Up to £24m to be invested in west Highland's Kishorn Port
Up to £24m of public money is to be invested in a port on the west Highland coast.Kishorn was used in the 1970s for the construction of the Ninian Central oil production platform - at the time the world's largest floating concrete structure.Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) said its investment would enhance the port's capacity for manufacturing floating offshore wind turbine foundations.Kishorn's dry dock, along with other facilities, are to be expanded.
HIE said there was potential for the port to support up to 1,500 jobs once the expansion was completed.The investment forms part a Scottish government commitment of up to £500m over five years to develop ports and offshore wind energy supply chain. Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes described the funding for Kishorn as "significant".She added: "It is crucial to ensuring Kishorn Port and the communities it supports can reap the benefits of the global renewables market."HIE chief executive Stuart Black said the site had provided skilled jobs in a rural area for decades.Kishorn Port Limited (KPL) director Alasdair Ferguson added: "The port expansion will provide the catalyst for the support and creation of jobs within Wester Ross and the wider Highlands, benefiting communities across the area. "We're grateful to Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Scottish government for their support."
The port is in an area of Wester Ross that is home to roughly 1,000 people.Between 1975 and 1987, the site was a fabrication yard owned by Howard Doris Ltd and in 1977 more than 3,000 people were employed there.There was not enough accommodation for so many workers in this part of the north-west Highlands coast so two retired cruise ships, Rangatira and the Odysseus, were brought in to accommodate them.The yard was used in the construction of the North Sea oil and gas industry's massive Ninian Central Platform in the late 1970s.This structure weighed 600,000 tonnes once completed, making it the largest manufactured moveable object at the time. Seven tugs were required to tow it from Loch Kishorn to its North Sea site.
The dry dock was used in the 1990s for the making of two concrete caissons - foundations used for deep water or soft ground - to support the Skye Bridge.The yard was mothballed until 2013 when work started on redeveloping it as a port for supporting the offshore renewable energy sector.In 2019, Kishorn was used for servicing the world's biggest semi-submersible offshore drilling rig, Ocean GreatWhite.The 60,800-tonne rig was towed to the Highlands from Singapore via Las Palmas in the Canaries.
Last year, a decommissioned oil rig was destroyed in a controlled explosion in the dry dock.The Northern Producer had been used in the Dons oil fields about 100 miles (161km) north-east of Shetland.After it was blown up, various parts of the rig were recycled.
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NHS Fife, for instance, is leaning on the hot takeaway trade to cut the typical portion of, for instance, fish and chips. And the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission suddenly has anglers in its crosshairs. Fishing practices should be reformed, it drones, as fish are 'sentient beings' with 'emotional experiences that matter to them.' It hopes ministers will soon review the law regarding 'actions that occur in the normal course of fishing.' Such a move, panted one newspaper and as if it had just unmasked Lord Lucan, 'could outlaw many aspects of angling such as hooking a fish and removing it from the water.' SAWC does, admittedly, have form. Only in February, it thought about forbidding cat ownership in parts of the country where there was demonstrable predation on birds and small mammals. It would make still more sense to shoot every last bird of prey out of the sky and, if SAWC wants a rough guide, between 1837 and 1840 gamekeepers in forested Invergarry killed 285 common buzzards, 63 goshawks, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles and 18 ospreys. Not to mention six gyrfalcons, eleven hobbies, 275 kites, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 462 kes-trels, 78 merlins, 63 hen harriers and seven orange-legged falcons. The First Minister, of less stern stuff, limply assured the public that the SNP administration had no plans to ban pet cats. Last year, too, the Nationalists were even forced to abandon a crazed scheme to ban wood-burning stoves in new-build houses. It feels increasingly as if you cannot take three strides in what one of John Swinney's predecessors once hailed as 'the best small country in the world' without being lectured, harangued, re-proached and disapproved of. Tobacco, sugar, booze, salmon or that jumbo-sausage