They're Called Boobs, Ed
This has a familiar ring to opponents of green energy extremism in the Highlands. It's the mantra of the SSEN, Westminster and Holyrood Borg. Ed Miliband's eyes already shine with that insane Borg glow. Remove his hair, zip him into a suit of kinky plastic armour and Ed's a regular cyborg and right on message too.
Most public meetings and social media forums tackling the energy infrastructure debate have their Borg element. Theirs is a message developers love to push. Look, the battle is lost already, they insist. Give up, make peace and get the best surrender terms you can. You might persuade SSE to pay for mending the electric kettle in the community hall.
They are wrong on two counts. First, for those who have the stomach, the battle isn't over. And second, as Trump's approach to Putin has taught us, if you give up opposition before you start negotiations, you don't have much leverage.
In Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon', the old Bolshevik Rubashov signs a false confession, not because he has been tortured but for the good of the party. He is innocent of treason but knows he is going to be executed anyway. It's the way the system works. So he confesses in order to aid the victory of the Reds and the establishment of a proletarian utopia.
The alt energy blob wants us all to be Rubashovs. We must be good citizens who accept our landscape's death by development. We should stop acting like difficult kids, green zealots snarl in our ears as they frog march us toward the utopia of Net Zero.
The words 'I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help' will be familiar to that daughter of the Free Kirk, Kate Forbes MSP. But her true idea of salvation is a steel and fibreglass forest of whirligigs in those hills. And her mission is to tell the many thousands of Highlanders whose daily lives and livelihoods will be wrecked: "Tough shit guys. Roll over. Greater love hath no man than this. Take one for the planet. You're going to have to live with the industrialisation of your landscape. It's all for the greater good of ... "
Of what and whom? SSE shareholders; SSE salaries and management bonuses; Chinese wind turbine manufacturers; Malaysian pylon builders; an independent Scotland; Miliband's place in history? Certainly it's not to the benefit of Highlanders or wider Scots. We already have enough electricity for our needs well into the future. No money from this is going to find its way into our pockets. Quite the reverse. Our power bills are the highest in Europe and by the time they've finished trashing our countryside, not a single tourist will want to visit. Game over for the Highland economy.
There are alternatives like more maritime turbines and subsea cables but guess what: they're less profitable. People get used to anything, one cynical old senior politician told me once. And with friends like these in high places, it's little wonder that SSEN cuts a figure of swaggering arrogance in the hills and glens. So confident is it of success that it had to be stopped from doing landscaping works in Glenelg before anyone signed something as unimportant as mere planning permission.
We do not live a totalitarian state. Ours is a democracy with a separate legal system. If the first fails you, there should be recourse to the second, available in the form of judicial reviews. The movie Erin Brokovich is based on the true story of a legal secretary who took on US corporate arrogance and dishonesty through the courts and won. In it, her boss asks her how she can just walk in to a Government department and get the information she wants. "They're called boobs, Ed," she tells him. The phrasing is 1990s but for boobs read courage and determination. We need them more than ever.
