Scotsman Letters: Highlanders aren't being listened to over wind farms

There are 2,245 wind turbines in Highland Council’s patch, either built or possibly on the way. There are more off-shore. When the wind blows, that will be enough for at least 11 million homes, but there are only 5.5 million people in Scotland. This electricity isn’t for the Highlands or even for Scotland, it is for England.

The tallest turbines proposed onshore are 250m high. If they are built they will be the tallest objects onshore in Scotland. The National Wallace Monument stands 167 metres high and the towers of the Queensferry Crossing are 210m. England’s tallest cathedral, Salisbury, is a mere 123m, and the London Eye is 135m. A new overhead power line is planned, on pylons 57m high, for 170km from Caithness in the far north to the large village of Beauly, together with three giant substations. It is claimed an overhead line is the cheapest way to connect the power, but no details have been published. Have they considered the environmental costs of the line and its construction, and the costs of maintaining it in some very wild weather?

This is the biggest change in the Highlands since the dams were built in the 1950s. They brought electricity to the Highlands for the first time, but we see no comparable benefit from the current proposals. We are just seeing the creeping industrialisation of the region by an industry that will provide very few permanent jobs, once the chaos of the construction is complete. It’s all part of meeting a 2030 deadline which some leading economists consider impossible anyway. The UK will just have lost its last vestiges of relatively wild land. Already, there are few of Scotland’s iconic Munros from which you can’t see a windfarm.

Scotland's ever-growing population of wind farms mainly serves England, says reader (Picture Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)

No-one has asked us Highlanders whether we want this change, or has talked to us seriously about how we might benefit. We have just one MP and one MSP, neither of whom will talk to us about this. We accept the UK must move to renewable power, but mightily resent the way that it is being imposed on us by people who have no idea of what it is doing to our communities, and apparently no interest either. This isn’t the way to do things in a democratic society.

John Heathcote, Contin, Highland

Electric shock

My wife had occasion to charge her electric vehicle at Broxden, Perth, this weekend on a Chargeplace Scotland charger.. She was on a “slow” charge as we were away for the day. On our return she checked the app to learn that the cost of charging, at a rate of 45p per kilowatt, was £23. Imagine her incredulity to find the equivalent petrol cost would have been £20.40 and that the carbon dioxide saving was nil! If government are to seriously support the move to electric vehicles then it is clear that prices must come down.

(Prof) William Saunders, Perth

In sickness…

A doctors' union has warned the NHS will struggle to carry on without urgent reforms – but what reforms? Everyone tells us the problems but nobody provides the solutions.

Neil Gray, the Scottish Health Secretary, says the draft budget measures would mean quicker treatments and more GP appointments. Well then that's OK, we don't need to worry any longer, problem solved – or is it?

We need to reduce the number of Health Boards, also their staff, and all the wellness and equality managers etc that have been created, stop all hospitality and travel, and put the money into frontline care.

Productivity is also a major problem that will be difficult to solve. The NHS must save £10 billion per annum and then receive another £10bn in funding to increase the number of beds and staff.

Finally, if you make use of the NHS, you should make a contribution towards the cost. A plumber costs £80 for a call-out – how much for a lifesaving ambulance?

James Macintyre, Linlithgow, West Lothian

Failed system

We need to talk about the voting system. The way we elect our politicians is driving a sense of distrust and alienation in politics.

The renowned British Social Attitudes survey reports record low trust in politics. Some 45 per cent of those polled almost never trust the government to put the nation’s interests first, up from 34 per cent in 2019. Meanwhile, 79 per cent believe the present system of government needs significant improvement.

Part of the problem is the way the first-past-the-post voting system systematically sidelines the voices of millions of people from the national conversation. With this system, millions of voters know their vote doesn’t matter.

Political parties know this too: under the current system, they don’t have to gain majority support across the whole country to win elections. Parties need only concentrate on the handful of voters who decide elections, in the knowledge that everyone else can be safely ignored.

This matters both in principle and for the choices politicians make in power. As long as Parliament doesn’t properly represent the whole country, trust in politics – and its ability to improve people’s lives – will flatline. It’s time for a fairer, proportional system that ensures everyone’s voice is heard, no matter where they live or how they vote.

Andrew Haughton, Edinburgh

Cruel idea

“Instead of threatening forcible resettlement of Palestinians in neighbouring countries, [President Trump] could offer to resettle the Israelis… I would suggest Nebraska, which is thinly populated and could easily accommodate the entire population of Israel” (Robert Cairns, Letters, 8 February).

Such sentiments bring to mind the removal of Jews from England by Edward I, their 16th century expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula and the pogroms of Tsarist Russia so graphically portrayed in Fiddler on the Roof.

Whatever some of us may feel about the scale and intensity of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas atrocities, it does not justify calls for the destruction of the Jewish State.

It’s fashionable in certain trendy left-wing circles to demonise Israel but simply shrug off Palestinian terrorism, and this letter is a perfect example. Shame on you, Mr Cairns.

Martin O’Gorman, Edinburgh

Modern Holocaust

The images of three Israeli prisoners emaciated and pale after their release from captivity by Hamas has invited emotive comparisons with concentration camp survivors. What, then, can be said about the relentless and intolerable suffering in Gaza, which has exceeded any other major conflict in the 21st century? Over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of them were women and children. Over 100,000 injured. Over 15,000 were buried alive under the rubble of their homes. The healthcare system in Gaza is on its knees.

For the first time in modern history, hospitals were reduced to ruins in deliberate attacks. Nothing justifies the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. The situation is abominable. The international community has been complicit, apathetic and silent. Gaza has been transformed into a desolate, deserted, forlorn and eerie place. Isn't this the Holocaust of modern times?

(Dr) Munjed Farid Al Qutob, London

Exciting Edinburgh

Last Friday was as bitterly cold a winter's day as I've seen, and yet I was never more sad to be taking a warm train back home after my eight hours in the city that has reclaimed its title of the Athens of the North with a vengeance.

Almost every street packed with tourists, the Royal Mile down to the Grassmarket a chorus of excited different languages, every bar and restaurant doing a roaring trade. A local taxi driver was moved to remark to me outside Waverley, “where the hell's it all of a sudden all gone right?”

The answer seems to me that Edinburgh's renaissance is the sum total of a multitude of imaginative and innovative enhancements, rather than one great panacea of the sort beloved by unimaginative mandarins and headline conscious politicians.

Trams glide a silent charm through its wide main streets, counterpointed by the enchanting tintinnabulation of their distinctive bells (which the tourists never seem to tire of); their drivers – along with those of the buses – are polite to a fault; many small shops have reinvented themselves into memento-selling mini-museums on some niche subject often connected with Edinburgh's history or otherwise – had I walked its cobbles much longer, I'm sure I'd have found a Museum of Things Found At The Bottom Of Kitchen Drawers.

Edinburgh has ceased apologising for its genteel quirkiness to placate the Glaswegian-centric “Scottish” media's faux “working class” inverted snobs, ceased trying to emulate transiently fashionable places, and returned to being itself. By ceasing to run from its past, it has found its future.

Mark Boyle, Johnstone, Renfrewshire