McGrath play chimes timely warning

BBC Alba recently broadcast The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black Black Oil, a highly charged play with a strong political message written by John McGrath.

It depicts the exploitation of Scotland from Culloden and the Clearances to the early days of the oil boom in 1974 by self-serving outsiders who had little concern for the effects of their actions on either the land or its people.

Presented by the 7:84 Theatre Company – whose name was derived from the statistic that 7 per cent of the population held 84 per cent of the nation’s wealth – the play toured Scotland to great acclaim. It was no surprise, given the power of The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black Black Oil to instil in the audience a feeling of great injustice, that in the early 1970s the SNP embraced it with enthusiasm. Indeed, the playwright staged a performance at the SNP conference in Oban in 1974.

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In one memorable scene a wideboy with a wad of ready cash is persuading a landowner to join him in a money-making venture requiring the use of his land. He says: “So – picture it, if youse will – a drive-in clachan on every hilltop where formerly there was hee-haw but scenery.” Now, almost 40 years on, substitute wind turbines for drive-in clachans and this scenario becomes uncannily prophetic.

Foreign owned energy companies are tripping over each other in the rush to grab the subsidies and extremely favourable contracts which guarantee profit for the next 20 years. The only other thing required to start generating money out of thin air is the co-operation of a landowner who, in return for some easy money, is prepared to see a wind turbine “on every hilltop where formerly there was hee-haw but scenery”.

This is being funded through increases in electricity bills and a third of all Scottish households now find themselves in fuel poverty.

Alex Salmond achieved some notoriety in 1988 by being suspended from the House of Commons for interrupting Nigel Lawson’s Budget speech with a vociferous protest against the poll tax in which he allegedly said: “This is an outrageous tax on the poor, while giving tax cuts to the rich at the same time.”

The First Minister would do well to reflect on those words and ask himself and the SNP how they have come to drift so far off course.

Where once they gained support by railing against the injustices of the past the SNP now appears quite happy to oversee the imposition of a similar injustice on Scotland and its people.

John McGrath’s play could be justifiably extended to bring it right up to date adding a new final act and re-titled The Cheviot, The Stag, The Black Black Oil and Wind Farms.

Kip Watson

South Sutor

Cromarty, Inverness-shire

Scotland’s Weir Group has entered the shale gas market with the £113 million acquisition of US pump valve maker Novatech, (Business, 26 January). US president Barack Obama has given his backing to natural gas fracking, a relatively clean energy source that has seen gas prices in America cut to about half of what they were three years ago.

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Argentina, Brazil, China and the Middle East are determined to harvest their own deposits. Should Poland be successful in bringing its shale gas onstream, it would then be self-sufficient in gas and also able to export it.

Britain has abundant supplies of shale gas beneath our feet which would prove the UK with energy security, stable energy prices and – unlike wind turbines – it needs no subsidies to make production worthwhile.

CLARK CROSS

Springfield Road

Linlithgow, West Lothian