Powering on with party line is no way to run a country

WHILE the SNP administration has confounded those who doubted whether the Nationalists, so long in opposition and seen as much as a movement as a proper political party, would be able to govern, its period in office has begun to demonstrate a worrying degree of obduracy in decision-making.

Nowhere is this thrawn approach better demonstrated than in the decision by enterprise minister Jim Mather to give the go-ahead to the highly controversial Beauly to Denny power line in the face of an unprecedented level of opposition to the scar this project will leave on some of the Highlands' most beautiful landscape.

We argued here yesterday that Mr Mather's decision to give the go-ahead for the line with unspecified conditions had left muddle and confusion, particularly after the minister was forced to admit that the administration had no power to insist that any of the line goes underground.

Now to this confusion we can add evidence from Giles Scott, the adviser to the Reporters who carried out the public inquiry into the plans, who, it turns out, was not convinced that the transmission line was justified on technical grounds.

As The Scotsman reports today, Mr Scott highlighted the fact that the application was based on an assumption that wind farms supplying electricity flowing south through the new power lines will operate at 60 per cent of capacity – when many experts think it is much lower than this, perhaps 25 per cent.

Yesterday that view was reinforced by Colin Gibson, a former director of National Grid, who told The Scotsman that he was stunned that, with this evidence before him, Mr Mather had given the plans the green light.

The doubts cast by the technical adviser to the Reporters come on top of evidence that the giant pylons that will carry the lines will harm many species of bird life and that it was impossible to gauge the scheme's effect on tourism. The suspicion must be that it will be negative.

From this growing body of evidence it has become clear that, even if one left aside the important issue of the effect of the Beauly-Denny line on the landscape, there were many grounds on which this project could have been turned down.

And yet ministers persevered. Why? It is hard not to conclude that it is because they put obdurateness before rationality. In this case they want to press ahead with something seen to be green because they cannot accept the evidence that nuclear power is a clean form of electricity generation.

In a similarly wilful way, the SNP wanted to introduce a local income tax that was not local; insisted on a class size reductions on the basis of very little evidence of their benefit; and put populism before principle by abolishing bridge tolls, boxing themselves in on the second Forth road crossing.

There is still time for the SNP to see sense on Beauly-Denny, but if it is to mature, the party must realise that blinkered, stubborn government is bad government.