Letters / Fantastic news for whom?
This week I read in the local media that Shetland is to be The UK’s first “Green Energy Island” and that Orion is to receive £2.8 million towards its aspirations.
Then I read infrastructure director John Smith describing this on behalf of the SIC, a partner in Orion as “fantastic news”.
Fantastic news for whom, John?
Has his excellency Jair Bolsonaro, emperor of Brazil and architect of the burning of vast areas of the Amazon rain forest with expulsion and murder of its indigenous inhabitants, to help his greedy associates become millionaires, sent his ambassadors to Shetland?
I’m making the link above because there are similarities here. Both here in Shetland and in the depths of the Amazon, ordinary local people ask:
- Why are these things happening to us without our input, consent or involvement? Why have we no say in the destruction of our environments?
- Why are our elected representatives more interested in their grand schemes and money making rather than seeking the wishes or feelings of the local residents that they are allegedly there to serve?
- Why are our leaders blind and obsessed with bulldozing Shetland, ripping up vast acres of peat, carving great holes everywhere to fill with concrete structures, again with no involvement or inclusion of the community?
- Why are the various environmental, planning and public health agencies rolling over and acting dead to the countless breaches of so many things ordinary builders, farmers and individuals would never get away with?
There are many more questions to ask about this. We are seeing a runaway train of industrialisation, landscape/habitat destruction, bullying, democratic deficit, political arrogance and the abandonment of proper local governance and public service, gathering an ever more rapid pace.
The only real difference between Shetland folk and the Amazonian indigenous people in terms of their exclusion from playing a role and having some say in what is happening to their land is that they are murdered if they ask or object.
As we do not get murdered (yet) for asking questions or objecting or even demanding some involvement (probably too late now anyway) we should start demanding more involvement and stop the SNP centralist outsiders and corporations run by greedy hedge funds running things here in Shetland and pulling the SIC strings, strings with a disposition towards bending over backwards for the corporations and their backs against local folk.
Vic Thomas
Catfirth
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