Nobody begrudges the young and vulnerable all the help and Christmas treats they can get but this growing practice by private wealthy multinationals of offering “gifts” to get cheap media promotion prior to planning application decisions is just wrong.
By all means, SSEN, give the children 250 toys (probably worth about a tenner each) for Christmas but do it privately without fanfare or looking for that photo opportunity to make out you are the good guys because in the grand scheme of things, you are most certainly not.
The average person on the street gives to charity far more relative to their income and situation but doesn’t seek any kind of payment in return or a media pat on the back.
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What SSEN is proposing will cause distress and mental health issues across the north of Scotland. It will devalue properties by thousands of pounds and crash the natural social progression of rural housing from the older members of communities to families because people cannot afford to sell for a reduced price if they can sell at all. It will adversely impact the tourism industry, the lifeblood of many communities, by spearing their massive, cheaper, Chinese-produced hardware into our precious and iconic landscapes for their profit. Not ours, theirs.
Our energy bills will continue to rise as to increase overland transmission capacity to encourage thousands more onshore wind turbines for the Scottish Government’s own onshore wind policy – as confirmed by SSEN and Ofgem – with NO guaranteed customers simply means a bigger bottleneck of wind energy than we have now and constraints will spiral even more out of control. Constraints to switch off turbines in times of low demand is currently almost £2 billion – all added to our energy bills.
The tsunami of battery storage proposals pouring into already flooded local authority planning departments will cost us MORE in the long run as the energy trading developers will buy super-cheap energy when the over-deployed wind fleet actually performs and hang onto it until they can sell at a grossly inflated price when it doesn’t. Our energy bills will not be coming down while this race by Big Energy to build more volatile and expensive weather-dependent energy far from the point of need is allowed to continue.
(Image: Jane Barlow/PA)
The policymakers in Holyrood need to give their heads a wobble and take some independent advice from engineers and economists because right now companies think them buying a few stuffed toys is reason enough for us to say: “Welcome all, come on in to Scotland. Trash our environment for your shareholders just like the colonisers have done in the past, and are still doing, all over the developing world for renewables.”
They are being encouraged by your lack of knowledge and lack of interest in what your constituents are telling you.
Roll on the Holyrood elections because the fence-sitters, the voiceless, the action-lite and the arrogant, dismissive MSPs need to understand that they will be vigorously campaigned against by those they have failed to serve. It is time for the people to take back control.
Lyndsey Ward Spokeswoman for Communities B4 Power Companies Beauly CHRISTMAS celebrations were cancelled in Bethlehem in 2024, as residents mourned the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
For a second Christmas, a representation of baby Jesus was laid in the rubble at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, where Pastor Isaac Munther appealed “never again, should mean never again to all peoples”. We urge readers to seek out his full sermons via the internet.
On December 21, 2024, around 30 local people gathered around a similar nativity scene in the centre of Dumfries to participate in a vigil, organised by D&G Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Through poetry, song and stories, we remembered and honoured the thousands of Palestinian children murdered by Israeli forces.
This Christmas, how many of us gave thought to the present reality of Bethlehem, a Palestinian town under illegal Israeli occupation, now strangulated and devastated by the nine-metre-high apartheid wall, its watchtowers and the illegal and expanding Israeli settlements to the north and south, constructed on stolen Palestinian land?
Christian, Muslim and secular Palestinians struggle together to live there under the cruel, military, illegal Israeli occupation.
The Palestinian Christian Kairos movement calls on us “to take a position of truth with regard to Israel’s occupation”. They see “boycott of Israeli goods and divestment from Israeli companies, or companies that do business with Israel, as non-violent tools for justice, peace and security for all”.
In D&G Palestine Solidarity Campaign, we support this call, originally made by Palestinian civil society in its Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) statement of 2005. The case is made that: “These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognise the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law”.
The immediate imperative is for our Westminster government to stop arming Israel, in line with its international duty under the Genocide Convention of 1948, to “prevent and punish” genocide – a crime against humanity, described in the Convention as an “odious scourge”.
Dumfries and Galloway Palestine Solidarity Campaign