Climb out of your ministerial cars and see how rural Scots actually live

THE trouble with devolution, now in its 20th year, is that to an extraordinary degree it has increasingly centralised most power in Scotland that matters to Edinburgh.

This is mostly in the hands of men and women who live within ready commute of it – and largely of the generation who came of age in 1980s student union politics, pleasantly marinated in its curious blend of Marx and Freud.

Two things mark these people: a remembered and visceral loathing of Margaret Thatcher and all she stood for – all the odder as she was poleaxed from office nearly 30 years ago and has been dead for five – and an event but dimly remembered by the general public, the 1989 European Parliament election.

To great surprise, there was a huge vote in that contest for the Greens. They did not win any seats, but – with more than two million votes – they handily outpolled the Liberal Democrats. It remains, in fact, the best ever Green performance in a national election.

The political establishment was sorely shaken and, almost overnight, stances hitherto thought to be the batty obsessions of the Prince of Wales and people who knit their own yoghurt became general party orthodoxy.

Politicians are now all but obliged to believe in manmade climate change. David Cameron felt it necessary to make a conspicuous visit to a glacier, murmuring to camera as if there had been a death in the family – and wind turbines are springing up everywhere in our countryside like so much aluminium ragwort.

But the most evident impact of tree-hugging sentiment in Edinburgh is the mounting Horlicks that is Scottish transport policy.

It is driven, if one might ironically so phrase it, by the Scottish Green Party and Central Belt politicians leading pleasant Central Belt lives.

Men such as Patrick Harvie and Humza Yousaf, who can breakfast late on tomato focaccia and a soya vanilla latte before hopping onto the 10.30am from Glasgow Central, to be met by a sleek ministerial Mondeo or, whimsically, birl from Waverley Station by bicycle rickshaw. And then, in Holyrood, pass motions proscribing all diesel cars over a certain vintage, declare war on pavement parking, bang on about emissions, menace us with congestion charges and proclaim the virtues of fold-up bicycles.

To be fair, the capital itself has already endured the system’s muesli-munching incompetence.

The Edinburgh tram system finally, in 2014, opened five years late, cost £776million (to say nothing of £200million interest on a vast loan), inflicted appalling disruption on city centre retail, and is more expensive, and much slower, than the efficient Airport Express bus that has whizzed back and forth for decades.

But it is rural Scotland that already feels the lash of virtue signalling and most woolly thought in the distant corridors of Edinburgh power.

Its obsession with electric transport and its determination to eliminate, in a matter of decades, what they doubtless consider the infernal combustion engine will make very little difference in Scotland’s capital.

Convenient

Most Edinburgh folk live within convenient walk of shops and schools and the local surgery – and the city boasts an excellent bus network.

In the sprawl of rural Scotland – the Mearns of the North-East, the glens of Inverness-shire, the larger Hebridean islands – we do not.

Children from all over Lewis are taught in a single Stornoway secondary school. Outwith the town, you can count the number of thinly scattered village shops – in some instances, the only one within a morning’s walk – on your fingers.

The last quarter-century has seen many close, along with assorted petrol stations and quite a few primary schools.

A car on this island is not a luxury, but a necessity, and in a culture where most women now work, most families – on lower incomes, largely, than in the big city – must run two.

We have, at least, a very good bus service. In the mass of the mainland Scottish countryside, public transport is a joke. It is also, if current Scottish Government ideology remains in its current rut, going to become a very expensive one.

The conversion of buses and lorries to rechargeable electric operation – and good luck with installing all the infrastructure necessary for that – will cost a shuddering sum. Inevitably, that will be reflected in higher fares and dearer goods, even as minions of the State move to prohibit perfectly serviceable Land Rover Defenders and Toyota Hilux pick-ups in sturdy Highland service since the 1990s.

There is an unnerving double apartheid in this. Decent folk in Perthshire, East Lothian and so on, still driving older vehicles as comfortable to them as a pair of old gloves, could find themselves forbidden to take them into any city precincts – far less Edinburgh – or be heftily charged for doing so.

To suggest they scrap the old Discovery and instead splash out on a glorified version of a sewing machine on four wheels – a hybrid, an allelectric car – ignores the reality that folk still running an aged motor are largely elderly and poor.

That policies of this order can be seriously mooted only serves to make those of us resident in rural Scotland certain that the people in power know nothing of our realities and care even less, from their ignorance of field sports and the proper management of wild salmon to the increasingly desperate lives of Scotland’s fishermen.

This may be of little account to the First Minister. It has probably been years since Nicola Sturgeon entrusted her person to ScotRail or squeezed thigh-to-thigh on a Corporation bus.

Her feather-bedded transport is charged to the taxpayer and, in the last general election, she seemed to spend more time in a lofty helicopter than on earth.

We might even touch on how rigid ideology has even begun to muck up our ferry services.

Three double-ended craft have in recent years been built for CalMac with banks of lithium-ion batteries to supplement their diesel machinery in the name of ‘reducing emissions’, which means they each cost two-and-a-half times more to build than a conventional vessel and even though one academic, after exhaustive study, has proven there is no saving in emissions.

Demolition

Meanwhile, two big ships being built at Port Glasgow – the first passenger vessels in the UK to be powered by liquified natural gas – are seriously overdue as naval architects and engineers struggle to ensure the safety of what will effectively be vast floating bombs and tens of millions are merrily earmarked to erect the much longer piers necessary to accommodate them.

At Tarbert in Harris, this will entail the blithe demolition of a handsome terminal building completed only in 2004.

Thus islanders are inconvenienced – and the public purse bilked for totally unnecessary millions – by politicians who know very little about ferries but are determined to make a righteous environmentalist point.

Why not, instead, expand our railway network? New lines from Airdrie to Bathgate, and from Edinburgh to the Borders, have been a conspicuous success.

St Andrews residents would love to have their train connection back – it was axed in 1969 – and reconstruction of the old Callander and Oban Railway – directly linking Edinburgh to Crianlarich and the West – would be a boon for Highland tourism.

But no. It is far more fun – and much less difficult – to posture with a lithium-ion battery and, like lazy policemen through the ages, pick ruthlessly on the motorist.