Far-sighted ideas need serious scrutiny
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THE final week of the Holyrood parliamentary session in this last week in June has made an epic amount of work for all MSPs. After the successful Aberdeen Donside by-election, we welcomed back Mark McDonald as the new member who reclaimed the seat for the SNP after Brian Adam succumbed to a long battle with cancer.
As a regional MSP, he piloted the High Hedges Bill, a move which no doubt helps promote better relations between neighbours over their garden boundaries.
On Tuesday, we completed a short crofting bill to fix a legal loophole concerning the rights of owner occupier crofters to de-croft all or part of their holdings for legitimate housing and developments. However, as we noted in our committee report, there are further issues to take up to tidy up a number of tetchy points of law.
I very much welcome the Post 16 Education Bill has made special provisions for the unique conditions of the college members of the University of the Highlands and Islands. The regional strategic board of the UHI will have a special duty to ensure further education spending cash is as fully and fairly distributed as possible.
Unlike regionalised college groups elsewhere in Scotland, the UHI is, as the title says, a university. Along with a group of north MSPs we met the North Highland College board and principal Gordon Jenkins some weeks ago in Thurso and as a result of very satisfactory lobbying, some extra assurances were added in a final amendment to the bill. Good luck to the UHI as it takes its full place as the unique collegiate body that covers our far-flung area.
We had rural affairs and referendum bill committees on Wednesday and Thursday mornings and Thursday afternoon opened with a ministerial statement on the second climate change report on proposals and policies and the Scottish greenhouse gas emissions annual target 2011 report. I asked a question of the minister Paul Wheelhouse on the plans for the kinds of ways our constituency can contribute to the fight to reduce our carbon footprint.
The final item was the Stage 3 Proceedings: Scottish Independence Referendum (Franchise). After amendments were disposed of we debated the principles of the bill that will allow 16 and 17-year-olds the right to register and vote in the September 2014 independence referendum. This is ground-breaking in many ways with young people still at school taking part at the polls for the first time.
Scotland is seeing reducing unemployment, building business confidence to create jobs and witnessing record levels of interest from overseas firms to invest here, that’s an excellent record indeed in austerity-driven Britain.
As this intensive month comes to a close some very far-sighted ideas are being widely debated. They should not be dismissed without serious scrutiny if Caithness and the rest of Scotland are to prosper. Like many, I approve of the discussion document from the Jimmy Reid Foundation, the Common Weal.
I consider this an aspirational look at how Scotland can seek to gain from both Nordic and other examples of best practice worldwide to shape the future of Scotland through integrating and uniting the hopes and aspirations of all sides of society. We can also hope the voices of all those who share these aspirations of a positive future vision will be heard. You can find the document on the Jimmy Reid Foundation website.
IN parliament I hosted the EU environment commissioner Janez Potoc nik, who is from Slovenia. He addressed our RACCE committee in a session before he went to the Royal Highland Show at Ingliston a week ago. His take on the new environmentalism is the key to a sustainable economy here and across our crowded continent.
A flavour of his speech which supports business growth is on the official report of parliament. It includes the following:
"As policy-makers, we must help our business sector to keep ahead of the curve in adapting to the global mega-trend of increasing resource competition and constraints. If we do not do so, we will lose relative competitiveness to regions of the world that are not locked into our resource-intensive infrastructures and systems."
He called for "public authorities, including at European Union level, to show leadership and give the right signals. We need… to build predictability and business confidence in the long and medium term so that business is ready to invest in the short term."
I take from this a particular lesson for our area full of natural resource rich renewables industries. He went on, "We need to go beyond the traditional three Cs – command, control and compliance, which formed the basis of the old environmentalism and are encapsulated in the polluter-pays principle – and develop the three Is: innovation, incentives and integration."
I welcome such guidance from a perceptive European citizen who has all of our futures in his thoughts. We need to look past each parliamentary term to the long view of the future we can forge here in this small northern nation.
trob.gibson.msp@scottish.parliament.uk
