Strath’s part in culture bid
It’s been great to be out with the family over the summer and I’ve tried to get the balancing act right between my duties as MSP, councillor and dad. This sometimes involves slinging our bikes onto the back of the car and combining a few constituent visits with time out with the family.
There’s been plenty to see and do this summer and we’ve been frequent visitors to Comrie Croft. It’s great to see how the centre has grown over the years, with so many businesses benefiting on and off site - from the popular cafe to the new market garden, an expanded bike shop and numerous wedding and event suppliers.
Whatever the weather it’s always jam packed with visitors. It’s also become a focus for grassroots mountain bike sports development in Scotland with potential Olympic stars racing and training there.
Comrie Croft shows what can be done with an imaginative use of land that has community business at its heart, which is food for thought in the ongoing land reform debate in Scotland. I’d be interested to compare the number of jobs and visitor numbers at Comrie Croft with absentee owned ‘sporting’ estates.
With Perth’s 2021 City of Culture bid now in play, Strathearn is well placed to be a winning part of the bid, drawing on cultural events such as the Drovers’ Tryst Festival and I hope a successful bid will strongly feature and support community initiatives. Perth’s pitch as a modern green European cultural city at the centre of a vibrant rural community is a strong one - let’s hope it delivers.
How we grow our tourism industry sustainably is an important question, but I doubt the answer is the Scottish Government’s planned removal of Air Passenger Duty.
It may cheapen deals for tourists coming to Scotland, but it also makes it cheaper to leave. There is good evidence to show that tourists from the UK actually spend more than tourists coming here from abroad, so the net economic benefit is questionable.
The real winners will be airports and airlines, who are less interested in who is coming in or out as long they can sell them a ticket and some duty free. As a motorist, I pay tax on the fuel in my car, but airlines pay nothing. If APD goes with no sensible replacement, then it is effectively a massive subsidy to the aviation industry and frequent fliers.
The £300m raised each year from APD could be invested in a deeper roll out of superfast broadband to rural communities or fixing the road infrastructure, all benefiting tourism. With an extra 60,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases going up in the air every year under an APD cut, it will only force other sectors of our economy to shoulder the burden to allow air travel to expand.
With the summer holiday ending, I’ll be spending more time in Edinburgh again but I’m keen to connect with constituents at Parliament and across Strathearn, so feel free to contact me anytime. mark.ruskell.msp@ parliament.scot