having a personal opinion of their own and accepting the party line imposed by a hierarchy of those who are in hock to the power-brokers or energy gurus.
Scotland has more than its fair share of this calibre of insensitive, ill-informed, disinterested bit-players on the fringes of the legislative scene, and also in councils, who should be probing, inquiring, debating and listening to, not only a wide range of experts, but also those they represent.
They do not do these things, and Scotland is having its back broken by bad legislation and intrusive, unwanted controls at all levels, from the personal and private to the broader field of national concern.
The “turbine syndrome” – characterised by complete indifference to public opinion – has spread its tentacles throughout the whole of the Scottish community and we need, urgently, to deny it further progress. If we fail to remove from office these modern barbarians, we will suffer the ignominy of becoming mere ciphers in a submissive, uncontesting, unresponsive society with all that that entails.
Andrew C McWilliam, 13 Boreland Road, Kirkcudbright.
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2006/11/09/the-trouble-with-scotlands-politicians/