Herald letters
HIGHLAND MP Angus Macdonald says that the cost of heating his Highland constituency office is 24p per kwh compared to 6p per kwh for his Westminster base (“Highland MP flags unfair fuel costs”, The Herald, November 13). On the Isle of Lewis, where I am a trustee of a community building, our heating cost is 35p per kwh. No wonder Na h-eileanan Siar have the highest rate of households in fuel poverty.
And what do the people of the Highlands and Islands get in return for paying these massive electricity costs? We get the environmental destruction that follows massive wind turbines and all their associated infrastructure. Red-listed birds and peatlands – one of the best carbon stores in the world – are expendable. As are the rural population; not many votes in the north. Politicians in London and Edinburgh, none of whom pays 35p per unit of energy, make the decisions. They extol rain forests in faraway countries while they can’t wait to bring the heavy machinery and the concrete to what is left of rural Britain. Catriona Campbell, Lewis.
HIGHLAND MP Angus Macdonald says that the cost of heating his Highland constituency office is 24p per kwh compared to 6p per kwh for his Westminster base (“Highland MP flags unfair fuel costs”, The Herald, November 13). On the Isle of Lewis, where I am a trustee of a community building, our heating cost is 35p per kwh. No wonder Na h-eileanan Siar have the highest rate of households in fuel poverty.
And what do the people of the Highlands and Islands get in return for paying these massive electricity costs? We get the environmental destruction that follows massive wind turbines and all their associated infrastructure. Red-listed birds and peatlands – one of the best carbon stores in the world – are expendable. As are the rural population; not many votes in the north. Politicians in London and Edinburgh, none of whom pays 35p per unit of energy, make the decisions. They extol rain forests in faraway countries while they can’t wait to bring the heavy machinery and the concrete to what is left of rural Britain. Catriona Campbell, Lewis.
The SNP sacrificing the Highlands for England’s net zero push is unforgivable. Scotland already produces more renewable electricity than it consumes, yet Highland households pay the highest prices in the UK. High prices to fund our own destruction by the industrialisation of our beautiful landscape, our wild places and nature.
The SNP is throwing the Highlands, its own people, under the bus of our colonial masters. This is not Scottish nationalism; it is complicit exploitation and it is surrender.
Right now, with the current flood of planning applications, our communities are being ignored, democracy forgotten and our lifeblood tourism imperilled. In England, they would never dream of doing this to the Lake District or Hampstead Heath, but here the SNP is sacrificing its own people, its own land and wildlife, its own tourist industry and communities for foreign shareholders and bill payers down south.
I suspect that this betrayal will be the SNP’s epitaph.
Paul Johnston, Tore, Rosshire.
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