Things are done to us, not by us

THINGS ARE DONE TO US, NOT BY US: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn

Things are done to us, not by us.

In the former Town Hall building in Thurso is housed the uninspiringly named North Coast Visitors Centre. It is a busy and popular all-year round museum, gallery, cinema and café. It houses one of the finest collections of carved Pictish standing stones in Scotland as well as the unique archive of Robert Dick, the revolutionary 19^th century baker turned botanist and geologist. As well as these treasures the building contains the human story of Caithness from the neolithic to the post-atomic age. It is a big, spacious and interactive cultural centre and regularly mounts exhibitions by important Caithness artists such as Dawn Mackay and Aileen Paton, which attract large audiences both locally and from all over the world. Scrabster is, for better or worse, a destination for cruise liners of all sizes and Thurso is slap bang on the curse and blessing that is the NC500. The footfall in the North Coast Visitors Centre is as likely to be from Canada as it is from Caithness.

The tragic flaw in all of this achievement is that the building is run by Highlife Highland, the cultural-leisure management company once of Highland Council, who are based in Inverness. While Highlife Highland operates as an independent arms-length charity, it remains a subsidiary of Highland Council. On 31^st of October the North Coast Visitors Centre will close for six months and thereafter will be re-open as a seasonal visitors attraction with the loss of five jobs. There was no prior warning, no discussion; just a visitation form a senior Highlife Highland manager. One by one the staff were told the bad news.  This is a travesty of cultural management and provision as the North Coast Visitors Centre is not primarily for tourists. It is part of the Museums Scotland network  and is a place where people from the North of Scotland – individuals, schools and community groups – come to connect with and learn about their history. Highlife Highland is sending a very poor message out to the people of Caithness which reads as – your cultural past and your creative future is not worth us investing in and is only for the tourists.

Highlife Highland was formed in 2011 by the Highland Council to “develop and promote opportunities in culture”, and as a trust of Highland Council, Highlife Highland should be held to the Scottish Government’s Fair Work commitments and obligations. This decision is clearly in breach of those principles, which emphasise security, respect and opportunity for workers. So far, there has been none of that due process apparent in the treatment of the workers. As to the pledge to “develop and promote opportunities in culture” this would apply singularly to Inverness with the development of Inverness Castle. This is Highlife Highlands flagship project and is part of the Inverness and Highland City-Region Deal, which is a joint initiative supported by up to £315m investment from the Ukanian and Scottish governments, The Highland Council, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and University of the Highlands and Islands. It is  aimed at stimulating sustainable regional economic growth. The inner Moray Firth basin is awash with “economic growth”. The Far North of Scotland is significantly not. Pennies are saved in Thurso. Millions are spent in Inverness.

Things are done to us, not by us.

For the Highlands of Scotland the concept of “economic growth” has aways been a fraught one: just what exactly is “growth” and whose “economy” are we talking about?  Due to the unique and medieval nature of landownership in the Highlands the “economy” has always been a basket case. With the concentration of vast swathes of land owned by a tiny number of mainly foreign individuals it could be argued that the Highlands does not actually have an economy in the accepted sense of the word. What we have are private interests. Sporting estates and entire straths, glens and islands which can be bought and sold like used cars keeps the Highlands depopulated and poor. The way these estates are run – over-grazed by both deer and sheep – denudes the landscape of its native trees and renders the place little more than a wet desert. What those who thunder around the NC500, and who mistakenly marvel at the “natural wilderness”, are in fact looking at a human-made construction.

When it comes to “developing the Highlands” both Westminster and Holyrood share the same tone-deaf, cloth-eared, shorn antennae approach of Highlife Highland. Not since the end of World War Two and the retirement of Tom Johnston as Secretary of State for Scotland has there been anyone in power who had the welfare of the Highland people as their major concern. With the formation of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board Johnston and others managed to bring electric light to the Highlands and Islands. The “Board” went the way of all privatised flesh in 1990. The mess that ensued in energy provision and distribution is an on-going de-regulated jamboree and with energy still a retained power under devolution it will remain so until some sanity and reason is brought to bear and a National Energy Company of Scotland is set up. But alas, there is no such thing. If you Google for it this is what you get: “The page ‘National Energy Company of Scotland’ does not exist.”

Things are done to us, not by us.

