Shooting and Fishing: The fish farms appeared to answer the West Highlands' employment problems

You have to wonder sometimes if there is some sort of relationship in politicians' minds between wind farms and fish farms.

In both cases much evidence is produced to show there are serious problems with these industries. And in both cases the politicians hang on like a tableau of deaf, dumb and blind monkeys hoping everything will come right in the end.

The similarity between the two farming methods is that they both appeared initially to be just what everyone was looking for. The wind farms were a ready made answer to global warming until it became clear to all but Mr Chris Huhne and our First Minister that they are anything but free and don't work. (Never in the field etc ... has so much been taken from so many and given to so few).

The fish farms, on the other hand, appeared to answer the intractable employment and communications problems of the West Highlands. At least there you could see the problem, unlike with global warming.

But it is now clear that the lice from the fish farms kill wild salmon, the very fish that the farmed version was supposed, on one level, to be saving from extinction. (Had these wild fish been birds of prey you can be certain the RSPB would have had the entire industry closed down by now.)

But in spite of all the evidence, hotly disputed by the fish farm industry on the back of one suspect scientific paper, the politicians don't want to know. The latest effort by the industry is to try and show statistically that the decline in wild salmon numbers has nothing to do with fish farms at all but is down to natural or unexplained causes.

Under the heading: "Let's Focus on the Facts", the Scottish Salmon Producers have produced maps and graphs which show the rate of decline on the east coast is the same as that on the west.

Now the wild fish lobby has come back with: "Let's Focus on the Real Facts". That fish die or disappear at sea is not in dispute by either side and affects both coasts equally. Netting effort on both coasts has similarly declined by an almost identical percentage. So that leaves you with the rod catch to play with.

The fish farmers took in the whole of the west coast, but the anglers took in only those areas where there are both fish farms and runs of wild fish – Cape Wrath to Bute, roughly.

The anglers' graph now shows identical rise and falls either side of the country but with the west coast graph going downhill while the east coast graph is going up. It's time to follow the wind farm industry and ship everything offshore.

- This article was first published in The Scotsman on August 13, 2011