Who should be accountable?

Don’t you just love it when some high up gets caught with his or her hand in the cookie jar and has to confess, apologise and take what’s coming? I guess this attitude is driven by schadenfreude but also by the belief that accountability has been exercised.Taking the pain because you are accountable seems logical and fair.

The other side of being accountable is being responsible. People who take responsibility inevitably accept that they are accountable for their actions, or should be. Society needs more accountability in critical posts.

Of course, it would be naïve to suggest that all people in power accept their accountability. It is human to try to justify error and also it is very human to enjoy pointing out others’ failure while ignoring your own.

However, if we do not have accountability then how can we be sure that the people in post take their actions seriously enough?

What is the relevance? Well, I have spent my career in an industry listening to people and organisations criticising it for its impact. Dire results were forecast: the extinction of wild salmon and sea trout and

Yet here we are so many years later and none of this has happened. of it.

As time passes it is becoming clearer that (as I have always believed)

We have been attacked for our effect on seals, only for the critics to

After all this time and so much press, not one of the criticisms appear to have any foundation. In fact it appears, as usual, that lot of and, as usual, time has shown them to be wrong.

It is the nature of humans to dislike something new and so criticism is natural. But in this case the criticism has led to a regulatory system predicated on saying no, to which anyone can object and repeatedly.

It is my view that it is time this was changed.Where is the accountability in objection?

If you wish to spread misinformation or even lie about a development’s risks there is no downside and you are free to do it as often as you like.

Furthermore, having done it several times, your view is still taken at face value. In other words, you do not have to be responsible or accountable.

So, after all these years, with all these scientists and single issue cam which do not appear to have any foundation.

An industry that has to prove its benign nature is not a bad thing but how far does this logic apply.When it costs a business a huge amount of money to develop a site and large amounts of time, then businesses think twice about it.

Allowing this sort of irresponsible criticism to go on means that jobs are lost and investment too.

For a fragile economy like the west coast of Scotland, this is unforgiv countryside it is so much harder.Thus to allow inaccurate theory, let alone misrepresentation, to slow the development of farming the sea is absurd. It is time we put together a system in planning which takes account of the likelihood of a group or person to use misinformation.

When there is clear evidence that a theory is at best unlikely to be true and at worst misinformation, all of the argument from the objector should be discounted.

If a theory is discounted in one development, then it should subsequently be ignored unless new evidence is put forward.

In the modern world the objector is looked at as a hero, facing capitalists who want to abuse their position.Yet so often the objector represents another industry, which tries to present itself as an underdog.

In some cases, as discovered by the Canadian campaigner Vivian Krause, foreign groups fund anti-industry objections.There is no system which ensures that objector groups declare their funding and the interests that fund them.

In a world which needs renewable energy, which needs the sea to be farmed, we need a planning and regulatory system that can no more be abused by the developer than it can be by the objector. It is time we reviewed the planning system as well as the regulatory system which develops from

it.