supper… ministers have their beady little eyes on us. And, no doubt, others have eyes on them too. It is only fair to point out that this culture of censure, rebuke and righteously rapped knuckles long predates the SNP's 2007 ascent to power. From practically the start, the devolved new Scotland rapidly won much wry comment for eat-your-vegetables nanny statism. After the first MSPs had solemnly voted themselves a com-memorative medal. In 2005, for instance, Nora Radcliffe – Liberal Democrat MSP for Gordon, till Alex Salmond toppled her from obscurity into oblivion – called for a ban on the boiling of live lobsters. The Scottish Executive, as it then was, pelted us with posters and raucous TV ads about the horrors of everything from eating too many crisps, through dodgy electric blankets, to the enormity of consigning your Christmas turkey to the fridge before it was completely cold. And, in April 2006 and to widespread trepidation – many journalists hurried up from England, hoping for riots on the streets – Jack McConnell's administration banned smoking in enclosed public spaces. A policy, in fact, first suggested by a Nationalist MSP, Stewart Maxwell. But Scots submitted to it so meekly that one wonders how much it emboldened another First Minister, fourteen years later, to impose all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on our liberties during Covid. At its height, you could not sit down on a park bench, enjoy coffee with a neighbour in your garden or leave your house more than once a day. It was even decreed an offence to venture beyond the bounds of your own local authority. When I in March 2021 had briefly to scamper back to my Hebridean lair, by deserted roads through silent towns, for an armful of Astra-Zeneca, I was so terrified of being stopped and challenged I carried a sort of letter-of-transit from my GP. Meanwhile, our unfortunate children shuffled down school corridors in sweaty masks as – concerned about classroom ventilation – ministers wondered aloud about sawing the bottoms off doors and Nicola Sturgeon tut-tutted that Prince William dared to visit Scotland. Behind this are two dark realities. The first is that, while finally responsible for a host of public services, the Scottish Government (and, by extension, the Scottish Parliament) delivers virtually none of them. Local authorities school most of our children; local health-boards direct primary care and hospitals, and so on. When it finally did have an immediate and grave responsibility, from the dawn of 2021 – vaccinating the elderly and the vulnerable against coronavirus – the Scottish Government made such a laboured fist of things that, quietly and with the deepest tact, Whitehall sent in the army. The second reality is that there is a very old middle-class tradition in Scotland of censuring working-class pleasures. In an era when, for most ordinary people, Sunday was their only day off, clergy insisted on the shuttering of galleries and museums. In a noted Court of Session case – with consequences, generations later, for the Western Isles – it was finally ruled that the good and respectable folk of Burntisland, most conscious of their goodness and respectability, could not ban the Sabbath visits of excursion steamers. In 1875 the Religion and Morals Report for the Free Church General Assembly railed that, to a large extent, 'our farm servants are ignorant, licentious, profane and rude'. What yokels might have thought of Free Church ministers is not recorded. Meanwhile, Presbyterians grew so obsessed with the demon drink that, by the Great War, many congregations celebrated Communion with non-alcoholic wine. And, in 1907, a United Free Church minister assailed a new social phenomenon as 'perfect iniquities of Hell itself,' capped in Glasgow Corporation's 1909 roar about 'the great and increasing evil' it was doing to the city's young men and women. Business ventures 'owned by 'aliens and Roman Catholics,' touting an unnecessary product 'epitomising,' gasped one gentleman, 'the evil of luxury being smuggled into the souls of Glaswegians.' The target of such ire? Italian ice cream cafés. As if not to be outdone, the Free Presbyterian Magazine warned young Highland lasses, seeking urban employment, of the perils of the white-slave trade. They should not, for instance, accept sweets from strangers. Retreating from such past larks to the latest decrees from those with the rule over us, it is striking how few stand up to logical examination. Take the Scottish Climate Committee's clamour for less beef and fewer cows; the reduced bleating of sheep. This is presumably pegged to three core tenets of tree-hugging faith: that reduced upland grazing will in scant decades see the regeneration of much Scottish forest; that cattle-feed is a wildly