Letters / The Schleswig Holstein question
Oh dear, Rosa is being sarcastic again (Whose spokesperson? SN, 09/08/14).
She knows very well that I was elected by the people of Lerwick South ward in February 2008 and again, with an increased share of the vote, in May 2012.
I suppose this does make me a “spokesman of the people”, as she calls it. Being elected certainly gives me the duty to consider and express views upon matters of public policy.
In this country we elect councillors to take decisions and if we don’t like the decisions they take we can chuck them out at the next election.
It’s called representative democracy and the system has its faults, but on the whole it’s better than government by daily opinion polls under the influence of vocal pressure groups.
I was interested in Rosa’s “wakening moment”, when she turned against wind farms because some visitors from Schleswig Holstein reported problems with flicker from the wind turbines there.
I bet they did. I was in Schleswig Holstein last October and can well understand their concern. In an area of fenland and farmland about the size of Unst there were several hundred wind turbines, many of them as close as 150 metres to houses.
It was an appalling piece of bad planning, almost as bad as the notoriously overdeveloped Smola wind farm in Norway that I had seen the previous month.
It was nothing at all like the planned Viking wind farm, or Whitelees or the Braes of Doune that I had visited previously on what my critics are pleased to call a junket (two Flybe flights, eight hours in a bus and one night in a ghastly motel – what fun we junketeers do have!)
It was because of bad examples like those in Germany and Norway that Viking Energy, from the start, insisted on avoiding the mistakes that had led to valid concerns from people like Rosa’s German visitors.
Rosa may recall that I was one of the formal objectors to Viking because I believed there were too many turbines in the original planning application. That is why I voted for the council to oppose it and trigger a public inquiry.
I lost that vote but the Scottish Government subsequently cut the number of turbines by a third and imposed some of the most stringent planning conditions ever on a wind farm. This satisfied me and, I believe, most other objectors, as a reasonable compromise.
Schleswig Holstein, by the way, is about as much like the Lake District as Norfolk.
While I was there I spoke to the mayor of one of the communities worst affected by the overdevelopment of wind power.
“Do you get complaints?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” he said. “What, about health worries?” I asked. “No,” the mayor replied. “It’s mostly about how all the farmers are getting rich from wind farm payments. People think the community ought to be getting some financial return as well.”
I said I would make a note of that.
Jonathan Wills
Bressay
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