AS I travel around the Highlands trying to avoid the heart-breaking scars of industrialisation creeping across the landscape, I have become increasingly aware of the presence of the navy-and-green vehicles belonging to SSE. I am either passing them parked at the side of the road, being overtaken by them, behind them or in a queue with at least one of them.

I encounter transporters with diggers and other large machinery careering around our narrow roads. When I am at home I hear helicopters hovering overhead, light aircraft weaving backwards and forwards and drones buzzing across the land, and yet no planning applications have yet been submitted.

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I am taken back to the awful time when the Beauly-Denny power line was constructed. The sound of vehicles beeping, crushing and unloading rock were shattering the peace. Our roads were a terrifying place to be, as many involved in the devastation used them as little more than a race track.

I really don’t know how much more the communities can take. People are under incredible mental and financial stress. They see the lives they have built with hard work and passion being systematically dismantled by the insane reality that rural Scotland and its inhabitants have been sold out to the wealthy global investment companies who pretend they are concerned about the planet as they shatter the environment around us.

We are under occupation by Big Energy, with SSE as the main aggressor in northern Scotland. They, along with other multinationals, also demand we accept even more massive swooshing wind turbines with demonic red flashing lights to be connected to a metallic jungle of transmission lines and sprawling substations, and energy traders inundate us with proposals for huge battery storage units; our precious silent black nights gone forever.

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Where are our elected representatives? Too feart to speak up and needing a spine transplant before they will demand action to protect the people who voted them in. Precious few are on our side and those that are find little support from others.

What a shameful situation to be in. Our governments back the multinationals against us and close their ears and eyes to our pleas for help and our tears. I have never known anything so appalling and so chillingly widespread in a so-called democracy. Those who sit on the fence and refuse to act will soon find their comfortable seats and political careers hanging on a shoogly peg as those they have so disgracefully let down seek to punish them at the ballot box.

Lyndsey Ward
Spokeswoman for Communities B4 Power Companies
Beauly

NOWHERE is the cruel social disparity in outcomes in the UK “justice” system starker than in sentencing.

Years ago there would be much eye-rolling at the lenient sentences given to sex offenders compared to those accused of – for example – crimes against property. Obviously if those doing the “robbery” were at the very elite end of society – ie bankers – there were generally no consequences at all. The main example being the number of bankers who faced any fall-out after the horrors of the greed-induced financial meltdown of 2008. Let’s recount. Just how many fiscal fiddlers actually went to jail? Oh – yes – ONE.

Fast forward to the recent incredibly harsh sentencing for the anti-fossil fuel protestors – between five and four years. One of the reasons given for the brutal sentencing was the cost of policing. The real cost of funding for policing the coronation of Charlie bags-of-cash turned out to be just under £22 million. And that is before you factor in other government (public) expenditure running to around £50m. There is something very off here...

Amanda Baker
Edinburgh