WHILE I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION: Charles Bannerman argues that eco drive should focus on over-population not opposing road dualling
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Most city residents know it often takes two-and-a-half hours to drive to Aberdeen – that’s 42 miles an hour. Once or twice on the A9, it’s taken me two hours and 45 minutes to get to Perth – that barely makes 40mph, writes Charles Bannerman.
Road links with the rest of Scotland remain truly appalling, leaving the Highlands desperately isolated from destinations, opportunities, markets and facilities, while there has been a focus on the central belt.
But the Green Party still seek to deny us the adequate connectivity on which our lives crucially depend. Do they not understand that decent road links between the Highlands and indeed the rest of the world aren’t a luxury but a vital necessity? And they’re certainly not a political bargaining chip.
It’s ironic that this party has named itself after a colour because it is, in fact, a political chameleon. It changes tint with political expediency and self-interest. It probably gets most publicity as an independence party, allowing it to draw votes from nationalists who don’t like the SNP.
But when circumstances change, such as since the May election, the Greens suddenly assume the totally unrelated role of rabid environmentalists, complaining about everything from dualling vital community road links to the development of new oilfields.
Strange, then, that this party, with eight MSPs from a mere 220,000 regional list votes, should now have effectively gone into coalition with the SNP who have categorically pledged to dual the A9 and A96 and, since the 1970s, have milked the slogan: “It’s Scotland’s oil”.
It all reeks of opportunism, and the whiff of a rat emerged quite early when the Greens magically, although perhaps not permanently, abandoned opposition to vaccine passports to rescue the SNP.
We in the Highlands should therefore worry when the Greens, in a fit of environmental tokenism, start moaning about improvements to our vital arteries. They really must understand that world population – the absolute fundamental of climate change, with gas emission quite secondary – is so large that civilisation simply cannot return to some kind of agrarian fantasy world of nymphs and shepherds and horse-drawn ploughs. And we in the Highlands are not sacrificial lambs.
We must worry that political expediency – a cornerstone of the self-interest and party benefit that politicians prioritise way in front of the electorate’s needs – may yet sabotage our prospects of road transport at least reaching the second half of the 20th century standard.
And my toes positively curl when I hear the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford shift from one foot to the other with the deftness of a Highland dancer and redefine these hugely important road improvements as a “safety” measure. No they aren’t Mr Blackford. They’re an urgent public necessity which your constituents need and demand more desperately than most.
Meanwhile, the Greens need to get a grip of over-population as the root cause of greenhouse gases, so if they really want to make a difference, they need to stop reproducing.
Don’t hold your breath, though. Former US Vice President Al Gore, of Inconvenient Truth fame, moralised loud and long about emissions. But the real Inconvenient Truth is that Mr Gore sired no fewer than four gas-guzzling American children.
And last time I looked, Boris was allegedly on six.