The population of Caithness – as of 2021 – is approximately 25,347. Ten years before it was 26,486. In 1880 the population of Caithness was over 40,000. Since then it has been a steady emigration, reaching its peak after World War One. The coming of Dounreay and the nuclear industry in the 1950’s changed little demographically. In reality, the people of Caithness were conned over nuclear power as the primary purpose was military: to produce plutonium for the bomb. We now have been conned over renewable energy as the primary purpose is corporate profit, while the natives pay the highest utility tariffs in Europe. The cruel, nonsensical irony here is that Caithness generates significant renewable energy, primarily from large offshore and onshore wind farms like the Beatrice Offshore Array and the many onshore wind farms in Caithness and north Sutherland, which combined have a capacity of over 432 MW, with more planned. Giant power companies such as SSEN EDF and RDW talk a lot to the press about “partnerships” with local communities, but in practice, partnership is just a word and power, in all its forms, is the reality. The companies transmit the electricity South for massive profit and Caithness carries the environmental cost whilst receiving none of the benefits. The roots of this injustice is in landownership

The ugly dog-dance goes like this: the power company rents the ground for the wind farm off a landowner. The landowner gets mega-bucks in rent. The power company builds ever-bigger turbines and proposes to build even bigger pylons to carry the “free” electricity South on the Grid. To achieve this SSEN Transmission plans to upgrade an overhead line near Spittal (on the edge of the Flow Country) to near Beauly, about 12 miles west of Inverness, and then South to Denny. The length of the line from Spittal to Beauly is planned to cover about 106 miles – carried by steel pylons about 187ft tall. There are various battery and hydrogen initiatives planned. Meanwhile, the Grid is not fit for purpose and at present cannot take the generated load, therefore turbines have to be switched off and the Ukanian government compensates the power companies handsomely for this. What the locals think about this industrialisation of their environment is not a real issue for the likes of SSEN, who treat the idea of “planning permission” as a green light, even when there is none. “Retrospective planning permission” is a favourite trick of Highland Council. The Scottish Government has also not covered itself in glory either in relation to wind-generated renewable energy. The ScotWind sell-off was both a missed opportunity and a disaster.

ScotWind was the name given to the leasing of Scotland’s seabed to companies who want to build offshore wind farms. These sections of the seabed aren’t sold off, but leased to developers for up to ten years at a time with the aim of them eventually building wind farms. There were 20 projects approved in 2022, after applying in the auction in 2021. Almost all of Scotland’s seabed up to 12 nautical miles out is owned by the King, and managed by the Crown estate. While ownership technically lies with the monarch, they cannot sell the assets, nor do the revenues from the land come to the monarchy. Profits generated by the Crown Estate land in Scotland goes to the Scottish Government. It has been claimed Scottish ministers spent profits from the special auction of Scotland’s offshore wind licences – known as ScotWind – on propping up the overall Scottish budget. Hence the lost opportunity. Whatever way you look at it, if you were to plan and build a renewable electricity generating capacity in Caithness and the Far North of Scotland you could not come up with a worse scenario than the one we suffer from now. It is not so much a dog-dance as a dogs dinner.

Things are done to us, not by us.

Caithness is where devolution does not work. What we see here in operation, in relation to renewable energy, is the least expensive option and the short cuts taken in order to achieve it. It is short-sightedness almost to the point of blindness. What this means, environmentally, in Caithness is replacing valuable hectares of peatbog with tonnes of concrete. In Caithness “net zero” will mean net profit for SSEN and net carnage to our lived environment. We already live with the never-ending decommissioning and pollution of Dounreay. Now this.

What we are seeing emerging up out of the peatbog is the implementation of Westminster’s strategic interests, facilitated by the Scottish Government, which are elevated above the rights of the people. The rhetoric of both Westminster and Holyrood masks the reality of land ownership, which makes this all possible as it is a system in which the individual has no rights. The habits of Empire have not vanished.

How much longer can the people of Scotland tolerate things being done to us and not by us? The problem we face in Caithness is that those who make the most noise about wind farms are a mixture of pro-nuclear, property-owning individuals, many of whom have retired here for the “good life”, who are anti-independence and anti-renewables in general.  The real-politic of the unjust corporate energy developments gets lost in the babble of reactive, semi-articulated negativity, on-line chat room conspiracies and rage chambers which lashes out at everything and focuses on nothing. These voices, in which prejudice survives all evidence, care little about cultural provision or a falling population and all that means for social services. What Caithness needs in the future is the opposite of what is happening at present.

Our culture is being shut down and our environment is being ripped up. Our MP has a constituency the size of a European country; our Lib Dem MP is an apologist for the establishment; and our councillors are told nothing and if and when they are do nothing about it. Inverness will have her Castle and Caithness will have her pylons.

On the Ulbster Stone, in the soon-to-be-closing North Coast Visitors Centre, there is a brilliant carving of a mysterious beast. This creature is common to many Pictish stones throughout the North of Scotland and obviously represented something vital and shared by all the people of the time. It represents something vital to us now and it is the perennial, ever-restless sense of justice without which all human society is sterile. The Pictish beast faces down the on-going injustice where the powerful and the rich are protected but not bound by law, the same law that binds the powerless and poor but does not protect them. That injustice is what will be pulsing down the pylon-hung cables from Spittal, through Beauly to Denny. We need to make better connections.

 

©George Gunn 2025