Anyone with an interest in the environment, but who also wants to free Scotland from London rule that we haven’t voted for for over half a century has until now been in something of a conflict. If you supported the SNP in an attempt to achieve the former you were at the same time supporting a government that has committed itself to the massive expansion of industrial aquaculture in our inshore waters, despite the advice from two Parliamentary committees that doing so carries gigantic risks to the marine environment.
Time and again in Scotland we’ve seen wonderful, miracle solutions to our problems forced on us by, no doubt well-meaning, politicians with pretty disastrous results. It goes back well before modern politics too. The very Clearances resulted from external and internal landowners bringing in new ways of doing things, replacing the black cattle with sheep, with dreadful longer term economic consequences and a cultural catastrophe.
Industries have come and gone. Ulva was once sustained by kelp, until ships brought in cheaper Chilean guano. Aluminum came to Fort William. Some are still here, just. Oil in Aberdeen, how much longer? Miracle solutions arrive, outsiders get rich, take the money and go.
In my childhood the Firth of Clyde supported lots of thriving sea angling businesses, catering for thousands of industrial workers at weekends, supporting trades, local cafes and restaurants. Then the neo-liberals lifted the Three Mile Limit, an emergency Victorian measure that has been proved, with hindsight, to have been well grounded in science.
With foreign holidays soon to be distant memories, what can we do to restore our coastal towns and landscapes to attract visitors and their cash? Building gigantic industrial silos, such as we see when coming off the Skye Bridge, may not be the best idea.
From early this Century we in mid Argyll have seen a merciless expansion of industrial aquaculture, forced forward by an industry that is almost entirely owned and is certainly entirely controlled by entrepreneurs from outside Scotland. Investors include oligarchs from former Soviet countries and folk like the extraordinary Jon Fredricksen. Supposedly “local” companies trade on their “family owned” image to get permissions, but truly work very closely with the big fellows, a bit like industrial lumpsuckers. Over the last twenty years we have seen sealice bred in the cages reduce the wild fish populations to such an extent that wild Scottish salmon are endangered.
I have campaigned against all this for about ten years now. The trigger was the utterly deranged attempt to expand salmon farming at Ardmaddy, something a very senior fellow at Marine Scotland (now MOWI) told me they would never consider (but that was before his Norwegian chiefs bought the units there). Then Marine Harvest found 83,000 dead fish on their site and many of us woke up to the true horror, hundreds of tonnes of fish wasted and going to landfill (or worse?). But that was just the beginning; our roads are now busy with tankers of dead fish going into a new biofuel industry. What a breathtakingly stupid way to generate power!
Tragically, the SNP has supported all this. I have occasionally spoken to individual MSPs, who expressed concerns, but there is no doubt that the party in government has pushed the industry forward, perhaps even more than the saner company executives would have wished. Marine Scotland scientists have been bullied by Ministers into retiring, older scientists have told me about fears for their pensions, evidence being suppressed, the big money East coast salmon rivers protected. The Tories couldn’t have done a better job and we would all have been screaming!
So, with just under five days until make your mind up time, what are the options?
Going on the latest figures today (Panelbase, Sunday Times), the SNP are set to get 48% in the constituencies, resulting in all existing seats being held plus probably two more. With less than a week to go that seems a pretty definite prediction. If you support Independence that’s a no-brainer for your constituency vote.
The List Vote gives us all choices. The result is, I suggest, totally unpredictable, for several related reasons.
First, the emergence of the Alba Party has forced a lot of us, myself included, to look at the arithmetic behind the D’Hondt voting system that Scotland was lumbered with, thanks to Tony Blair and Donald Dewar. The main reason for their choice was the desire to ensure that Labour would always control Scotland, but it’s been suggested that they also wanted a system so opaque and unpopular that nobody would want to introduce anything similar in England.
The result has been that in Scotland we’ve got four different ways of counting votes, for the UK, Scottish (two systems), local (and until recently a fifth for the EU). I’m sure that I’ve not been alone in having to remind myself each time of the niceties; for example how many of us don’t realise that with Single Transferable Voting you MUST vote for all your preferred choices to exclude those you absolutely don’t want (the system used and then abused in the recent SNP list selection, by the way).
To summarise for the forthcoming election, the first constituency vote is simply counted on “First Past the Post” and list votes are then discounted depending on how well your party has done.
In Highlands and Islands let’s assume that the SNP hold their existing six constituencies. They did this last time with a vote share of only 41.46%, against today’s national poll of 48%. D’Hondt then provides that their list vote will be divided by seven (seats won plus one). In 2016 this meant that 81,600 list votes counted for 11,657 and got the strong, competent Maree Todd elected on the sixth round of counting. This time the SNP are fielding someone who was patently not the first choice of members, rocketed to the top because of her diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (google it!). If only a few people are troubled by this and decide to stay at home, all the SNP list votes will be wasted.
In 2016 the Libdems won two seats, Shetland and Orkney, for a total of only 14,536 votes and D’Hondt ensured that all their 27,223 list votes were wasted. This time the SNP have two very strong candidates in Tom Wills and Robert Leslie, but friends who know those places are sure that the old Liberal tradition will prevail once more. Will those 27,000+ voters educate themselves on D’Hondt and look elsewhere?
Labour also got two seats in 2016, both list ones, and will probably do so again. They are hugely supportive of aquaculture and of course the Union, so they’re not getting my vote.
If you both favour Independence and want to save the environment, what are the options?
Alba presents voters for the first time with a serious, independence-focused list party, fronted by a number of well-known personalities. The same Panelbase poll puts them on 4%, an apparent drop from a couple of weeks earlier, which still suggests that they will win two seats. I suspect that they will do much better. The almost total media blackout on the party should concern all of us, whether or not we buy into the various narratives that are being spread about. Beneath the pollster’s radar, massive on the ground canvassing is going on for Alba, much of it by former SNP activists who know their territories. I saw a lot of this at close quarters in Glasgow in 2014, when hundreds of people unaffiliated to any parties were chapping doors on housing estates and getting people out. There is a very strong contingent of former Women for Independence supporters now supporting Alba.
But, what do Alba say in their manifesto about the environment? Almost nothing.
The Greens have Ariane Burgess at the top of their list. In 2016 they got one seat, for John Finnie, with quite a healthy 14,781 votes, which of course wasn’t discounted. She’s a strong, well balanced person, with business experience and a good environmental track record, unlike some of her comrades who come from rather urban backgrounds and seem distracted by other issues. I’m uncomfortable personally with some features of her party, but it looks as if her vote will hold up without mine.
Finally, we’ve got Andy Wightman, probably Scotland’s foremost land issue campaigner and a man of great knowledge of legal history and land ownership. Google him and buy his book “The Poor had no Lawyers”. Someone commented on social media that he would scare the daylights out of the landowners. He also happens to have actual, on the ground, experience of working in forestry, lives locally and has political experience. And he will vote for Independence. I’m giving him a chance.
