The SNP’s message to young rural Scots is clear – your community is withering on the vine and we’ll let it happen
MY retirement daydreams are nothing out of the ordinary for a life-long urbanite. I wish to escape the city. I want a reasonably sized village fairly close at hand but not much more than that.
There will be a garden, a sitooterie and a picture window through which to enjoy a ruffled blanket of landscape which looked this way before me and will look little different after I’m gone.
I’ll have a modest means of transport, reliable internet connectivity and, most importantly, distance from the major centres of population, whose restive racket-making I swear I won’t miss.
‘Why didn’t I do this years ago?’ I’ll ask myself on riverside rambles to nowhere. ‘Really? For decades, you chose Glasgow over this?’
Hinterland
In my defence, my family’s rural hinterland was all but extinguished before I arrived. I stuck with what I knew.
And yet, young Scots who grew up with the country air in their lungs are increasingly rejecting the places they know. They are turning their backs on the rural communities and lifestyle which sustained them in childhood and embracing the very places I wish to see disappear in the rear-view mirror.
A survey this week shows a quarter of rural 18 to 24-yearold Scots plan to become urbanites over the next 12 months. As many as twothirds in the same age group have longer-term plans to join the rat race.
They cite the lack of career opportunities in their areas, a shortage of affordable housing, poor connectivity on internet and mobile networks. There is nothing for them here, they conclude.
The sentiment is hardly new. One rarely hears of rural schools whose rolls are rising. We hear of them clinging to existence after decades of depopulation brought on by young people deciding there is nothing to hold them in the places where their roots are and having their babies in towns and cities instead. There is scarcely a Scottish island which isn’t battling to keep hold of its young people. They lose them to colleges and universities and pray for a homecoming which, in practice, turns out to be the odd weekend visit.
Our towns and cities turn out confirmed urbanites and turn sons and daughters of the country into the same. It has been happening for a century or more.
But it is a much newer phenomenon which has accelerated the process, creating what was justly described this week as a ‘demographic time bomb’.
That phenomenon is the post-referendum Scottish Government, which has treated rural Scotland like something unwanted on the sole of its shoe.
Under First Minister Alex Salmond it was possible to see how the SNP could just about relate to the countryside. His Aberdeenshire constituency was largely rural, his home a former mill in Strichen. He gadded around the local Highland games.
Under Nicola Sturgeon, all appearance of kinship with Scotland’s rural areas vanished and, two First Ministers later, it remains absent.
Irvine-born Ms Sturgeon couldn’t help where she was from, of course. What she could help was the temptation to fill her government with ivory tower urbanites who saw the world exactly as she did.
She could have avoided a deal with the Scottish Greens, a party that understands even less about the countryside than her outfit does. And she could definitely have held her tongue and listened when the few party colleagues who truly do ‘get’ rural Scotland warned about the SNP policies which threatened to destroy it.
If the lifeblood is already being sucked out of rural communities on the West Coast and Hebridean isles which, for generations, have been sustained by fishing, how wise was it to launch a plan to declare their fishing grounds ‘highly protected marine areas’ and therefore off limits?
Notable in their opposition to the hare-brained scheme were MSPs Fergus Ewing and Kate Forbes, both of whom, naturally, were shouted down by their government of urbanites.
Only the sheer scale of the revolt, the prospect of entire communities abandoning forever the party which had abandoned them, forced the climbdown.
There has been no such climbdown on the proliferation of wind farms throughout Scotland’s rural areas, devaluing properties, despoiling the landscape.
What is the countryside good for if you are an ivory tower urbanite? Why, powering our cities, of course. Throwing up as many monster turbines as necessary to get the job done and, when there are more than enough, ordering the installation of yet more so that Scotland’s rural areas can power England’s cities too.
Industrial
Don’t forget all the industrial kit you will need to keep city lights on. Vast substations whose hum can be heard up hill and down dale; interconnectors; megapylons snaking hundreds of miles across prime agricultural land to carry the electricity from the megaturbines which rural communities campaigned to stop but were over-ruled by someone in Edinburgh.
One thinks of the Scottish Government’s failure to keep its promise to dual the A9 from Perth to Inverness – the backbone of the country, sure, but too far north of the Central Belt, too rural, to keep ministers interested.
One looks at the ferries scandal – a government-orchestrated catastrophe for island communities hastening their depopulation even as we speak.
One considers the latest wheeze – to create a third Scottish national park, though most in the first two wish only to be free from their shackles and bureaucracy – and the argument becomes ever more compelling.
Communities
The SNP offers rural communities only disdain. If it had set out to dismantle quality of life in the countryside, it could scarcely have performed more effectively than it has done through failing to understand anything about it and not troubling to find out.
For some of their number, there appears an intellectual disconnect between the food on their tables and the fields that grow it. Others see rural Scotland as one big re-wilding opportunity – or home to bucket list destinations to chalk up in a campervan.
Do they understand that people actually live there too? Rural dwellers, the few of them left, could be forgiven for wondering.
Investment in rural Scotland is on the ‘backburner’, argues Jack Swindells of the Countryside Alliance. ‘Agriculture, fishing and other land-based professions continue to struggle with funding being cut by the Scottish Government.’
The message to young people in rural areas is being heard loud and clear: your communities are withering on the vine and we in government are letting it happen. Truth is, we don’t know why you’d want to live in the back of beyond anyway. Come to the city. Try our wine bars and cycle lanes. Vote SNP.
Leave the countryside to retirees with picture windows looking out on wind farms and pylons stretching as far as the eye can see. You won’t hear their moans from the city. We don’t.
When I do finally escape Glasgow, I fear it will not be to any Scottish rural idyll. There are ever fewer of them around. Our government places no value in them.