Martin Hannan: A pit here? You must be choking

Published on Tuesday 2 March 2010 08:49

THE acid test of the Labour Party's and the SNP Government's commitment to greening this country is about to take place in Midlothian in the next few weeks.

Scottish Coal has put in an application to develop a massive open cast coal pit in the heart of the beautiful countryside at Cousland, south of Edinburgh. The Midlothian planning committee is due to consider the application sometime soon.

It's a Labour-controlled council, and Labour councillors will make a political decision. Planning is supposed to be non-political, but if you believe that is what happens, check outside your window for flying pigs.

It will not go down well in a traditional mining area, but Midlothian Labour should conclude that this is the wrong pit, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and reject the application outright.

The plan goes against Midlothian Council's own policies for the area which stress the beauty of the countryside. It also poses a health risk to people living nearby – increased asthma rates among children living close to open cast pits is a well-recorded problem.

The village of Cousland is just a few hundred metres away from the planned pit, from which two million tonnes of coal will be extracted and sent to Cockenzie power station over the next five years. Scottish Coal has thrown large sums and a lot of experts into developing the application, and has enlisted the support of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to its cause.

The villagers of Cousland have mounted a well-organised campaign under the banner Communities Against Airfield Opencast – the title could have been sexier – and their case is formidable on many grounds.

More than 800 people and organisations have objected to the plan, including East Lothian Council in one of the strongest objections I have ever seen by one council to another. The village of Ormiston, just inside the East Lothian border, is about one kilometre east of the site, and the council is concerned about the effects on local people there. Strangely, Hibernian FC have not commented on the issue, despite their training ground being less than two miles from Airfield and directly in the path of the prevailing winds.

I wonder what manager John Hughes will say when he finds out that his precious lads could be choking on coal dust come pre-season training.

As far as I can see the only people supporting the application are Scottish Coal and the NUM.

Their only real grounds for convincing the council that the pit should go ahead is the number of jobs it will create. Most say 50, but the real number of new jobs, according to the council's economic development people in a report, will be about 30, with the rest of the workforce transferring from existing open cast pits that are nearing the end of their working lives.

Those council officers support the application because it will bring jobs. Yet there is no calculation on what will happen through loss of jobs and tourism amenities.

By contrast, say the Cousland campaigners, at least 30 jobs will be lost in the area because of the effect on local farms, horse stables, and small businesses who moved there precisely because it is in open countryside.

All sorts of background skullduggery have been alleged, including Labour representatives getting their backsides metaphorically kicked by the NUM.

Two or three Labour councillors should fear for their seats – if they support the plan, villagers will vote them out, if they don't, the miners will turn on them.

What is really sinister and frankly daft is the late campaign being mounted apparently by employees of Scottish Coal. You can see it yourself on the Midlothian planning website, where there have been a rush of late letters supporting the application.

Sorry to disappoint the writers, but as the letters are all obviously produced by the same person with just the name and address of the signatory to be filled in, and since the objections were all rather late, by the rules the council should ignore them or treat them as a single objection.

So all round it's a real dilemma for Midlothian's Labour council, and also for the SNP Government – as always, I remind you that I'm a member of the latter party.

I suspect Midlothian Council will continue the issue for further reports – it's been dragging on since August last year already – or it may pass the plan knowing the number and nature of objections will ensure the Scottish Government will become involved.

As renewable sources of power will not provide all of Scotland's energy for decades to come, we are going to need coal, because the anti-nuclear SNP Government has ruled out a second Torness to fill in the gap years – yes, I know the problem of disposing of nuclear waste, but solutions are being found, and it's a much more sensible option than raping the countryside and fuelling carbon-emitting coal-powered plants.

It's a major issue for the government, because there are literally dozens of potential open cast sites across rural Scotland, and Cousland will be seen as a test case for these.

Because of poor energy planning and the lack of renewables as yet, we will need coal from open cast pits. But other sites would surely be much more suitable, as Cousland is just too pretty to scar.