inefficient use of grain; and that cows, naturally flatulent, are responsible for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The precise figure is, in fact, disputed. But the Committee's lordly loftiness flies in the face of basic realities. For one, about 65 per cent of all the land in Britain can bear nothing but grass. Cows and sheep – hold the front page – eat grass. We cannot. Our cloven-hooved stock will, accordingly, be an essential part of our food economy till the end of time, and the beef industry in particular has for years been working hard to reduce its carbon footprint. For another, much of upland and coastal Scotland is too high – or too exposed to salted winds – to bear significant woodland. Life in somewhere like Lewis or Tiree is, as someone once said with feeling, like living on the deck of an aircraft-carrier. Snow can fall on Ben Nevis in any calendar month of the year. And, even were it otherwise, the Climate Change Committee seems to be blithely unaware of the real menace: deer. The deer population on Britain, as Patrick Galbraith details in his rather good book about Brit-ain's vanishing birds - In Search of One Last Song - is completely out of control: two million beasts on the trot, the highest in a thousand years. The ideal on a well-managed Scottish estate is five deer per square kilometre – on some, numbers are at an unsustainable twenty per kilometre. The depredations of muntjac alone have wiped out the nightingale in many parts of England. Deer threaten the survival, too, of black grouse, ptarmigan and the capercaillie. They are, additionally, responsible for many fatal road-accidents; and there is no more ferocious foe of forest than browsing Bambi. But households remain reluctant to buy and cook venison – and, absurdly, much of the venison for sale in Britain today is imported. In any event, most of us eat less red meat these days, not least because it is so expensive: you will struggle to buy a family-sized pot-roasting cut for less than a tenner. And in the Hebrides, well within living memory, it was a rare treat: fish and potatoes all week, with meat (and the related broth as the first course) on Sundays. There are other environmental realities that seem to have eluded the Climate Change Committee. Without cattle, as the Royal Agricultural Society of England has pointed out, 'there would be no dung, which would vastly reduce the presence of dung beetles in their habitat. 'As well as delivering a myriad of ecosystem benefits, such as sequestering carbon into the soil, dung beetle larvae are a key food source for ground-nesting birds. It is estimated that dung beetles save farmers in the UK £367 million per year…' Then we have that NHS Fife obsession: how big is your fish supper? In fact, fish and chips – cooked properly and well – is a remarkably healthy meal. There is, for instance, no added sugar. It is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins B12 and D, and high-quality protein – and less fat than a typical serving of, say, chicken tikka masala or an oil-slicked Chinese takeaway. 'Typically,' assures one authority, 'fish and chips on average have 9.42 grams of fat per 100 grams, while the average pizza has 11, chicken korma 15.5 and a donner kebab a whopping 16.2…' We come to SWAC's vapourings about angling. One rather doubts such solicitude extends to every creature of the earth. Even the Commission's august personages doubtless prefer life without headlice, tapeworms and rats and most, presumably, vaccinate their children. It remains official NatureScot advice to smash dead any American signal crayfish you meet in our fresh waters and, for over two decades, it has been determinedly exterminating feral mink in the Western Isles. Where SWAC may have a point is the dubious practice of 'catch and release.' My own view is that you should only venture out with the rod for fish you can eat and, having caught your salmon and thumped it on the head, you head for home and the deep freeze, rather than hauling in fish after fish, weighing them, measuring them, taking a few snaps for social media and then returning them to the deep. Not forgetting a protracted chat about emotional experiences that really mattered to them. But, in coarse fishing, catch and release is the whole point: we might, perhaps, command barbless hooks, or even the soluble sort decreed in the pursuit of bluefin tuna. The wild Atlantic salmon may not always be with us; the typical Scottish political animal will add to the gaiety of nations for decades to come. Bossy, virtue-signalling, carefully picking its targets, and unconsciously living what Ronald Reagan once mocked as the prevalent tenets in modern statecraft. If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it – and, if it stops moving, subsidise it.
