FISHING & SHOOTING
There used to be a weekly cartoon strip in the local paper which covers Alex Salmond’s constituency called “Mains”. Mains, the farmer, was prone to couthy pronouncements to farm servant Jimmy. In one edition Jimmy, who had heard the factor described as an opportunist, asked Mains what it meant. “Weel. It’s a man who when he’s in hot water decides he was needing a bath anyway,” opined Mains.
Thus it is with Mr Salmond, his party and salmon. The general view of salmon fishing, emanating from the SNP, is that salmon is for toffs. As if to ram it up the collective fundament the Scottish Government, of which Mr Salmond was then first minister, backed a £100,000 European Union grant to Usan salmon netsmen of Montrose to improve its coastal salmon netting business.
The fishing forums went bananas, as did all the official salmon fishing bodies, as well as the Faroese and the Icelanders who had been cutting back their netting operations in the name of conservation.
The EU and Scotland are signatories to the North
The fishing forums went bananas
Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation convention that states salmon fisheries should only target stocks at “full reproductive capacity”. Usan was already operating on the edge of an EU special protection area for salmon.
Usan then bought, as it was quite entitled to, the salmon netting rights on the river Ythan in Mr Salmond’s constituency, an event which incurred the wrath of, among others, the decidedly un-toff but numerous and well-heeled Aberdeen and District Angling Association (ADAA) which owns fishing on the Ythan, Dee and Don. In the meantime, Usan has been pilloried for shooting seals to protect its nets. Right or wrong, the publicity was not good.
By now in hot water as far as anglers were concerned, Mr Salmond took a bath. It seems to have dawned on him after meetings with AADA that Usan weren’t after all ruddy-cheeked artisans being driven to extinction by greedy landowners. Writing in two east coast dailies he lauded salmon angling as a proletarian activity, worth millions of pounds in tourism and jobs, whose participants release the majority of fish – as if this were news.
He then denounced the £180,000 sale of Ythan nets to Usan, the very company whose business his government had backed with EU cash, and declared communities should have the right to buy out netting rights. Behold, the benign face of land reform.
It’s just a pity the Scottish Government hadn’t come to the party a little earlier.
The bulk of Scottish nets have already been bought off over the years by river trusts, individuals and charities at no cost to the taxpayer. But never mind. Mr Salmond has emerged pink, cleansed and converted. Possibly.