Zombie culture

It’s always a sharp culture-shock to return from Tuebingen, where Baden-Wuerttemberg, Europe’s major hi-tech region, has boosted industrial production to 35 per cent of GDP (Scotland: 14 per cent) with a planning strategy of major regional rail investment involving re-openings and electrification.

The Borders has a run-down economy, whose textiles and food products once rivalled whisky as a quality export and could do so again. Roads may be blocked for days on end in winter, but there’s immense industrial, manufacturing, educational and tourist potential.

Not least through the 2014 bicentenary of the Waverley Novels and the reopening of Abbotsford as a European culture centre potentially on the level of Goethe’s Weimar, but also as a centre of green – particularly cycle – tourism, at which BaWue also excels. Try taking a bike on a bus …

But what do we get from the “two legs good, four wheels better” brigade? With peak oil now on us and the prospect of the $200 or $300 barrel: “Build more roads!” This zombie economy comes from our oligarchs: the folk who torched the Scottish financial sector en route – by four-wheel-drive of course – to their second or third homes and golf courses. They want rural Scotland as a gated estate and a new Borders line gets in their way – as it damn well should do!

Railway improvements have a proven record of outperforming their targets – see the Alloa line, the doubling of traffic being clocked up by English rural branches, and the remarkable new Welsh Highland Railway through Snowdonia.

Rail is a technology the Scots, once its masters, have to re-learn. The Edinburgh tram disaster, Europe’s worst, shows us that. Re-learn it we must, otherwise we will join the zombies.

(Prof) Christopher Harvie

Scottish Association for Public Transport

High Cross Avenue

Melrose