YOU report that Scottish National Heritage is consulting until early April on draft guidance to protect “wild land” (Bid to prevent development on wild areas, The National, January 27). Looking carefully at its proposals, SNH admits its complex suite of criteria is at root subjective.
Nowhere in the consultation document does it explain why its advice to the Scottish Government was never run past the communities affected. Indeed, concepts of remoteness, inaccessibility and sanctuary point to an outsider view.
The wild land lobby is well organised and along with nature-supporting NGOs has helped build an nearly irresistible notion that “wild land” areas of Scotland are under threat. Well they are not: for example wind farm development is excluded from National Parks and other sites.
Fortunately, the argument on behalf of human fauna that largely made these special landscapes over many centuries is hotting up in reaction to the raft of environmental designations. This “wild land” fetish has 42 core areas already mapped out. Every census shows humans are the most endangered species.
Rob Gibson
Evanton, Ross-shire
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In begging Trump for scraps, May rides a risky tiger
THERESA May’s meeting with Donald Trump was supposed to be a political coup, to prove that Britain had a powerful ally in pursuing its exit from the European Union and could obtain a US trade deal to compensate for the possible loss of access to Europe’s single market.
It is a measure of the rapid deterioration in economic and political relations between the US and the rest of the world that May’s visit has instead prompted bitter recriminations from leading voices representing British imperialism.
May goes as a supplicant to beg for whatever scraps four-times bankrupt Trump will throw. This contrasts unfavourably with the Mexican President who snubbed Trump and said they won’t pay for the wall.
Trump’s ascendency is now widely understood within British and European ruling circles as marking the definitive end of the United States’ post-war role as the anchor of European integration and guarantor, through Nato, of Europe’s imperialist interests.
The resort to extreme nationalism, intimidation and violence flows from the declining global position of US imperialism, after a general breakdown of world capitalism signalled by the 2008 crash. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, the US has sought to counteract its economic decline through an assertion of military might.
A quarter-century later, Washington’s wars have proved disastrous while its economic position has continued to deteriorate.
Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee
ANENT the meetings in Washington and Mrs May’s scramble for a trade deal with Mr Trump, perhaps it is time to remind her – with a slight adaptation – of the sad fate of another lady.
A middle-aged lady of Riga Once went for a ride on a tiger.
They returned from the ride With the lady inside And a smile on the face of the tiger.
Somehow I doubt if she will have remembered it.
Brian Patton Foulden, Berwickshire THE last time Britain surrendered to America, at Yorktown in 1781, the band played The World Turned Upside Down.
Richard Easson
Dornoch
MANY comments are made about how the Scottish Government should concentrate on the UK market and forget the EU market, citing that Scotland has four times the trade with the UK it has with the EU. Sturgeon should stay at home, we hear.
Why? The Scottish Government is elected to govern Scotland and its economy. Why should she not maximise opportunities for Scotland in a market of 550 million people, 10 times that of the UK, with much more growth potential than the stagnant UK market.
Scottish economic growth is what is required and that will not come from trade within the UK alone. That is the only way we can tackle poverty and inequality and give opportunity to our children.
The argument is that Scotland would lose its UK market trade volume if it were independent, ie the rUK would not buy from us. Yet the UK can only produce 60 per cent of the food it needs. Scotland has 15 per cent of UK beef production but consumes only nine per cent; produces all UK seed potatoes; provides most of UK fish – the list goes on. The likelihood trade with UK would disappear is balderdash.
So why are the Unionists harping on? The answer is more sinister. This supposed reliance of Scottish trade on the UK furthers their argument of Scottish dependency on the UK. A self-driven, thriving Scots economy that reaches beyond the UK is the last thing Tories etc want, preferring a Scotland chained to the UK like the chained unicorn on the royal coat of arms.
Roy Bertram
Inverurie
AFTER its passing of the Treaty of Union, the Scottish Parliament went into abeyance (as did the English Parliament) in 1707. Can it have two successor parliaments?
Surely the answer is no and as long as we continue to send MPs to the Westminster Parliament it is they, not Holyrood, as Andy Anderson suggests (Letters, The National, January 26), who retain the status and authority of being the successors to the 1707 Parliament.
Exclusively answerable to the electorate of Scotland, is it not they, not Holyrood, who in law cannot be subordinate to Westminster?
In the absence of agreement from Westminster for a referendum, it would be they who would therefore be Scotland’s lever to exit the United Kingdom, when the Scottish electorate decide.
Whatever was said at the opening of the Scottish Assembly in 1999, how could it be the re-convening of the Scottish Parliament of 1707 so long as we send MPs to Westminster? Despite its name-change to Government in 2007, Holyrood cannot be other than a sub-committee of Westminster, and as with any sub-committee of any organisation it is not possible for it to hold powers giving it equal status to the one which created it. So the Supreme Court’s ruling should not be a surprise just a clarification.
This does not however, as Alan Hinnrichs laments (Letters, The National, January 26), make Scotland a colony or a subordinate in any way of Westminster or the UK for a moment longer than the people of Scotland decide it should be so.
By aiming our ire at Westminster, we fail to recognise that the real and only challenge which prevents Scotland taking its affairs into its own hands, is our ability to persuade enough of our fellow travellers that that is the best way to go.
Alisdair McKay
Inverness
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