Letters / Centralising cancer
I totally applaud Gordon Thomson of Unst for setting up Communities United for Rural Education (CURE). (Communities unite to defend their schools; SN, 24/01/14)
Despite my children being long gone from the rural Shetland education system which served them both extremely well, I will join the cause anyway as the unthinking slash and burn ethos coming out of the town hall baboon house needs to be challenged.
Unfortunately its not just the centralisation of education that needs to be addressed, its the rolling centralisation of everything that the current batch of visionless baboons are hell bent on.
If it’s not a down and out policy of destruction of rural Shetland as some of us think, it is definitely a political centralising cancer that even rural members are now suffering from.
If you fast-forward the SIC DVD it may well show that they want us all to live in Tingwall, Bressay, Weisdale, and the Ness of Sound.
It wouldn’t surprise me if high-rise towers on reclaimed land at Gremista weren’t on the agenda. It’s time folk in rural and outer isles areas started to refuse to pay their council tax for the services no longer there.
Ok, I choose to live in a rural location but even in the heady SIC spending days we only got minimal gritting, one rubbish collection a week and thankfully no street lights.
Now we are paying the same high price for nothing, so Lerwick residents should pay three or four times the council tax as they have more than three or four times the facilities!
You pay for what you get should be as relevant as you get what you pay for.
The constant commuter mentality to the centralised Lerwikopolis is a result of no strategy for Shetland as a remote and rural community, only a set of constant knee jerk reactions of failed SIC administrations now so loaded towards Lerwick – it’s a real social injustice.
At the risk of insult by associating myself with some of Stuart Hill’s ideology, I cannot understand why Shetland has not explored Crown Dependency status such as the Isle of Man with all the offshore opportunities this status this would bring. The Isle of Man is an independent crown dependency, it is not in the EU giving its community so many advantages and wealth creating opportunities that most parts of the failed and greed-riddled UK can only dream of.
Vic Thomas
Clousta
Shetland
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