ONCE again SSEN make well-orchestrated headlines with their sly offer of giving homes built for their workers to local authorities to help ease the housing crisis. They have obviously spent time identifying a problem and working out how best to use it to their advantage.
You have to ask yourself, with their promises of using local labour why they need to build accommodation in the first place, because local workers would live locally otherwise they wouldn’t be local!
The message from them would appear to be: let us help you with your housing shortage but only if our planning applications get passed.
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Housing is the responsibility of the local authority, those elected to serve us and to whom we pay substantial taxes. If there is not enough money in the coffers to house people then we have to ask why. It is not the job of a multinational to provide homes as long as they get planning approval for their highly contentious concrete-and-steel road show that is causing so much anguish and mental distress all over the north of Scotland.
SSEN placed itself as principal partner at the Housing Challenge Summit in Aviemore on Tuesday that was chaired by Highland Council convener Bill Lobban. Why were they even there? They are a global investment company hell-bent on destroying our natural environment and reducing the value of hard-working rural folks’ homes for profit.
Big Energy are actually contributing to a housing crisis because of their devastating industrialisation in rural areas. Residents are unable to move because they can’t realise the true value of their homes. That denies families the larger properties they need. They remain trapped in homes that may have become too big for them to manage and afford. Big Energy is destroying the natural social progression in our rural communities.
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SSEN/SSE are flooding our media with adverts and sponsorship. They are in our schools, involved in the renewables/tourism oxymoron, have the Highland Council leader open their Highland “hub” and appear alongside them in what is little more than a promotional video.
They are impossible to escape but their savage promotional strategy is backfiring. We see them for what they are. We are not stupid and we don’t like being manipulated, it just hardens our resolve to stop them.
Lyndsey Ward
Spokeswoman for Communities B4 Power Companies
IN his letter of October 20, to justify a Holyrood indyref, Andy Anderson writes: “The fact of the matter is that Schedule 5 Part 1 subsection (2) of the Scotland Act is quite clear on this matter. It states that all UN human rights covenants which have been signed by the UK Government can be passed into Scottish law and are specifically excluded from the ‘reserved matters’ under the Act.”
That statement is not quite accurate, and well-intentioned belief in it seems to me to be a magical leap of faith. I cannot find Mr Anderson’s reference in the act, which makes no mention of the UN, so he may be thinking rather of paragraph 7 of the schedule, which does reserve “relations” with “international organisations”, but does not reserve “observing and implementing international obligations”.
The starting precept of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is that all peoples have the right of self-determination. Related obligations are laid on states, ie on the UK and not on Scotland.
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The real question is this. Does the UK prevent the people of Scotland from exercising their right of self-determination? I cannot see that it does. The Scottish Parliament is a devolved and subsidiary body, legally prevented by its founding act from legislating on any matter which “relates” to the “Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England”, and we should not fixate on achieving independence through it. But the Union itself is a union of parliaments, in which sit the supreme representatives of the people of Scotland. In legal, constitutional and political terms, it is the Scottish MPs who hold the power to remove Scotland from the Union by their own fiat, if so mandated by the Scottish people.
All that is required is the winning by head-count of a General Election on a true plebiscitary manifesto, easily drawn up by any party standing throughout Scotland. Such a victory would create the mandate and fill virtually every Scottish seat with a member elected to take Scotland out. Why the SNP have shunned this course, ever since the 2014 referendum, can perhaps only be answered by a forensic psychiatrist.
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The UK state imposes not a single barrier on that route, and in its exceedingly rare statements on the issue London has always described the Union as one of consent, which Scotland is free to leave. That is no more than a recognition of the actual position in UK legal and constitutional terms.
So we need not conjure rabbits out of a hat. We only require a party to issue the appropriate manifesto, and for the majority to vote for it. Our lamentable predicament for now is that the SNP so mucked up the last election with an empty manifesto, throwing away its majority of the Scottish seats, that Scotland almost certainly will have to wait till the next Westminster election before we can have another chance.
Brian Boyce
Motherwell
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